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2x 7800 GTX vs 1900 XT-X

Soldato
Joined
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What would be the best option here then?

Just ordered a new PC with 2x 7800's but thinking about selling them right away and getting a 1900 XT-X...


Need some advice. Cheers.
 
if you get the x1900 in crossfire mode.

but you cant. if youve ordered for sli geforce your mobo wont support crossfire. so i wouldnt sell 2x 7800 for one x1900xtx
 
Two 7800gtx 256mb about £600 :eek:
one ati xt1900xt £339

By looking at most the reviews on the net.The xt1900xt is about the same speed as two SLI 7800gtx 256mb..

Am running two 7800gtx myself...
I think am going order one the xt1900xt tomorrow and give it some tests myself..
If the xt1900xt is about the same speed as my two 7800gtx..Then i be selling my two 7800gtx.
 
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D.P. said:
Two 7800GTX 256 ****s all over the X1900XTX.


Why do you think this...


All the reviews show the ati1900xt about 30% or more faster then a single 7800gtx 256mb..Adding another 7800gtx in sli only gives you on avg an extra 30% to 50% more fps.

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peterattheboro said:
Just ordered a new PC with 2x 7800's but thinking about selling them right away and getting a 1900 XT-X...
Need some advice. Cheers.
Omg!! :eek:

I thought some people upgrade a lot, but I didn't here of someone upgrading a computer component that hasn't even arrived yet :p

My advice is:

a) Spend a day or two researching your hardware before impulse spending

b) Understand that blowing £500+ on your graphics set-up is more about spending £500 than what the graphics cards can actually do!

c) Top end/cutting edge graphics cards are about the worst (if not thee worst) investment you can make for your PC. You may get a buzz for a few weeks but you will soon get bored, and when some new VGa cards arrive on the scene you will more than likely wanna upgrade again

D) There is more to pc'ing than Benchmarks and *buzz* marketing

e) Do not compare yourself/your system to other peoples on these forums, a great deal of them are loonies!!!!!! :D
 
You have ordered them so keep them you wont be dissapointed either way you go and i doubt at all you would notice a difference selling the 7800's for the x1900. Looking at the benchmark above there is a difference on the max but min theres not much in it and thats vs one 7800gtx. Stop worrying and be happy with what you have. There is a sudden craze that everyone should have a x1900 and this will happen again when the g71 comes out. Btw what rez will you be playing at?
 
D.P. said:
Two 7800GTX 256 ****s all over the X1900XTX.
Correct, but probably not as "strongly" as you put it.
However you are just talking about pure fps. In the interest of money, power and heat - to quote - the XTX would **** all over the GTX's.

I myself would go for the X1900XTX (looking at the pros and cons in all aspects) - but if you want all out performance, then obviously the 2 graphics cards are going to be better than one.
 
Big.Wayne said:
Omg!! :eek:

I thought some people upgrade a lot, but I didn't here of someone upgrading a computer component that hasn't even arrived yet :p

My advice is:

a) Spend a day or two researching your hardware before impulse spending

b) Understand that blowing £500+ on your graphics set-up is more about spending £500 than what the graphics cards can actually do!

c) Top end/cutting edge graphics cards are about the worst (if not thee worst) investment you can make for your PC. You may get a buzz for a few weeks but you will soon get bored, and when some new VGa cards arrive on the scene you will more than likely wanna upgrade again

D) There is more to pc'ing than Benchmarks and *buzz* marketing

e) Do not compare yourself/your system to other peoples on these forums, a great deal of them are loonies!!!!!! :D

Reason i'm thinking of getting rid is because I've always gone with ATi.

Now the company I've bought this PC from doesn't do ATi cards in the package and I couldnt be arsed building the PC myself :)

Another issue is the 2 7800's use a lot more power than the single X1900XTX but I will be running a 600w PSU.
 
lemonkettaz said:
nobody mentioned 7800gtx 256mb in sli....

it was just 2x 7800s

this could mean the 512mb 7800

thats what i was wondering. Them fps graphs dont actually say anything about sli.
 
