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crossfire vs sli ? New build

86JR

86JR

86JR

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Which is best ?

By this i mean, more reliable, better driver support ?

Im speccing up what I hope to be my last upgrade for a good while, as my 260gtx and q9450 combo wont let me play bc2 maxed out at 1680x1050.

I like to buy the best so i dont have to worry.

Games wise, well i want to broaden my horizons, in the past i only played bf2, but now i wish to play

bc2
bf3
c&c4
avp2
ruse

etc all maxed out.

Going to buy a dell 27" screen when they sort their act out and they a bit cheaper.

No interest in eyefinity.

The cards im looking at are

5850 x2
260gtx x2
285 x 2
5870 x 2

cant afford quad sli / quad cfire, dont have psu for it.

I currently have

q9450
4gb pc8500
gigabyte p45 DS3
Antec 900
260gtx
Corsair 850w non modular

was looking to buy

Intel Core i7 980X
Asus P6X58D
Kingston HyperX 6GB
Lian Li PC-P50R

Whats best then ? Am i going to see any increases going for the higher spec cards over two of the lower spec cards ? Should I just buy a single, dual core gfx card ? Is one 5870 good enough ?

Thanks :)
 
The 980x is a bad ass of a chip, do you really need it? You won't notice an increase in gaming performance (though in multi threaded apps it rocks) The money saved could be put towards a lot of cool stuff :)

With a single screen a single 5870 will suffice but if you want to be extra specially certain then go for 2x 5850 or 1x 5970.

My money (assuming this is just gaming)

i5 750
4Gb Corsair Dom
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4 Intel P55
5970
 
twoblacklines said:
So i wont be far off 5970 performance!?
Click to expand...

Depends a lot on the game and resolution, you really need 2560x with 8x AA to see the power of the 5970, whereas at 1680x with 4x AA there will be little in it in most cases except for crysis and a couple of other games.
 
Right, i just overclocked my 260 from 575mhz to 620/1336/1000 (gpu/shaders/mem) using evga precision.

I then went into bc2 settings and enabled the max of everything, vsync off.

IT ran well, but a little choppy.

turned HBAO off and I dont see any problems except in big tank battles.

Could my quad core be bottlenecking the card, or have i reached my graphics card limit ?

I can try to OC it more, or upgrade it.
 
Try 720/1440 VRAM 1200 this seems to give the best performance on regular cards and most should hit it stable (some might have trouble going over 1152 on the memory tho)
 
so 720/1440/1152+ ?

Will try that tommorow :)

Card didnt go over 65 deg C on the half hour I played at 620mhz :)
 
Oh yeah does anyone know how to make precision log things ?

I cant find out what fps it does in game, the fps counter is in my taskbar but when i window out it resets to 0.
 
twoblacklines said:
so 720/1440/1152+ ?

Will try that tommorow :)

Card didnt go over 65 deg C on the half hour I played at 620mhz :)
Click to expand...

Yeah - dunno if I'm talking rubbish, but it seems to me that the core/shader clocks have some kinda relationship like motherboard FSB/NB (I know the shader clock has discrete blocks) certain combinations seem to give better performance than other random, supposedly higher clocks, more apparent in games like crysis - 720/1440 on my old BFG MAXCORE pair seemed to give better performance than 729/1458.
 
Overclock the CPU aswell, might make a difference.
First I have heard of a 260 struggling, maybe something else is wrong.
Do you really need max AA at that rez, not sure you do to be honest.
 
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