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Crossfire, SLi, Bigger single card......

Akasa Venom Strike, should be big enough i hope

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ALXAndy said:
From the sound of it you like to throw money at problems. That's great, but none of your setups (providing you had them new) would have been weak enough even when Crossfire wasn't working well to leave you with any major headaches.

I read reviews on CF 5770 and it seemed too good to be true. Wait, these £250 GPUs can actually beat a 5870 that costs £50 more? and by quite a margin too? SIGN ME UP !!!!oneone.

And then the reality of it dawned on me. When it didn't work (hint - often) I did not have enough muscle to do what I wanted my games to do. Which was annoying at the best of times, and swear worthy the rest.

I stuck it out for the best part of 11 months. You? it seems to me that your setups cost many many hundreds of pounds. Your 5970s alone are man enough to take care of any game in the world when running alone, so chances are you are simply eradicating the issue by throwing money at it.

His scenario (and mine when I used it) is the same.

Unless you go by the name of Merlin then I don't know how you can put up with Quadfire. Been there last year for a laugh (£80 for a pair of 3870x2) and it was absolutely bloody horrible.
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Been using 2560x1600 since 2006, relying on a single gpu is out of the question.

For the most part a single 1900xt,3870 would have been a headache at 2560x1600 but i never had to run a game on a single 1900xt,3870, its down to the games i played and when i played them.

The 3870x2 was horrible, but it was the first of its kind and it had more problems than 2x3870 as a game would sometimes work on 2x3870 but not on the 3870x2 and would take a driver revision/revisions to sort it out.

4x3870 was great and really 3x3870 was enough, but wanted to try Quadfire and there was another slot and like most men they like to fill that slot.

I was happy until the unfortunate reality of 512MB Vram smacked over the head like a sledge hammer.

As far as the 5970s the rare occasion that i have to run on single GPU, NFS hot pursuit, DarkSiders, performance of a single 5870 at 900/1200 does the job to hold 60fps, but i have not yet run a game which would be an issue with single 5870 performance because CF support has been there for them when i play and sometimes i do test with just a single 5970 and its not enough in some games.

And now that future drivers will have Custom CF profile options things should get even better.

Getting 2 low end GPUs to match a highend GPU that can not come close to doing the job when CF is not working is asking for headache, just get the highend GPU.
 
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As previously said go for the bigger single card if you can afford it. 5770cf is getting me by for now and has performed admirably over the past year but i cant see it managing much longer hence me looking to get shot when AMD's next lot of offerings come out.
 
ALXAndy said:
Yeah that makes sense.

I'd have nothing to do with SLI if it wasn't for the fact I want to run surround.
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Yep you have no choice if you want surround, as long as the pleasure out weighs the pain :D
If ever PLP gets sorted i will be going 4960x1600 full time in games, but for now it has its benefits just as is, some games will run in windowed mode at 4960x1600 and HTSoft for some others.

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I couldn't live with how it laid the desktop out, though.

That's why I'm getting a second PC to dedicate to it, because it's horrible trying to navigate the way it lays out the desktop :(

Looks like AMD are addressing that issue with the 7 series.
 
6970 Lightning, great card but is it £70 better than a 6950?

For another £130 you can go CrossFire.

ALXAndy doesn't rate it, that's fine, he had a bad experience.

I had 7800GT SLI and while it was fantastic when it worked, it was horrible when it didn't and there was no way to make it work at the time, you could try making a profile in NCP but it never worked for me.

There is the other end of the spectrum too as Final8y pointed out!

I have had 6950>70 custom cooled AC Extremes in Crossfire running [email protected] or [email protected] for almost a year and can't rate it enough!

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Now that's what I call a cooler!:D

You can find both of them here if someone fancies giving it a bump?:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=19041495&posted=1#post19041495


Yes you get the odd game you need to wait for a profile(usually a Nvidia title), but I'm a patient guy and don't need to jump on a game on release with the only exception being BF3.

Radeon pro usually fixed the profile problems much the same as Evga's fixes work for SLI.

