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A Card For A Core I7 920, Gigabyte EX58 UD5 Setup - £150 to £200

ScottMC7000

ScottMC7000

ScottMC7000

Associate
Joined
19 Oct 2009
Posts
234
Location
Moray,Scotland
Last April I was looking for a new graphics card (well add on anther 5 years prior really I think). I've held out thus far though and weathered the storm of the bit mining craze and waited till black friday, but alas whilst tempted, the type of card I was looking at, the Nvidia GForce GTX 1060 6 Gig, was still and pretty much still is hovering around £230 when one adds up all the costs, including the postage to Scotland. The 3 Gig version didn't seem like a great leap memory wise from the 1 Gig that I've been using for the past 9 years. It's been a great card, and has fine playing games like Battlefield 3, 4 not so much though at 1080P which I'm still using.


Gaming is really secondary to why I want to upgrade though, it's really because I've been working on big 3D rendering and graphic projects in Cinema 4D such as futuristic city scapes and flying space ships. Now all this has also involved video editing with all manner of visual effects, but my current graphic card just can't cope in being able to process this movie which is just over 10 minutes long and results in being corrupt in not properly rendering and displaying what it does in the viewport of Hitfilm. In Cinema 4D, displaying high poly objects is a bit of a nightmare, rendering isn't so much of an issue with my quadcore 17 920 CPU.


For the past 19 years in using PC's, an AMD Athlon 750 with an ATI Rage 128 was my first, I have always stuck with Nvidia. I bought the last GForce Gainward (the fastest AGP card with 512MB of ram) back in 2006 for my Athlon 64 3500 2.2 Gig PC, for like £240, which I consider pretty silly, even with about 3 and half years out of it. The Palit 1 Gig cost just £95 as a comparison, which I had expected to upgrade a few years later, but strangely.. that didn't happen.


With having used what I've trusted and that being with Nvidia, it's really not until the past few days where I've seriously considered switching to what AMD (previously ATI as I one knew it). This is really primary down to the price / performance and value for money aspects. What does concern me though is reliability and power consumption that AMD graphic cards have when compared with Nvidia. I also produce music with Presonus Studio One 4 with my PC so being relatively quiet is at present is important.


I'm aware of 2 graphic cards, one that being Sapphire Radeon RX 570 Pulse 8192MB
and it's Nitro sister as being options here.. the latter having just a 54 Mhz overclock which doesn't seem much. Given what I do creatively and the amount of polygons/ textured scenes and video editing I'm doing, when I look at Nvidia and their equivalent GTX1060's, 3 Gig, 6 Gig, and the RX of AMD with 8 Gigs of builtin ram, I'm both curious about the application benefits that has, other than with games and higher resolution displays. Nvidia seems pretty mean and giving the 40 - 60 price difference of similar spec cards out there.

I'm not looking to upgrade my CPU to a new PC ect...till well.. it stops functioning as a working PC. It actually has 18 Gigs of ram but Windows 10 ( pre release ) and Linux Mint 18 is able to see.

I also need a 6 pin PSU to 8 pin graphics card cable as my current one for the Antec 750 Watt New Blue PSU only has a 6 pin, for these cards I think.



My Setup. (Jan 2010 Build)
Coolermaster Scout Case.
Windows 7 64Bit Home Premium.
64 Bit-Intel I7 920 CPU @3.57GHz,
(with a Zalman CNPS10X Extreme CPU Cooler)
Gigabyte EX58 UD5 Motherboard.
16 Gigs of DDR3 1600 Kingston Ram.
Nvidia Geforce Pailt GTS 250 1 Gig Graphics Card. (9 years old and still kicking)
Antec 750 Watt New Blue PSU
Dual 1080P capable LED Monitors.
Western Digital 500Gig Hard Disk - 1 & 2 TB External Disks
 
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ScottMC7000 said:
I'm not looking to upgrade my CPU to a new PC ect...till well.. it stops functioning as a working PC. It actually has 18 Gigs of ram but Windows 10 ( pre release ) and Linux Mint 18 is able to see.
Click to expand...
As already mentioned, your system is basically begging for an X5650 or X5660 CPU. It's a drop in upgrade, the chips are stupidly cheap second-hand, and you end up with a 6 core / 12 thread processor that should overclock to around 4GHz with your existing cooler.

GPU wise, AMD are excellent value at the moment; NVidia, less so. It's probably worth checking forums specific to the software you use and seeing if someone has done comparative benchmarks. Some packages like NVidia best, some AMD.
 
From various comments around the web from those who have bought a Radeon RX 580 Red Dragon V2 8192MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card, it's loud, runs hot, and uses more power than that of a RX570 so that's a turn off for my preferences. Is the Saffire RX760 is better in this respect in comparison, and is there a 8 pin cable in the box I can connect to my PSU ? Vega 56 models are way over my budget..and around a 3rd of the cost of the system I put together 9 years ago...

