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Would an AMD FX 4170 bottleneck GeForce GTX 660 SC in tri-SLI?

Da_epic_ninja

Da_epic_ninja

Da_epic_ninja

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2 Dec 2012
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Hello all,
I am completely new to these posts so excuse me if I do something wrong.
Anyway, onto the point;
At the moment I have an AMD FX 4170 running at 4.2 GHz, and a single EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Superclocked. In the future I plan on upgrading most components in my PC, including a new motherboard and obviously two more 660s. However, although I know my CPU is fairly decent, I'm not sure if it could handle that without a serious bottleneck. I wont be buying an intel CPU anytime soon, but I could possibly buy a Phenom II. However, I have no experience in overclocking and Would prefer to have a higher GHz than 3.2.
I have a 1920x1080 res monitor and I shan't be buying any bigger. However I may buy two additional monitors of the same res. How would this effect the GPUs and CPU?
Thanks for any replies and be warned I only recently jumped onto the PC bandwagon. I know most of the terms but some of the extremly technical stuff I'm not too up on but I will try my best to understand
Cheers :D
 
Afaik you can't do tri sli with a 660, and if you could it'd be bottlenecked by an FX4170 at 4.2GHZ.

Although I wouldn't call an FX4170 fairly decent, while then saying you'd buy a CPU almost 3 years older than it.

If you were putting money into another 2 660's, I'd put money on another 660 and an i5 3570k since you can't get 3 660's.

A 4170 would bottleneck a 660 SLI easily enough too.
 
Thanks,
I didn't realize you couldn't do 660s in SLI, may I ask why? (Not questioning your expertise just curious ;) )
Hmm Intel CPUs are expensive so yeah
These upgrades aren't gonna happen until the probably July and maybe some more at the end of the year, so they are distant. I will have around £800 to play with, but could probably push that up a bit if it's what's necessary. What sort of setup would you recommend for a PC that can run most games on high settings with a half-decent FPS?
 
They can do SLI, just not Tri-SLI, and it's because it's not physically possible, it's a limitation so you can't create some uber performance per bang rig, the 78XX do the same thing for AMD.

Their used to be a time you could Tri-Fire/SLI the mid range cards, but alas not anymore.

7950's are brilliant GPU's, you could do a tri-fire 7950, but you'd be so bottlenecked by your FX4170 it'd be horrendous, hell, an FX4170 can easily bottleneck a single 7950.
 
Right so you're saying I've pretty much gotta go intel if I want the better performance?
Is there any particular partner company to look for when buying a AMD GPU? Is there any nvidia alternatives?
Well I've just found this motherboard for an 1155 socket http://www.******.com/291652-asus-p...-8-channel-audio-atx-motherboard-p8z68-v-gen3
So that's all great.
So would the i5 3570k bottleneck two or even 3 7950s? Doubt I'd ever really do three but just asking.
Also Looking at motherboards I've confused myself, there are some that advertise as being capable of quad SLI and crossfire but only have 2 PCE x16 slots? Huh?
Thanks for all the replies so far thy've been extremly helpful :)
 
Intel if you're after the extremes of GPU performance that you're after.

A 3570k and two 7950's would be stellar, 3 again, brilliant.

An i5 3570k could easily bottleneck 2 or 3 7950's still, that's a 150 quid CPU trying to push around over 600 quid of GPU's lol.
 
Well, there's no fool proof way of never getting a bottleneck lol.
An i5 3570k and two 7950's, all overclocked is a pretty sweet combination.
 
Oh right I thought you said it would easily bottleneck. I must have misread, my bad.
That's great all it all fits fairly well into my price range, the only other things I need to worry about is a new case, motherboard and PSU and I'm done. I know what case I'm gonna get and I have a fairly good idea of motherboards too. I also used 'extreme psu calculator' to find I'd need around 565 W so I'm gonna go with a corsair 650W.
This all fits fairly well into my price range, cheers :)
What about if I wanted another 2 monitors to have a 3 monitor configuration? How would that effect the setup?
This is another thing which is in the extremely distant future, but I play a lot of racing games so the idea of the full round view interests me
 
Oh and btw, as I said I've never done any overclocking before, when the time comes nearer I will research further into this but I thought you needed water cooling for any serious overclocking?
 
Well, easily bottleneck as in you could quite easily create a situation it'd bottleneck in.

7950 Crossfire and an i5 3570k? I'd be fine with that personally, but I know a lot of people wouldn't.

Having a 3 screen set up would mean your bottleneck at 1920x1080 with those situations an i5 3570k can bottleneck the 7950's wouldn't be apparent, as they'd be working their ass off at that resolution lol.

Overclocking on air is pretty safe, you could quite easily get a rather restrained 4.2GHZ on an i5 3570k without breaking a sweat, and quite easily get it to 4.4.
 
Great, as I say I'll probably reserve multiple monitors for when I win the lottery so that doesn't overly bother me.
However, if I overclocked to say 4.4GHz, would I need a PSU greater than 650W?
 
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