Is Upgrading Your Graphics Cards Worth Lowering Your CPU's OC

Le Beau Serge

Le Beau Serge

Le Beau Serge

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15 Jun 2014
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Hi Everyone,

I had previously posted on the forum a build I had planned on putting together but worked out the temperatures would not work out without watercooling and I can't do it. So I have decided to go with a system from Overclockers.

The default spec for the system offered by Overclockers is an i7 4790K @ 4.7 GHz, 8GB of RAM with 2 x AMD Radeon R9 290Xs 4096MB Graphics Cards in Crossfire & Watercooled.

I contacted sales and asked if they could upgrade the RAM and the graphics cards to 16GB and 2 x AMD Radeon 295 X2s they said this was fine but it would lower the overclock to 4.0 GHz.

I have a 4k monitor and plan on getting one or two more in future that's why I thought it was a good idea to upgrade the cards but in your opinion is it worth the reduced clockspeed?

Regards,

S
 
It should not have any bearing on your CPU speed. infact those days are well behind us.
you could just accept overclockers 4ghz offer and overclock yourself its not like its hard to do. But If I were you I would be onto them and ask them WHY it has to be reduced by 700mhz, in the old days yes you would probably need to have reduced your OC on CPU when adding more ram... now days that's not the case.

In regards to "Is it worth it" that's entirely upto you, If you want 4k and you know you want it now then yes I suppose it is worth it for what you want.
Should you go 4k now is another question entirely, personally I feel 4k is not ready yet and the expenditure is certainly not worth it in my opinion.

I would go with a 1440p 120hz+ monitor myself and go 4k down the line when the technology is more mature AND we have GPU's that don't require £2000 spent to achieve 4k.

Edit: I miss read that you already have a 4k monitor although I still feel the 1440p monitor would be a better choice (EG: get the 2x290X's and spend what extra you would have on a 1440p monitor)
 
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murah said:
It should not have any bearing on your CPU speed. infact those days are well behind us.
you could just accept overclockers 4ghz offer and overclock yourself its not like its hard to do. But If I were you I would be onto them and ask them WHY it has to be reduced by 700mhz, in the old days yes you would probably need to have reduced your OC on CPU when adding more ram... now days that's not the case.

In regards to "Is it worth it" that's entirely upto you, If you want 4k and you know you want it now then yes I suppose it is worth it for what you want.
Should you go 4k now is another question entirely, personally I feel 4k is not ready yet and the expenditure is certainly not worth it in my opinion.

I would go with a 1440p 120hz+ monitor myself and go 4k down the line when the technology is more mature AND we have GPU's that don't require £2000 spent to achieve 4k.

Edit: I miss read that you already have a 4k monitor although I still feel the 1440p monitor would be a better choice (EG: get the 2x290X's and spend what extra you would have on a 1440p monitor)
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Thanks for your input I will consider it and it would deferentially better cheaper going with the 290Xs.

As for why they have to reduce the the OC this they did say the following in the email but I didn't understand what he meant to be honest:

"The amount of head the 295x2 cards will throw out will be a lot and they are fairly long compared to the 290X cards that are in the system by default, we might need to drop the CPU clock back to 4.0GHz rather than 4.7GHz"

Again thank you for your time. :)
 
I wouldn't go with the 700mhz drop on the cpu. 4.7Ghz is a very good speed and I would bet on it being one of their higher binned ones. If you settle for the 4Ghz one it's likely to be one of their lower binned cpu's and may not go much further if you want to try to get more out of it.
 
"The amount of head the 295x2 cards will throw out will be a lot and they are fairly long compared to the 290X cards that are in the system by default, we might need to drop the CPU clock back to 4.0GHz rather than 4.7GHz"

Because it's a watercooled system you might have to drop CPU speed to keep the whole system in decent temps? still not worth it if you ask me.
 
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Thank you all for your advice I will go with the default option of 2 290Xs. If I want more RAM (16GB up from 8GB) then the clock speed will likely be 4.5 GHz or thereabouts so they.

lude1962 said:
How about 295x2 and a r9 290x crossfired , 200 watts less heat to worry about.
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I didn't know you could crossfire two different cards. I was under the impression that this didn't work for games but I'm used to Nvidia cards perhaps there different?

Once again thanks to all for your input. :)
 
Not really different cards - a 295x2 is two 290x's so you'd be running effectively 3 290x's (while 2 295x2's is 4 290x's)

It's like an nVidia 690 which is 2 680s on one card.

Edit: Also, worth remembering a dual-GPU card like a 295x2 or 690 does not give you twice as much usable memory - it's got twice as much on the board, but that's split between the two GPUs on there so it's got the same usable memory limit as the card it's based on.
 
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David Bisset said:
Not really different cards - a 295x2 is two 290x's so you'd be running effectively 3 290x's (while 2 295x2's is 4 290x's)

It's like an nVidia 690 which is 2 680s on one card.

Edit: Also, worth remembering a dual-GPU card like a 295x2 or 690 does not give you twice as much usable memory - it's got twice as much on the board, but that's split between the two GPUs on there so it's got the same usable memory limit as the card it's based on.
Click to expand...

Thank you David that's good to know. :)
 
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