s939 Crossfire system... your Thoughts?

Netvyper · 8 Sep 2006 at 23:14

s939 Crossfire system spec... your Thoughts?

As it stands... my PC is a bit of a mess....
I Found the cash for an X2 3800 a little while back,
Powered by an ASROCK 939 Dual.
Has 1.5gb of Kingmax DDR3500, and a Radeon 9800 SE AIW (yeh, those lovely hercules cards

)
PSU is Hiper Type-R 580w thingeh...

Since payday is nearly here again, I decided i really needed to do something about my system.

My Proposal is:
Antec SLK3000B Midi Tower Case - No PSU (CA-027-AN)
£34.06
Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-131-AS)
£105.74
Pioneer DVR-111DBK 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter - (Black) OEM (CD-038-PO)
£25.79
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB ST3320620AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-078-SE)
£140.88 (£70.44 each) [For Fileserver not this box - A good chunk of storage is needed, but not nessecarily these drives if there's something better value for money]
HIS ATI Radeon X1900 XT ICEQ 3 SILENT Heatpipe 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-053-HT)
£234.99

Total: £541.46

This is really the top end of my budget, infact, its about £30 over, but i can go hungry for a few days

.
What i'd like from you wonderful folks, is thoughts on the capabilities & compatibilities of the system. Is it worth looking towards the Crossfire route in future, or are the cards likely to be unavailable before its nessecary? If you had my budget, and general requirements, what would you buy?

Im not as into overclocking as I used to be, but a little bit of extra power never hurt anyone

... the key factor is stability though.

Trusty · 9 Sep 2006 at 00:06

Yeh mate the Asus is a good board, it will complement the HIS 1900 xt and X2 3800 well.

The storage tho, i would get a raptor in there but if u need more storage rather than speed then go for Barracuda's! there very good! better than western's anyway!

As for the Crossfire, its a personal preference, i dont see the point in spending £220 for another graphics card when u may only get 20 fps extra, the one XT will play any game out there at the moment at 30 fps or more. so i dont see the point.

Graphics is the fastest moving technology, definatly faster than cpu's and memory. Your best bet is to play with one card, than when a even better card comes out, sell the XT and get the latest card. The XT will last this year tho, i would have thought!!

PS I just got the HIS XT yesterday, and got 710 core and over 820 mem on stock volts!!

Dam fast card!!

semi-pro waster · 9 Sep 2006 at 00:28

I don't personally think that Crossfire(or SLi for that matter) is worth it unless you are working with (very) high resolutions and detail levels so I'd pick a cheaper Nforce4 based motherboard which will work just as well and enable you to eat

The Asus motherboard is good but if you aren't going to go for Crossfire it loses some of its allure.

The hard drives are a good choice though, they are not much slower than a Raptor but have a massively improved capacity in comparison.

Netvyper · 9 Sep 2006 at 00:33

I think a raptorX is going to be in my next round of upgrades; pending research ofc

What NF4 board would you reccomend; obviously the premium DFI & Asus boards are outside my price range, and I dont know what else is a solid choice atm.

semi-pro waster · 9 Sep 2006 at 00:49

If you are thinking about overclocking then the DFI Nforce4 ultra at the bottom of the page would be my recommendation, conveniently enough saving you around £25 so you only need starve for a day or so

If overclocking isn't so important then the Asus Nforce4 ultra would do equally well and is even cheaper.

MagicUK · 9 Sep 2006 at 09:31

The DFI does kick ass. i was getting 280x10 on my old msi neo 2 and would keep crashing any higher, on my dfi im running at 325x9 (2925) and working stable and very happy with the purchace!

Netvyper · 9 Sep 2006 at 13:03

semi-pro waster said:
If you are thinking about overclocking then the DFI Nforce4 ultra at the bottom of the page would be my recommendation, conveniently enough saving you around £25 so you only need starve for a day or so

If overclocking isn't so important then the Asus Nforce4 ultra would do equally well and is even cheaper.

MagicUK said:
The DFI does kick ass. i was getting 280x10 on my old msi neo 2 and would keep crashing any higher, on my dfi im running at 325x9 (2925) and working stable and very happy with the purchace!

Im always thinking about it; not sure if my ram would handle an FSB higher than the Asus board can manage though, its what, 215mhz @ stock? I dont think 325 is going to be anywhere near achievable

... In addition, its going to be 3 or 4 sticks (when i grab that last 512mb for 2gb

), which iirc is bad for clocking?

Glad to see im on roughly the right wavelength, its been a while since i've ordered significant kit

Edit: Regarding the DFI Ultra; the DXG means I can run 2x Cards for dual outputs, but not SLI/Crossfire?

MagicUK · 9 Sep 2006 at 13:12

The HTT is 325 but im running a lower multiplier so mem is running at 245, thats with 2x512 crucuial balistix and 2x512 G skill for a total mem of 2gb, obv running at 2t timings but at 5,3,3,2.5 so very happy.

also the DXG can be modded with a hb pencil to enable sli, u will find more info at dfi street about it, i havnt done it yet but will be as no one seems to encouter any probs!