Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Dec 2009
- Posts
- 2,727
- Location
- Gillingham, Kent
Last week I was weak and ordered a second 5870 (honestly, the deal I saw was too good to pass up!). However, when installed on my system it produces stutter in most of the games I tried and occasional drop in FPS for a second. Overall, peak FPS was higher than with one card, but it was a lot more stuttery, minimum FPS were lower and it didn't feel as smooth as with one card.
This has convinced me that I finally need to update the rest of my system as I think the Core2Quad and dual 8x crossfire lanes are holding me back. The relevant parts of my current system:
Q9400 @ 3.8GHz
Asus P5Q-E (P45 chipset, 16x PCI-E for single card, 8x each for crossfire)
8GB Kingston HyperX 1066 DDR2
2 x XFX 5870 1GB
1 x 26inch DGM Monitor (1920 x 1200)
2 x 24inch Iiyama Monitors (1920 x 1080) - all three run at 1920x1080 for gaming in Eyefinity.
Now my dilemma is do I go for 1366 or for 1155? Sandy Bridge is obviously quicker, but it is limited in PCI-E lanes. Even if I went with a motherboard sporting an NF200, the CPU is still limited to 16x in total so I am not sure this is a viable solution. 1366 is older and slower, but has a better infrastructure for multi-card graphics. Sadly I haven't been able to find any reviews that actually compare Eyefinity Crossfire setups between the two chipsets.
All the benchmarks I've seen for PCI-E lane comparison shows little penalty with 8x/8x compared to 16x/16x, but they all say as resolution increases the penalty gets larger - I game at 5760x1080, so I guess that's me!
I would prefer to go for the newer, faster CPU generation rather than one that is approaching EOL, but I am concerned that I will run into the chipset's limitations with my GPU setup and resolution. I realise I'm nowhere near cutting edge on anything, but it's still not quite a mainstream setup either.
Any advice, opinions, and relevant links very gratefully received.
This has convinced me that I finally need to update the rest of my system as I think the Core2Quad and dual 8x crossfire lanes are holding me back. The relevant parts of my current system:
Q9400 @ 3.8GHz
Asus P5Q-E (P45 chipset, 16x PCI-E for single card, 8x each for crossfire)
8GB Kingston HyperX 1066 DDR2
2 x XFX 5870 1GB
1 x 26inch DGM Monitor (1920 x 1200)
2 x 24inch Iiyama Monitors (1920 x 1080) - all three run at 1920x1080 for gaming in Eyefinity.
Now my dilemma is do I go for 1366 or for 1155? Sandy Bridge is obviously quicker, but it is limited in PCI-E lanes. Even if I went with a motherboard sporting an NF200, the CPU is still limited to 16x in total so I am not sure this is a viable solution. 1366 is older and slower, but has a better infrastructure for multi-card graphics. Sadly I haven't been able to find any reviews that actually compare Eyefinity Crossfire setups between the two chipsets.
All the benchmarks I've seen for PCI-E lane comparison shows little penalty with 8x/8x compared to 16x/16x, but they all say as resolution increases the penalty gets larger - I game at 5760x1080, so I guess that's me!
I would prefer to go for the newer, faster CPU generation rather than one that is approaching EOL, but I am concerned that I will run into the chipset's limitations with my GPU setup and resolution. I realise I'm nowhere near cutting edge on anything, but it's still not quite a mainstream setup either.Any advice, opinions, and relevant links very gratefully received.
