Birthday Presents!

[siravarice]

So it's my 21st soon and I'm pondering on what to get. Do I stay with my favoured M-ATX form and get a Rampage 3 Gene, i7 930 or go with the new MSi P55a Fuzion?

I already have an i5 750 so going with the Fuzion would open up the opportunity for another graphics card, and if I do go with the Fuzion, would it be better to get a GTX 480 to go with my 5870? Or another 5870? Or maybe a 470 or 460 or something? Generally I want it quiet so a 480 is probably out of the question, I'm just thinking about the Green Team's better performance with using DX11.

Any suggestions?

 

[alienware]

Don't fancy an AMD Hex?

I don't see a huge point in going 930 if you already have a 750 tbh. I mean sure they're faster, but not something you could ever notice unless you put it to paper (benchmarks). But the over all feel won't be much different. Saying that though it wouldn't be dramatically different with a hex core either, but at least you have the 6 cores that will carry you farther into the future.

If you already have a 5870 I would deffo keep the I5 and go Crossfire FTW.

 

[siravarice]

So crossfire beats the hydra+lucid with an nvidia card?

 

[tinytomlogan]

So crossfire beats the hydra+lucid with an nvidia card?

Its a tough one dude, really depends on the CPU you want tbh. To match an AMD hex youll need a 930 or an 1156 870.

I think Id go with the Gene as it could be more for less in the long run.

 

[alienware]

Well the problem with this Lucid thing is that it's pretty new. I don't have million of specific details on it.. Is it driver based as well as the chip?

Infact it took me about ten seconds to find this -

SweClockers.com, when testing the MSI Big Bang Fusion which features Hydra 200, gave it very poor ratings citing the following: Poor drivers, poor game support, small if any performance gain over a single video card, graphical artifacts, unstable gameplay and a high price tag.

Which all points to it being driver based, which means you could well have serious problems that you need to rely on MSI for. If MSI were only making Lucid and putting all their money and effort into it? fine, but you literally need to wait on them and Lucid should you have problems.

It's been explained before but Crossfire scales in any game. Sometimes it needs a profile but that seldom needs doing. The only time I have ever had an issue was with Dirt 2 and a week later ATI released a fix (by way of the Crossfire profiles). Now SLI is purely driver dependant, and Nvidia have only just started to get that right. And if you take Nvidia and compare them with some one like Lucid? well it doesn't exactly fill me with hope.

The Hydra 100 has been around for two years now and has failed to make it into the mainstream. I mean, take a look on this forum and see how many people are using it or have been discussing it?

I suppose dude that it comes down to you. If you really want something different (and cool !) then go for it, but with it being driver based it would scare me off tbh. I mean take a look at the recent thread regarding Crossfire Ares. It just isn't happening.

See also - Quadfire, Triple and quad SLI, etc etc. They all sound nice, look better but seldom give out the performance to pounds.

 

[siravarice]

Ok so for now the Fuzion is a no-no. Are there any really good M-ATX motherboard for the 1156 platform that offer 2 16x PCI-E lanes? Just thinking that another graphics card would be better than another CPU. Especially in the long run.

 

[alienware]

Well I wouldn't say it's a complete no no mate, but just do your research. Obviously don't base your opinions on what I say as I could well be wrong, but yeah, just do plenty of research before handing over your hard earned beans !

I mean if you like to fold then it's a no brainer really. For that it would be brilliant.

As for the mobo? Well again, I'm a complete rank amateur on those. Tom will do you right (as could many others that are not me

) but one thing I do know is that 1156 Crossfire micros are not in abundance.

I think you'll have a choice of not many, and in those are Asus (gene) EVGA (errrrrrm...) and DFI (if they ever did one for 1156, I know they did for AM3).

As I suspected, EVGA indeed make one for 1156. I wouldn't say it's a horrible price either, but make sure to do your homework. They have incredibly odd bioses (some would say quirky) and thus you may have to go about OCing a bit barse ackwards.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductID=1124540&source=froogle

Then onto the reccomended Maximus III Gene

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-Maximus-III-GENE-Intel-P55-Motherboard-LGA1156

Which is £25 ish more, but I would suppose if you are overclocking hard you will reap the rewards from.

After looking quite hard those are about the only two I can find.. And the less said about EVGA the better tbh. Although I could be wide of the mark and it could be an excellent little board. It just has some very stiff competition.

