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groove200

groove200

groove200

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Joined
3 Aug 2004
Posts
256
Location
Sittingbourne , Kent
Hey guys,

Ive been wrestling with an upgrade for the past few weeks and come up with what I have below.

Im currently runnng a core2 2.4ghz with a rubbish graphics card an a Lian Li V360 cube case. Whilst it has served me well I want to get back into my PC gaming so time to upgrade. I think ive come to the conclusion the cube style case is going to be too restrictive for my new requirements , hence the addition of a new case as well.

Ive got a Hyper 680w Type R II power supply which im thinking should be ok to move across , along with a decent 1TB hd for my data ( tbh most of my data is on the home server anyway )

I was wrestling with Xfiring a couple of 5850's instead of the 6950 (hopefully to be tweaked to a 6970)......but keep going round in circles on this particular aspect.

Hoping this should see me for a few years , and let me play Battlefiled3 at some top end settings to boot.

Any comments ?

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6950 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £203.99

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor £167.99

MSI P67A-GD65 Intel P67 (socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - (Sandybridge) ** B3 REVISION ** £139.98

OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G) £98.39

Fractal Design Define R3 Midi Tower Case - Silver Arrow £84.98

G.Skill RipJawsX 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL ) £79.99

Akasa AK-CCX-4002HP Venom CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/LGA1155/LGA1156/LGA1366/AM2/AM3) £38.99

Plus a couple of extra Fractal Design 140mm fans and some IC Diamond therma compund for good measure
 
This ram - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-094-KS&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1517 - is guaranteed to fit under that heatsink.

DSCF2664.jpg


^
Thtas a Venom with geil ram that has doesnt have the heatsink fingers like the Ripjaw ram.
 
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Yea stick with the 6950, crossfire only gives each card 8X PCI-E bus speed, meaning your losing performance from each card, not worth it IMO.
The Freezer 7 Rev-2 does an equivalent job of cooling like the Venom but is £20 cheaper. That's if you want it, I kinda like the aesthetics of the Venom.
 
Nice one stulid.......thanks for the heads up and recomendation. Looks like i may have run into problems with clearance otherwise. Is your Board and MSI as well ?

Cheers Emphacy......wasn't aware of that in the xfire setup , so 6950 looks the way to go. Probably a quieter setup as well ;-)
 
Emphacy said:
Yea stick with the 6950, crossfire only gives each card 8X PCI-E bus speed, meaning your losing performance from each card, not worth it IMO.
The Freezer 7 Rev-2 does an equivalent job of cooling like the Venom but is £20 cheaper. That's if you want it, I kinda like the aesthetics of the Venom.
Click to expand...

running any graphics card (except for the double GPU cards) at x8 speed will give barely no drop in performance. there was a review comparing two 580GTX's (even more powerful than the 6970) with exactly the same rig at x8/x8 and x16/x16 crossfire, and the x8/x8 was only 0.1FPS slower in several games

also, where did you come up with the freezer 7 being as good as a venom??? it might be so on the AMD sockets (the venom is notoriously bad on these) but i highly doubt it on a sandybridge

i would recommend going with the 6950 simply because it gives you the option of adding another one in at a later date, almost doubling your graphics power
 
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groove200 said:
Nice one stulid.......thanks for the heads up and recomendation. Looks like i may have run into problems with clearance otherwise. Is your Board and MSI as well ?
Click to expand...

thats a foxconn p67 board that I did for a forum members build.

the heatsink was good!!!
 
Reaper 392 said:
running any graphics card (except for the double GPU cards) at x8 speed will give barely no drop in performance. there was a review comparing two 580GTX's (even more powerful than the 6970) with exactly the same rig at x8/x8 and x16/x16 crossfire, and the x8/x8 was only 0.1FPS slower in several games

also, where did you come up with the freezer 7 being as good as a venom??? it might be so on the AMD sockets (the venom is notoriously bad on these) but i highly doubt it on a sandybridge

i would recommend going with the 6950 simply because it gives you the option of adding another one in at a later date, almost doubling your graphics power
Click to expand...

You got any source on that X16 - X8 XFire setup? I'd like to look into it.
And I remember it from another thread, could have been an AMD build, but I can't remember.
 
Emphacy said:
Yea stick with the 6950, crossfire only gives each card 8X PCI-E bus speed, meaning your losing performance from each card, not worth it IMO.
QUOTE]

yes, u do loss performance, but not enought to make dual 16x worth to much more then dual 8x, its only very minor impact to performance, ofcourse 16x does help, just not so strongly that you could laff at the dual 8x CF configures.

their are experiments done that prove its only a minor impact, personly i wouldnt worrie to much about it so long as stated befor, its the same bandwith for the 2 cards (16x,4 crossfire will effectively be 4x,4)
Click to expand...
 
Emphacy said:
Yea stick with the 6950, crossfire only gives each card 8X PCI-E bus speed, meaning your losing performance from each card, not worth it IMO.
QUOTE]

yes, u do loss performance, but not enought to make dual 16x worth to much more then dual 8x, its only very minor impact to performance, ofcourse 16x does help, just not so strongly that you could laff at the dual 8x CF configures.

their are experiments done that prove its only a minor impact, personly i wouldnt worrie to much about it so long as stated befor, its the same bandwith for the 2 cards (16x,4 crossfire will effectively be 4x,4)
Click to expand...

Type slower or brush up on your spelling and grammar ;)
 
The Sapphire looks almost certain to unlock from the reports ive seen :)

Despite me being even more unsure now of which direction to go graphics wise, will the 6950 (70) do me for BF3 and the next couple of years do you think ?

Im so far out of the loop on PC gaming i really want to be able to run it at my monitors 1920x1080 with everything turned up to full :D
 
If a 6950/70 doesnt last you, theres not much else thats faster out there, only a 6990 and GTX590(dual gpu cards) and a GTX580 and maybe the GTX570 are quicker.
 
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