I have dual 7990s under water which have been mining for a while but since selling my laptop which I used for gaming, I'm looking at a simple, cheapish upgrade to turn this dedicated miner into a gaming system/miner. Case isn't an issue as it's on a system benching case.
Firstly I fully understand that quadfire is pointless and doesn't scale well and tbh i'd probably end up gaming on one card at the same time as mining on the other.
I already have a MSI Z87-G55 motherboard which is paired with 2400MHz memory and a Intel i3 at the moment.
The trouble is deciding what path to take..
Option 1 (and the easiest) would be to simply upgrade to a 4770k and a custom cooler (or put it under water too) however having had a 4770k in the past I do know that it sometimes became a bottleneck having a single 7990, let alone two (similar situation to the 4670k, the upgrade to a 4770k, although better, never properly cured it).
Option 2 was going to involve moving to AMD (I have no preference) and getting a Asus Sabertooth 990FX & FX-8 Eight Core 8320. I'd overclock this and end up with 8 cores instead of 4 + HT. This would cost the same, if not slightly less then option 1. This would be done on the belief that a 8 core CPU would be able to handle the work load better. Are they phasing AM3+ out, there seems to be little choice in terms of high end motherboards?
Option 3 was a bit stupid (however the cheapest) and involved socket FM2, a Gigabyte G1.Sniper A88X and a AMD Kaveri 7850K but this would be a 4 core setup which I refuse to believe would run one 7990, let alone two. I quite like the FM2 motherboards and what they offer (in terms of looks too) and the bonus of having a decent IGP means I could mine with both 7990s and game if I wanted to.
Where does Mantle come into play? Is it really the bees knees and offload a lot of the CPU load? I'd like to spend as little as possible however if the 4770k is the only one that's going to 'work' then i'll have to go for that.
I may look at 4k gaming in the future so I presume the higher the resolution, the higher the usage of my cards and that a CPU bottleneck will be less obvious.
Games played include Battlefield 3/4, Company of Heroes 2, Arma 3 plus others.
Firstly I fully understand that quadfire is pointless and doesn't scale well and tbh i'd probably end up gaming on one card at the same time as mining on the other.
I already have a MSI Z87-G55 motherboard which is paired with 2400MHz memory and a Intel i3 at the moment.
The trouble is deciding what path to take..
Option 1 (and the easiest) would be to simply upgrade to a 4770k and a custom cooler (or put it under water too) however having had a 4770k in the past I do know that it sometimes became a bottleneck having a single 7990, let alone two (similar situation to the 4670k, the upgrade to a 4770k, although better, never properly cured it).
Option 2 was going to involve moving to AMD (I have no preference) and getting a Asus Sabertooth 990FX & FX-8 Eight Core 8320. I'd overclock this and end up with 8 cores instead of 4 + HT. This would cost the same, if not slightly less then option 1. This would be done on the belief that a 8 core CPU would be able to handle the work load better. Are they phasing AM3+ out, there seems to be little choice in terms of high end motherboards?
Option 3 was a bit stupid (however the cheapest) and involved socket FM2, a Gigabyte G1.Sniper A88X and a AMD Kaveri 7850K but this would be a 4 core setup which I refuse to believe would run one 7990, let alone two. I quite like the FM2 motherboards and what they offer (in terms of looks too) and the bonus of having a decent IGP means I could mine with both 7990s and game if I wanted to.
Where does Mantle come into play? Is it really the bees knees and offload a lot of the CPU load? I'd like to spend as little as possible however if the 4770k is the only one that's going to 'work' then i'll have to go for that.
I may look at 4k gaming in the future so I presume the higher the resolution, the higher the usage of my cards and that a CPU bottleneck will be less obvious.
Games played include Battlefield 3/4, Company of Heroes 2, Arma 3 plus others.
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