 

[siravarice]

Ok so looking at the Asus Maximus 3 Gene. Lots of good reviews and only £150 quid too. Another question, I have an XFX Black Edition 5870, could I run the standard XFX 5870 with the Black Edition in crossfire? Because the Black Edition is just the same card but with an overclock, which I can turn down of course.

 

[alienware]

Yes of course. All the BE and XXX are are regular cards with a fancy OC bios on and nothing more (oh apart from the carboardy sticker overlay-ey thing).

Your I5 should do 4ghz all day long with that Fenrir on mate tbh. And at low temps too !

What I would suggest is using the BE as the main card (just if CF ever goes wonky) leave it at factory settings and then performing a ten second overclock to make them match. The second card will clock itself to absolutely nothing when it's not in use

Get a second opinion on all of the above though (from a professional like Tom who has had experience with those specific parts of course)

 

[tinytomlogan]

Ok so for now the Fuzion is a no-no. Are there any really good M-ATX motherboard for the 1156 platform that offer 2 16x PCI-E lanes? Just thinking that another graphics card would be better than another CPU. Especially in the long run.

Quick answer is no, to have 2x16x the board would need an NF200 to boost the lanes as the P55 only has 16 in total on chip.

The Fenrir is good, but its its not going to be amazing, really depends on the volts your cpu needs for 4ghz. anything over 1.3 and Id worry about the Fenrir

 

[siravarice]

So the Maximus 3 Gene can't run two 5870's in crossfire? Or can it but with a performance drop? I probs won't overclock my i5 much more than it already is until much later on, when it can save me a bit of money over a new CPU.

 

[alienware]

It can but take this as an example.

2 x PCI-E 2.0 x16 (x16/x8 Bandwidth)

What that basically means is that a single lane (or slot) is 16x. Put in two cards however? then it splits the lanes into dual 8x.

Now that is something I know quite a lot about as I had to look hard into that when I needed a (cheap) board to run my 5770 in Crossfire.

Making this uncomplicated you can expect a 15% max decrease in frames over the two cards in dual 8x than you would get in dual 16x. It doesn't make a massive difference to have 2 16x lanes running side by side, but it is a difference none the less and should be taken into account.

Tom is bang on as usual, I think the P55 is limited to doing that, and you are limited to a choice of two whole motherboards.

X58 seems to come with dual 16x but those boards are more expensive and would require you to buy a new CPU. Welcome to socket tomfoolery, it's really rather bloody annoying.

EDIT.. BTW dude.. I forgot to mention this earlier... This may help you

SLI - driver dependent, card dependent. ONLY two identical GPUs (I think RAM size may be questionable) can be used.

Crossfire - any GPU from the SAME FAMILY can be used. So that means you can add ANY Crossfire capable 5xxx card to yours and strap the buggers. So for example your 5870 used with a 5850, or 5770 etc.

Nvidia tried to make SLI do this a few years ago with Hyrbid SLI and failed in the head. My Crosshair 2 was supposedly able to do it. What they did was put some cruddy thing onboard and then told you that you could SLI it with another Nvidia card. Firstly the drivers were utterly terrible and secondly it just ruined your performance. They discontinued it shortly after and stopped giving out drivers for it.

Argh. Sorry to do this to you dude... OK I have dug up some quick figures for you

Motherboard : ASUS Rampage II Extreme - (X58 chipset dual 16x lanes)

CPU : Intel i7 920 @ 3.6GHz

RAM : 6GB Corsair Platinum @1333mhz

PSU : OCZ 1000w Gold PSU

HDD : 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1

Monitor : Samsung 2433 24" @ 1920x1200

OS : Windows 7 Ultimate 64

GPU : Sapphire HD5770 x2

Was a set up used here on this site to review the Radeon 5770 Crossfire setup. In Vantage it scored (regular clocks !) around 17,800 for 3d. See here - http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/sapphire_hd5770_crossfire_review/4

Now my system is comprised of the following.

Motherboard : Asrock Alive ! Xfire (£30)

CPU - AMD Phenom 2 940 @ 3.4ghz

RAM : Corsair Dominator PC6400 4gb DDR2 @ 800mhz

PSU : 750w Hipro

ETC. Far inferior to the test rig used here. I scored 14,900 in my first pass. Now I know that the dual 16x helped but the test rig pretty much massacres my machine in every aspect.

 

[siravarice]

So really if I want crossfire/SLI I need x16 lanes on both. Although a 15% decrease isn't much. What score did you get from just a single card?

