Gaming - crossfire or 2X series

[MattShepherd]

Ive been doing a little research, and it seems the old theory of dual core reigning supreme is beggining to come to an end. Certainly so with the big chunky games such as crysis 2, which actually had a tri core chip coming out on top.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-ii-x4-810-and-x3-720be-review-am3/25

This surprised me since its the general consesus that dual core is by far and away the king for gaming, which on older games such as cod 4, it certainly seems to be, but anything less than a year old seems to be having 3core+ as top by a small margin over dual, this will only increase as games progress i guess.

Anyway my point was this pretty conclusive stress test basically highlighted that with overclocking, on warhead at 1600x1200 they were only seeing 5/6 fps increases, which led to the single graphics card bottlenecking the system (geforce 280 was used). So im wondering, which is right way to go, cross firing 2 cards, or buying the x2 series cards.

Im also wondering just how much ram is needed without holding such a powercard(s) back. From that test i think im aiming towards an amd phenom II 940, though i cant decide whether or not to go ddr3, which is gonna hike the price up consideribly.

Before discovering ocuk i was planning a £800 budget build, now my imagination and intrest is soaring and i keep wanting to find and know more lol

any input is most welcome thanksssss

 

[decto]

DDR3 has suddenly become a lot cheaper so it's worth serious consideration.

Dual cores are prefered for gaming as they overclock well and are significantly cheaper than the well spec'd quads. When the budget is tight a £100 Dual core + £200 GPU is far better than £200 Quad and £100 GPU.

Crossfire / SLI is an option if you have £300 + to spend, otherwise aim for a good single card solution. SLI usually requires an expensive SLI capable board while the intel P45 does a fair job with crossfire.


4GB memory is 2x2 Dimms is standard these days. That leaves 2 slots free for an upgrade.

There will always be a bottleneck of sorts in the system. Just try to get a sensible balance.

Forget future proofing... since the future is often only 6months!

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[MattShepherd]

well on that site its showing the phenom 920 is performing slightly better than the best dual core chip there is on a game like crysis warhead, and for some reason the 920's are the same price as the most expensive dual core chip.

they also said that no matter the overclocking they cant get more of an increase than 5-6 fps purely because of the single card, so surely crossfiring / x2 series would be a good idea, but which is better?

 

[D D Danneh]

well on that site its showing the phenom 920 is performing slightly better than the best dual core chip there is on a game like crysis warhead, and for some reason the 920's are the same price as the most expensive dual core chip.

they also said that no matter the overclocking they cant get more of an increase than 5-6 fps purely because of the single card, so surely crossfiring / x2 series would be a good idea, but which is better?

Well performance wise, they're pretty much identical, but the 4870x2 only takes up one card slot. On a P-XX chipset mobo I would recommend that, as you are limited by slots. There aren't (afaik) any P-XX boards with true dual pci-e 2.0 running at x16. Some can do one card at x16 and the other at x8 though. Ideally you want the full x16, but if you had x16 for a 4870x2 and then later on added another 4870 to a x8 slot, you'd be sorted.

 

[decto]

well on that site its showing the phenom 920 is performing slightly better than the best dual core chip there is on a game like crysis warhead, and for some reason the 920's are the same price as the most expensive dual core chip.

they also said that no matter the overclocking they cant get more of an increase than 5-6 fps purely because of the single card, so surely crossfiring / x2 series would be a good idea, but which is better?

The Athlon X2 7750BE as a long way from the best dual core CPU out there. The article and in particular the Crysis Warhead benchmark is looking to see if the game will benifit from more cores than two which it does. It's in no way a comparison of the best performing CPU.

Where 4 vs 3 cores exists, the 3 core is higher clocked so will win since the fourth core is poorly untilised.

3dm and vantage are a farce since they are stupidly CPU loaded... which in not reflected in real gaming.

As for graphics, Crysis will bring near any system to it's knees especially once you apply AA. You''ll spend a lot of money trying to make it look pretty at high frame rates

If you really must have a dual card setup then look at the 4850X2, 4870X2 or GTX295...... £300+ cards

The sweet spot is the 4870 X2 since the GTX295 is only marginally faster despite costing a fair bit more.

I wouldn't bother with the two card SLI / Crossfire solutions at this time unless you already have one of the cards. They do work well buy you need to buy the cards at the right price and the boards are more expensive.

 

[MattShepherd]

okie thank you very much

one final question before i think about ordering, ive went for the 8750x2 series, but i dont spose anybody could advise between 4gb of ddr3, or 6-8gb of ddr2? and any ram recomendations for an amd setup, since a lot of the ram seems to be tailored towards intel, im guessing because of the massive stranglehold intel had for a while.

sorry if these questions seem tedios, but im learning and i appreciate it a lottt )