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Trifire 16x 8x 8x atleast - Motherboard + cpu help

metigue

metigue

metigue

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Joined
3 Oct 2011
Posts
100
Bulldozer is appealing to me as it has the potential to become so much better with software patches.

This would give me AM3+ and 16x 8x 8x

I really want Sandybridge, but then I'm stuck on p67 or z68, and I am struggling to find a CHIPLESS 16x 8x 8x MoBo

I'm even looking at 1366 and going x58, so I can have 16x 16x 16x

But that would add £600 to my entire build price.

Basically, what should I do?
 
Take the MARGINAL performance hit without the full 16x on all lanes and a p67 or z68 board.

BD is not a good investment now, software is not going to help. At best you might see single digit % average improvements on Windows 8 with a newer scheduler.

Right now, in the short to medium term any meaningful improvements via software will be supporting new instruction sets, video encoding and the like - nothing in gaming really.

BD just makes no sense as a new bundle purchase, overclocking headroom is average and overshadowed by huge power draw. Highly Threaded operations where BD should excel see it falling behind, matching or at best slightly beating Sandybridge chips.

To paraphrase the review sites own conclusions:

Go 2500k and get a solid performer in all areas, good IPC for low threaded applications and just as good performance where you can load up all cores.
 
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metigue said:
but the only Mobo's I can find for sandybridge are 16x 8x 4x, and the 4x will give a big hit to the third 6950
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Except it won't.
Scaling isn't 100% on trifire, you'll lose a few percent, 10% at best, but you'll lose a lot more on Bulldozer because it can't push it.
 
metigue said:
*sigh* But I really do care about that 10% why can't socket 1155 just have more lanes?
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Tbh, you probably won't see any drop because it's tri-fire.
And you'd lose more if you want AMD because they're not good enough.

1155 doesn't have more lanes as it's mainstream.

mmj_uk said:
You could always hang on another month for SB-E, as far as I know there will be a 2600K equivalent and the X79 chipset will have much better support for trifire etc.
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And about as expensive as X58 :p.

The OP can upgrade to Ivy next year and get more bandwidth too.
 
More detail here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/sandy-bridge-e-and-x79-preview/3

More PCIe lanes

The one thing that people grumble about the most with P67/Z68 is the relatively small number of available PCIe lanes (16) for graphics cards. If you are working a setup with two or more graphics cards (SLI/Crossfire), the PCIe bandwidth is limited at x8:x8.
Here again the performance difference is trivial as running today's fastest cards barely utilizes all that bandwidth, but two x16 and then room for another x8 obviously is much better.

Sandy Bridge-E has a nice 40 lanes available. You can split them up in a variety of combinations, two x16 links with one x8 link, one x16 link and three x8 links, or one x16 link, two x8 links, and two x4 links. So this will be one concern less, though I betcha some of you would like to see three x16 as an option.
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Best of both worlds really, fastest CPU and plenty of lanes.
 
metigue said:
It's not, but patience is x.x I currently have no desktop.

I don't want to pay extra for outdated tech though -1366
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If you buy something now though you will probably be kicking yourself when X79 comes out (i've heard it's next month).

I'm currently in the same situation running an AMD E350 :o now that Bulldozer officially stinks I'm tempted to wait for X79 if it's not too long.
 
metigue said:
It's chipped. I don't want to have a brickton of extra latency because it has to be handled by the N200
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what res do you plan to run at?

you'd only really need high pcie lane speeds if you were running very very high res like me 5760x1200 and above. my board can run 8x16x16. and about the nf200 chip dont knock it because i was running both my 6950's in native 8x8 mode, people i spoke to in the past who were running my setup told me they tried moving there cards to the 16x16 configuration which uses the nf200 and saw no difference, however i thought i would give it a go because they were not running my res, guess what.....i got a 10+fps boost in fc2, i never tried any other games because i didnt like the fact that my cards were sandwiched together, however once im watercooled i'll deffos be moving the cards back and taking advantage of the nf200
 
Howling said:
Had to lol. Sorry. *chuckles*
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I've read horror stories about the N200

Sin_Chase said:
Any reason you need to go Tri-Fire? Crossfire with 2 better cards perhaps?
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Trifire because it alleviates stutter and gives me the enthuisiast performance I'm looking for at a low price.

I'm probably going for the Asus Maximus IV extreme-z because it's shiny.
 
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metigue said:
Bulldozer is appealing to me as it has the potential to become so much better with software patches.

Basically, what should I do?
Click to expand...

you should believe us when we say that bulldozer has no potential, especially compared to what intel has on the market
 
panyan said:
you should believe us when we say that bulldozer has no potential, especially compared to what intel has on the market
Click to expand...

Well I know how good sandybridge is, it's just that I was scared off of high end socket 1155 boards because of some horror stories I read.

Any opinions on the Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z?
 
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