 

[thestepster]

17,800 seems pretty low for that

i got like 25k for my set up

 

[siravarice]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/15.html

Found this while looking around, the difference between x16 lanes and x8 lanes is smaller than you think. It's more like 2-5% difference.

 

[alienware]

So really if I want crossfire/SLI I need x16 lanes on both. Although a 15% decrease isn't much. What score did you get from just a single card?

Half. Literally half. IIRC a 280GTX XXX scores about 12,000

17,800 seems pretty low for that

i got like 25k for my set up

Firstly there's cost to performance. A pair of 5770s can be had for about £230 now tops. A pair of 460s is over £320, bit of a difference. I agree that the 460 in SLI offer great bang for the buck, but so do 5770s XF considering they are nearly £100 less. Take off a third of your GPU score and you get this..

1/3 of 25,000 is 8333. 25,000 - 8333 is 16667. So, at the same price to performance ratio your 460s are not as good as a pair of 5770s for cash to performance

And then you are running the fabled (yet mostly useless for anything other than benchmarking and some minor encoding) CUDA cores.

Then there's heat, power consumption and the fact that a pair of 5770s is more than man enough to run any game you throw at them, even on my crappy rig

BTW Silo.. I ran some more Vantage today. Turns out that upping my Hypertransport to 1000mhz and sorting my memory settings out paid dividends. I am now hitting 15,500 GPU marks with a pair of 5770s on dual 8x with a Phenom 2 (which is only as good as a 45nm quad Intel). I would say that the Gene and a pair of 5870s will muller anything you throw at them tbh.

 

[thestepster]

the 460's are not much like the 465-470-480, use loads less power and they dont run hot either my card doesnt even touch 50 on 40% fan speed in a 26 degree room while folding and idles around 23 so its a good bit less than any other cards ive had in the past, x1900 - 4670 - 4850 - 8800gt x 5 - 9800gt - gts250

and i know the 5770's are cheaper by a good bit for me they are useless they fold like poo a £35 8800gt would outfold both cards together and thats the no 1 thing my cards are for

and cude cores are used for folding

 

[alienware]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/15.html

Found this while looking around, the difference between x16 lanes and x8 lanes is smaller than you think. It's more like 2-5% difference.

Oh I can well believe it mate !

There is a MAX loss of 15% however, but only in veeeeery rare situations. You will hear me moaning sometimes about how certain things are just not what theyre cracked up to be (DDR3, triple channel, dual 16x PCIE, SATA 3 ETC).

Add it all together all at once on a new rig? yes, will all add up to make a difference.But adding one at once and you will notice no difference at all. It's all just another bloody ruse to get us rushing out to buy new crap and binning our perfectly good computers. In all honesty a Q6600 is still more than enough to run any game at perfectly acceptable framerates. My E4500 with a 280GTX XXX conjoined to its bumhole was bloody fast. Things got smoother when I went for the Phenom 2, but then they should considering the NM was pretty much half, it was clocked 900mhz less than my 940 and gave up two cores.

the 460's are not much like the 465-470-480, use loads less power and they dont run hot either my card doesnt even touch 50 on 40% fan speed in a 26 degree room while folding and idles around 23 so its a good bit less than any other cards ive had in the past, x1900 - 4670 - 4850 - 8800gt x 5 - 9800gt - gts250

and i know the 5770's are cheaper by a good bit for me they are useless they fold like poo a £35 8800gt would outfold both cards together and thats the no 1 thing my cards are for

and cude cores are used for folding

We've had the folding discussion before

Yes, folding is awesome excellence ETC ETC blah blah but I am sure Silo does not want to spend his 21st Birthday money giving to Charidee, mate ! Poptastic ETC.

The 460 *IS* a 465. It's just cut down and cheaper, and runs cooler and eats less leccy. It's still greedy however, but compared to the other Fermi cards it's at least presentable.

And you're negating to realise that a pair of 5870s will rip off the 460's neck and poop down their throat

 

[thestepster]

the 460 has the gf104 to gf100 the 465, 470 and 480 have and they overclock stupid amounts 675 stock core to 922 easily and the 475 is about to get released on that 2 so it could be very promising to challenge the 480 if it overclocks as much as these 460's do

i know they would get there ass kicked by 2 of them but a single one thats a different story

 

[siravarice]

I would rather have Crossfire than SLI when it comes to gaming, it scales a whole lot better and is much less dependent on drivers. I don't fold so it doesn't matter if I don't go nvidia. And stop hijacking my thread Stepy!