You do get gains moving to an i7 with multi-GPU. But is it worth it? Probably not in pure FPS terms but I always felt a bit sad seeing my GPUs not at 99% usage.
An i5 will have both GPU dipping a lot more frequently than an i7.
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7950s in CF or 290
- Thread starter liscoe
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You do get gains moving to an i7 with multi-GPU. But is it worth it? Probably not in pure FPS terms but I always felt a bit sad seeing my GPUs not at 99% usage.
An i5 will have both GPU dipping a lot more frequently than an i7.
Soldato
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For me to get anything near (and it's still way off) 99% usage with two 7970s and an i7 920 @ 4GHZ I have to downclock my cards massively to 800/1375 or lower.
Even then i'm only seeing 75-80% in BF3/4.
Even then i'm only seeing 75-80% in BF3/4.
If you go Xfire on your current CPU you will see a big jump in average and high fps in BF4, however, the mins will unlikely be affected very much as your FPS will still plummet when the CPU is maxed as it simply can't keep up with how much info the 7950's are requesting. However, BF4 is so broken at the moment that for me and several other users that on Windows 7 with an i7 the mins still didn't improve. Win 8.1 upgrade and my min drops into the 60's for about 10 seconds in a 30 minute game overall, averaging 80-100 on every map apart from Shanghai which is closer to the 70's as oppsed to Win 7 where the mins hit the 30's and 40's for the majority of the game..
I'd definately get a 2nd 7950 but don't think about changing anything until Mantle supposedly removes the CPU bottleneck.
I'd definately get a 2nd 7950 but don't think about changing anything until Mantle supposedly removes the CPU bottleneck.
Soldato
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Your problem will be finding a 7950 that isn't a silly price.
Wack up the scaling to 125% it looks lovely and will have both cards sat at 100% quite easily
This is just so wrong. A decent clocked 2500k will happily drive a pair of decent GPU's. I upgraded from a 2500k to 4770k and I do not see these magic gains a 4770k is meant to give.
Tbh my games were perfectly smooth with the 2500k and are perfectly smooth with the 4770k. In my opinion going from a 2500k to 4770k gained me nothing more than higher benchmark scores.
I had ~50% gpu usage in BF4 with my 2500k and 7990. Granted I only play at 1920x1080.
Tell me about it. I upgraded from an 2600k @4.7GHz to 4770k @4.5GHz and not one single game gave me even a single digit FPS boost. This was with a GTX780 MSI Gaming card (now running R9 290X). Even the jump from PCIE 2.0 to 3.0 on the new motherboard made a grand total of eff all difference.
Worst £400 I ever spent in my entire history of PC gaming and that goes all the way back to 1990.
I had a pair of GTX 780's both at 1150 on the core. At 1440p everything cranked up it was perfectly smooth on the 2500k @ 4.6Ghz. I upgraded to the 4770k @ 4.5Ghz and BF4 was still perfectly smooth I saw no difference visually ingame between the two.
If I turn off the HT on my 4770k it runs the same. No difference visually noticed with HT on or off.
Unless you monitor the GPU's or use synthetic benchmarks there is no visable difference.
I'm just voicing my opinion and most will disagree with me as I'm more about how a game looks and feels rather than benchmarks or what monitoring software says.
Soldato
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7950 CF will be more powerful, but a 290 is newer tech. I believe I was somewhere that the 290 can do a lot more compute calculations than the previous gen cards (and their rebadges) and Mantle apparently likes compute. If that's true then it could mean that the 290s can get some bigger gains from Mantle.
Not sure if a 2500K will bottleneck 7950 CF or not, but I would imagine that even if it is bottlenecked it'll still perform better than a single 290 (surely moving the bottleneck from the GPU to the CPU means that you are fully using the CPU?.
Of course, if you got a single 290 then you could consider a second further down the line. But I'm guessing that was the plan with the 7950 and then this happened, so might happen again with the 290...
Not sure if a 2500K will bottleneck 7950 CF or not, but I would imagine that even if it is bottlenecked it'll still perform better than a single 290 (surely moving the bottleneck from the GPU to the CPU means that you are fully using the CPU?.
Of course, if you got a single 290 then you could consider a second further down the line. But I'm guessing that was the plan with the 7950 and then this happened, so might happen again with the 290...
Soldato
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Em...not sure what were you expecting when you are just using one high-end GPU card not two, which an overclocked i5 would be plenty in most cases...Tell me about it. I upgraded from an 2600k @4.7GHz to 4770k @4.5GHz and not one single game gave me even a single digit FPS boost. This was with a GTX780 MSI Gaming card (now running R9 290X). Even the jump from PCIE 2.0 to 3.0 on the new motherboard made a grand total of eff all difference.
Worst £400 I ever spent in my entire history of PC gaming and that goes all the way back to 1990.
Seriously, you'd had better off kept your 2600K at 4.70GHz and gotten another GTX780 to SLI rather than moving from the 2600K to 4770K and a single GTX780 to a single 290x...
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Soldato
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+1 pointless upgrde for single card