As Final8y said the new 12.1's have a similar profile maker built in now to make life easier.

Yes you could possibly be banging your head off the desk, but it's never happened with me and it could also happen with using 1 card too.

@ALXAndy, I enjoy phys-x but can't use it right now due to having my 3 slot coolers, so when I'm bored of BF3, I'l be going single 6950>70 +9800gt GenL hack for BAC.

@Cleeecooo, why would you wan't to turn the crap off when you can run it with your setup?
 
Same cooler as on my 5970 Toxics but only bigger of course.
I got some 5970 EK fullcover water blocks that i may try to modify to fit, but ill wait until the 7990 or whatever is out just in case i kill the cards so that have something to jump to :D.
 
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tommybhoy said:
6970 Lightning, great card but is it £70 better than a 6950?

@ALXAndy, I enjoy phys-x but can't use it right now due to having my 3 slot coolers, so when I'm bored of BF3, I'l be going single 6950>70 +9800gt GenL hack
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Sorry for the odd chop I'm on the Ipad.

Firstly yes, it is better. Built better overall and has the two games. The games practically give you back your £70. But the build quality is as good as it gets. I guess you have to be super geeky and give a crap about those sorts pf things really.

Moving on. The quality of the cooler beats the crud out of anything Arctic have ever made. I had one of those triple slot jobbers on my 8800GTX. It's not just some fans suspended on a plastic frame above a heatsink.

GenL's Physx mod for me is essential. I have to pick up a card to hybrid ppu with the 6970 soon because I'm a Mirror's Edge junkie and that game is one of the two good Physx games.
 
@Final8y, Yep, knew that mate.

I kept 1 from my 5870 and got another, they are simply immense!

On the one hand I wouldn't mind the frozrs as they only take up 2 slots, but I very much doubt they could genuinely sit 'silent' in my case when all my fans are off, the Extremes can't be heard in auto when in idle at all!

Still can't hear them at 70% either and keep the cores nice and cool.

@ALXAndy, I still doubt 2 of the lightnings would be any quieter/cooler, as my cooler was 2 gens later than yours, but we will never know unless you buy another lightning and bring them up to my house and plug it in to compare.;)
 
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ALXAndy said:
Yo. Yes and no.

No, SLI drivers are much better, and EVGA do a patch thing of their own so it usually works.

Thing is mate, you ain't going to circumvent the caveat, and that is that the 570 doesn't have enough vram. Adding another doesn't add any more ram. It just makes the cores rip games to shreds. However, if you ain't got the vram you need you're in trouble..

I run quad SLI GTX 295s. Acceptable vram limits? these things go bezerk. Give them Battlefield 3? they crap out. Absolutely useless.

So that leaves you (if you want to be safe) with the 2.5gb 570, 6970 2gb (may as well get the Porsche like Lightning as it's cheap and comes with games) or a 3gb 580 which is overkill.

And out of the 3 the 6970L is the cheapest..

Ed. I refuse to turn AA off. You end up with a game console and the flickering of the jagged edges gives me a headache. I recently bought a 360. I played Fallout : New Vegas for 35 mins before feeling rather ill.
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Which crevice of your ass did you pull this gumph from? Left or right side?
 
More confused than ever now! Most seem to think a single GPU is the best solution although i do find it hard to understand why mainboard builders would keep pushing out sli/crossfire boards, if it really was of little benefit.

Grrr what to do.
 
1.3GB GTX 570 is absolutely fine for 1080p at Ultra 2xAA (4xAA is ok if you don't mind dropping to 40fps), but u defo dont "need" more than 1.3GB for BF3 at 1080p - there is no stuttering. The fact that BF3 can (and will) use more VRAM if you have it doesnt mean it's essential and the price increase of the 2.5/3GB version is just silly for minimal (if any) performance gain.

Just close web browsers and disable aero (can be done automatically by editing properties under BF£.exe) when u play BF3 and u net a spare 300-400MB VRAM.
 
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