I dont think it can be classed as that, as each core can only see 256mb... now im no graphics god - but i would assume that the objects etc that are being drawn would needed to be loaded into BOTH sets of memories?
 
Would my system go faster in games with 2x7800gtx 256's or 1x1900 thing ?
That is thee question, I cant find a performance review that tests 2x7800gtx 256's :(
 
ACESHIGH said:
offers great performance, compared to 2x 7800GTX.

I'd agree with the power and noise part but not the comparable performance, the SLI setup is still faster, given a choice however, I'd always choose one powerful card over 2 less fast cards if they were comparable.
 
Some info about SLI by Steve Lacey.

http://www.steve-lacey.com/


Friday, January 20, 2006Flight Simulator and SLI
by Steve @ 03:10 PM in FlightSim, GameDev
Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (2)
There appears to be a general confusion in the forums about what SLI is, how it works, how applications take advantage of it, whether Flight Simulator gains any advantage, etc…

Hopefully this will clear up some of these issues, but first a caveat. I don’t have an SLI system and I’ve never seen Flight Simulator running on an SLI system. This information is based on what I know, so take from that what you will.

SLI itself is a bit of a misnomer. SLI stands for (or used to) Scan Line Interleaved. Basically, one horizontal scan line goes to one card, the next goes to the other, etc… Now this doesn’t mean that you get 2x the performance as there’s a bunch of work that has to be done on the hardware no matter what pixels are being filled e.g. clipping triangles, performing vertex shader operations, etc…

This is basically what the original consumer level (i.e. 3DFX circa 1998) was doing, because no consumer 3D hardware performed the geometry transform and full triangle setup on the hardware. It was all done in software and then the final projected triangle with all associated edge derivatives were sent to the hardware. The overhead of the per triangle stuff was only incurred once.

With the hardware doing little else other than filling pixels, the true SLI mode made sense. It also made playing the original Half Life with a 3DFX Voodoo 2 SLI setup a lot of fun…

Fast forward a few years and hardware is doing pretty much all the work, that means that sharing the rendering load between multiple cards very hard. To be quite honest, most apps are geometry and transform bound - the 3D hardware vendors have got very good at pushing pixel fill-rate, while the busses that get the data to the card haven’t really kept up. Stick two cards in the mix and you’ve doubled the data that needs to be sent to each card.

Of course, they could arrange for one card to be a conduit to the other card, or something like that, but I’m just speculating as I don’t actually know…

It’s very easy to saturate an AGP bus with 3D data, let alone the PCI bus. Just ask any audio developer about the fact that the graphics guys have been eating all the bandwidth.

Now, with PCI Express the bandwidth has gone up again, and we’re on our own bus. Also, the graphics card guys need to boost the speed again (and of course they want to sell you more than one of their quite expensive cards), so SLI makes a return.

This is goodness, but as far as I can tell it’s not really SLI - i.e. they’re not interleaving scan lines, but rather providing a bunch of different ways the cards can be used in tandem. Techniques such as splitting the screen in half and sending one half to each card; rendering one frame on one card and the next on the other card; etc…

Check out NVidia’s website for the various options that they provide.

So, at the end of the day, it’s a way to split the rendering between multiple cards - though it’ll probably never get you a real 2x performance improvement. Of course that doesn’t matter though - anything better than 1x is good!

So, what about the application (i.e. Flight Simulator)?

The application knows nothing.

It’s all hidden under the hood of the driver - there is nothing the application needs to do to enable it, support it or anything it.

Of course, we may do some interesting things that make it hard for SLI to work effectively, but hey, we shipped first. Hehe.

Anyhow, these guys have done some testing and it looks like it does improve the graphics (in particular fill-rate) performance, as you’d expect.

Does that make sense?
 
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ACESHIGH said:
X1900XTX - cheaper, less heat, offers great performance, compared to 2x 7800GTX.

That would be my choice. :)

Yup, and can always be Crossfired with another if you get a Crossfire board, where they would whoop the 2x GTX's. :)
 
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