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Best card for Dell U2711

harmony said:
^^
850W is more than enough for 2x 6950 CF.

In terms of gaming performance and most daily application performance, i7 2600K is of poor value compared against i5 2500K. Even if you need HT desperately for certain applications it won't provide you more than 15% performance increase in most cases.

For most people, the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps is very obvious, especially for first-person-shooting games. You might tweak your settings to get 30 fps and 60 fps respectively then try to feel and compare.

With that budget, personally I'd go for 6990 + 6970 TRI-CF, which is faster than GTX580 3GB 2-way SLI. If you stretch your budget you could go for GTX580 3GB TRI-SLI.
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wouldn't a 6990 + 6970(£900 of the budget gone) be overkill if its only for bf3? unless photoguy is planning on playing crysis(1/2), metero 2033 etc then wouldn't 6950/70 xfire suffice?
 
shaffaaf27 said:
2x 2GB 6950s are the best price for performance in most catagories.
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Thats where I starting then I googled ....

Damm you google, dam you...

Just to confuse matters even more. I found this article on micro-stutter (which I had not heard of till today).

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,review-32256-15.html

If you take the opinion of the reviewer, it seems to suggest sticking with a single gpu solution if possible.

I think I am going to buy one card (maybe the sapphire 6950) and just run games at a lower res. I think this almost gets me my cake (or curry) and lets me eat it!
 
2 580s? I play on this monitor with an overclocked 5850 and its fine. I knock the aa down to 2x and all is as it was. Even shogun is fine, although the maps were always hard on the gpu even at 1080p.
 
OP: This is why I have bought two U2412m monitors (in the post, not here yet :() instead of the 27 inch Dell.
I have one med-high gpu and just didn't want to have to buy another to play games maxed out :p.
 
Hi I have a U3011 same res as your 27 LCD. The 6990 runs every game so far maxed out fine and its nowhere near as loud as the reviews make out
 
Would 2 of these be good? HIS ATI Radeon HD 6950 IceQ X Turbo 2048MB
What mobo would i need? I bought the dell on a bit of a whim, got it cheap, didnt think i would have trouble playing at the resolution....
 
matthewwhitton said:
Would 2 of these be good? HIS ATI Radeon HD 6950 IceQ X Turbo 2048MB
What mobo would i need? I bought the dell on a bit of a whim, got it cheap, didnt think i would have trouble playing at the resolution....
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You'll need a case with reasonable cooling capability because these cards dump most of the heat inside your case.

Also it is important to choose a motherboard with reasonable PCI-E spacing, i.e. there must be at least a pair of X16 slots separated by at least 2 other slots, otherwise if you install them with no room between, you risk overheating problems.
 
I play on the u2711 with crossfire 6950's, ulocked shaders and overclocked, and I must say they really purr at max settings on almost all games... The only times they struggle below 40fps is when using stupid settings which even 3gb 580 sli can't run properly, such as ubersamping in witcher 2 etc...

400 quid for a pair you can't beat 2x6950's!
 
oulton said:
I play on the u2711 with crossfire 6950's, ulocked shaders and overclocked, and I must say they really purr at max settings on almost all games... The only times they struggle below 40fps is when using stupid settings which even 3gb 580 sli can't run properly, such as ubersamping in witcher 2 etc...

400 quid for a pair you can't beat 2x6950's!
Click to expand...

Actually 3-way SLI of GTX580s can sustain 60 fps most of the time, with Ubersampling enabled.

I do agree with you that 6950 2GB x 2 is the best choice. (best value + bang for buck)
 
I'm very tempted to say to hell with waiting for the new new cards and just get 2x sapphire 6950 toxic and hope that both unlock shaders so effectively 6970 xfire for the fraction of the price, currently have a msi 5850 twin frozr ii(think I've already mentioned it in this thread) and was looking at the sapphire 5850 vapor-x for £120 from ocuk(from their clearence section, think was new as no mention of b-grade) but thats gone.

harmony wouldn't tri xfirex of 6950 or 6970(or even 6990 + 6970) also be able to do 60fbs? and think oultan ment 2x 580s not 3x 580 :)

p.s. I have q6600@3hz(will be putting in my q9450 once I clean out my pc), any ideas as to how many fps I'll loose compared to the sites/mags that do the reviews/benchmarks as they use i920+ in their tests so the cpu doesn't bottleneck the graphics card?
 
fowler002 said:
I'm very tempted to say to hell with waiting for the new new cards and just get 2x sapphire 6950 toxic and hope that both unlock shaders so effectively 6970 xfire for the fraction of the price, currently have a msi 5850 twin frozr ii(think I've already mentioned it in this thread) and was looking at the sapphire 5850 vapor-x for £120 from ocuk(from their clearence section, think was new as no mention of b-grade) but thats gone.

harmony wouldn't tri xfirex of 6950 or 6970(or even 6990 + 6970) also be able to do 60fbs? and think oultan ment 2x 580s not 3x 580 :)

p.s. I have q6600@3hz(will be putting in my q9450 once I clean out my pc), any ideas as to how many fps I'll loose compared to the sites/mags that do the reviews/benchmarks as they use i920+ in their tests so the cpu doesn't bottleneck the graphics card?
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Well to be honest I have no idea whether 3 x 6950/70 would do 60 fps in The Witcher 2 with Ubersampling. The game is an nVidia's title, and the last patch notes explicitly stated that the Ubersampling was optimized for nVidia cards (didn't mention AMD cards). I strongly suspect that the scaling of CrossfireX with Ubersampling is still very low. (Note that the scaling of CrossfireX without Ubersampling has been much better than the scaling of SLI without Ubersampling in a previous version of the game, when I still had my pair of 6950 CF; but at that time the scaling of CrossfireX with Ubersampling was very horrible i.e. almost 0% improvement over single GPU.)
 
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Thanks for the advice everyone. I think whatever I get it will be better than my Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB running on a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550....
 
PhotoGuy said:
Thanks for the advice everyone. I think whatever I get it will be better than my Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB running on a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550....
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what do you have the q9550 clocked at?

I tried ocing the q9450 on a dfi lanpart lt x48 and it was like plucking teeth trying to get it to 3.6ghz, got to 3.4ghz i think fine but over that it took me days of messing around in the bios and looking on the clunk forum as there was some one on there who was also trying to oc the q9450 on the same motherboard. other than ocing and benchmarking the q9450 and the 9800gtx I didn't get much use out of that pc before it 'died'(well got a virus/malware within a few months of building it, I formated the hard disk to reinstall windows but for whatever reason it wouldn't so I gave up and have recently dissambled the pc).

currently have the q6600 in my pc but will be putting the q9450 in once I come to clean the pc, only have the q6600@3ghz as couldn't get it stable at over that on the p5q dlx tho didn't spend too long on it.
 
fowler002 said:
what do you have the q9550 clocked at?
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I am not really an avid overclocker, and don't pretend to understand all the gizmo's so I settled for 3.20. I had issues with 3.40 not been stable, a friend did sugest some stuff but I was happy with 3.20. I should add it was my friend who did the all the overclocking!

Good luck with your build
 
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Yes, but just wait for the BF3 beta to come out. Stupid going Tri 580 or whateva when you get away with a single 480/6970.
 
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