Side topic...

I use Cinema 4D R11.5 XL with various modules I had bought during upgrading, but it got too expensive upgrade. There's no upgrade path because Maxon are a greedy, and penlise you if you fall behind their upgrade path. OpenGL is supported for it though and there's always Blender which has made significant progress over the past few years to harness newer graphic card tech. I also use Pixologic ZBrush 2018, which I use for building space ships and the cityscapes, which I then transfer to Cinema 4D to do the animation stuff.

Yeah, I've been aware of the 6 core, 12 thread, I7 chips available for my motherboard, for £12 though.. it sounds too good to be true when it cost around £200 for the I7 920 I have lol. (I did spy one on Ebay on my search whilst amazon they are about £100). I've never removed the HSF cooler from my system or with any previously, and the Zalman I have is a bit of a monster compared to some others. I was in two minds about getting this one but I've been really happy with it due to the external remote control to adjust noise levels from near silent to a jet engine for heavy rendering purposes on the fly, but medium all I need at my current overclock. 4 Ghz on the CPU is quite wasteful (electricity wise), more noisy with having to keep the CPU below 70 degrees.

WIP project, hence need for new graphics card.

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AMD GPUs are cheap at the moment because sellers are clearing their stocks for the new Radeon VII GPUs.
 
Quartz said:
AMD GPUs are cheap at the moment because sellers are clearing their stocks for the new Radeon VII GPUs.
Click to expand...

Given the specs though, they will be stupidly expensive and in a market of their own to compete with Nvidia, so I really can't see how the lower budget market pricing will be affected to the point where retailers will be clearing their stocks. That's my take on it anyway.
 
ScottMC7000 said:
Yeah, I've been aware of the 6 core, 12 thread, I7 chips available for my motherboard, for £12 though.. it sounds too good to be true when it cost around £200 for the I7 920 I have lol. (I did spy one on Ebay on my search whilst amazon they are about £100)
Click to expand...

They weren't always that cheap. The i7 920 go for around that price on eBay as well.

If you drop the 5650x you'll have more power and your temps will be lower. It would .be stupid not to at that price .
 
ScottMC7000 said:
Yeah, I've been aware of the 6 core, 12 thread, I7 chips available for my motherboard, for £12 though.. it sounds too good to be true when it cost around £200 for the I7 920 I have lol. (I did spy one on Ebay on my search whilst amazon they are about £100). I've never removed the HSF cooler from my system or with any previously, and the Zalman I have is a bit of a monster compared to some others. I was in two minds about getting this one but I've been really happy with it due to the external remote control to adjust noise levels from near silent to a jet engine for heavy rendering purposes on the fly, but medium all I need at my current overclock. 4 Ghz on the CPU is quite wasteful (electricity wise), more noisy with having to keep the CPU below 70 degrees.
Click to expand...
Old CPUs in general do not hold their value well, and the socket 1366 ones particularly since there is a flood of old Xeons recovered from scrapped servers, but desktop X58 boards to put them in are comparatively rare. My X58 board originally came with an i7-930 and I still have that chip in a drawer, because it wasn't even worth selling. As for power and temps, the X56xx Xeons are significantly more power efficient than the i7 920 because they are built on a newer fabrication process (the same 32nm process that was used for the 2xxx Sandy Bridge series).
 
It looks like I'll be pulling the trigger on the Saffire RX570 I linked to in my opening post having watched some youtube videos from some well known testers... variants like that above it seem more power hungry than I like.

So what am I looking for now ? Well the Saffire has both a 6 pin and 8 pin PCI power port. Has overclockers got any 6 Pin (from the PSU) to 6 & 8 Pin dual cables ?

Thanks...
 
Danny75 said:
Is this your PSU? https://static.raru.co.za/pdf/5036605-5438-user-manual.pdf

Maybe it's not the exact model but worth a double check. That one has 2 x 8-pin (6+2) and 2 x 6-pin. The latter modular.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's the one I have, it's been an excellent PSU thus far, but it's even better now because you're right. I had another look in the case and didn't notice that there was 2 little wires each with 2 pins on them to bring them from 6 to 8. I've never needed to take the card out, so never thus never used them. I didn't see them on the extra modular cables so assumed they were all like that, but the primary system cables are the only ones they reside on. My current card uses two 6 Pin's. I guess if I was using 2 cards that I may want to utilize the extra power ports of the PSU and have another cable for that. But then, I'm only using one screen most of the time, so it's never been necessary. That's great, that'll knock off the extra 7 quid I thought I'd have add to my purchase with unneeded cables :-)

Cheers
 
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