Soldato
- Joined
- 2 Jun 2003
- Posts
- 3,058
- Location
- Bristol UK
Hello you knowledgeable people,
I put together a rig earlier in the year (about May) and while I like it I have a bit of a bug to tweak it more to my liking. This may be a little premature as I probably won't do this until January (I know things can change) but just preempting my thoughts.
I currently have a Zalman Z11 Plus case and while it was good for the money I think I made a mistake in buying it. It can 'only' fit up to 290mm GPUs and a lot of the beefier cards are larger than that, amongst other reasons. I'm fairly certain I want a Phanteks Enthoo Pro, as it looks like it has great features and a darn site classier than my current case. Both HDD bays will be removed and I'm going to put my mechanical drives (have 1, will be 2) in the 5.25" bays out of the way. Also far bigger and plenty of room to work in and route cables.
I have an idea what i'll do with the case fans in my current case (3x Coolermaster sickleflow 120mm & 2x Corsair AF140, all blue LED) so that's not a problem. Probably going to stay on air cooling; my FX8230 @ 4.5GHz doesn't go above 55C even when being slayed by games or benched, under an Arctic Freezer Pro rev2. I won't have the budget to watercool nor do I think my rig warrants it. I'm fine with the noise it produces fwiw.
The only real hard decision I find myself mulling over is graphics. I currently use a Powercolor Devil R9 270X (a little overclocked), and while it can play games fairly well at high-ish details it's not exactly setting the world alight; and with FC4, GTAV etc around the corner I fear it's going to be beaten into submission by the likes of those games. I also am dabbling in recording gameplay so while D3DGear is light on resources I need to drop it down to 30FPS to be fluid.
Would you sell that (and the case) and go for a far more powerful single card, or maybe buy another 270X and CrossFire it? I have an Antec 750w 'Classic 80 Gold' PSU (that's staying) and I game at 1080p on a 22" monitor. I have used AMD for every card I've bought; so something like the 290 Tri-X OC looks a great card at £228? Would you even maybe get 2 new/used 280Xs and CF them? Obviously I couldn't CF a 290 with current PSU, that would be even further down the line but worthwhile in the long run? NVidia worth a look?
If you've read this far, thank you!
I put together a rig earlier in the year (about May) and while I like it I have a bit of a bug to tweak it more to my liking. This may be a little premature as I probably won't do this until January (I know things can change) but just preempting my thoughts.
I currently have a Zalman Z11 Plus case and while it was good for the money I think I made a mistake in buying it. It can 'only' fit up to 290mm GPUs and a lot of the beefier cards are larger than that, amongst other reasons. I'm fairly certain I want a Phanteks Enthoo Pro, as it looks like it has great features and a darn site classier than my current case. Both HDD bays will be removed and I'm going to put my mechanical drives (have 1, will be 2) in the 5.25" bays out of the way. Also far bigger and plenty of room to work in and route cables.
I have an idea what i'll do with the case fans in my current case (3x Coolermaster sickleflow 120mm & 2x Corsair AF140, all blue LED) so that's not a problem. Probably going to stay on air cooling; my FX8230 @ 4.5GHz doesn't go above 55C even when being slayed by games or benched, under an Arctic Freezer Pro rev2. I won't have the budget to watercool nor do I think my rig warrants it. I'm fine with the noise it produces fwiw.
The only real hard decision I find myself mulling over is graphics. I currently use a Powercolor Devil R9 270X (a little overclocked), and while it can play games fairly well at high-ish details it's not exactly setting the world alight; and with FC4, GTAV etc around the corner I fear it's going to be beaten into submission by the likes of those games. I also am dabbling in recording gameplay so while D3DGear is light on resources I need to drop it down to 30FPS to be fluid.
Would you sell that (and the case) and go for a far more powerful single card, or maybe buy another 270X and CrossFire it? I have an Antec 750w 'Classic 80 Gold' PSU (that's staying) and I game at 1080p on a 22" monitor. I have used AMD for every card I've bought; so something like the 290 Tri-X OC looks a great card at £228? Would you even maybe get 2 new/used 280Xs and CF them? Obviously I couldn't CF a 290 with current PSU, that would be even further down the line but worthwhile in the long run? NVidia worth a look?
If you've read this far, thank you!
obviously by Jan AMD could have released new, more power efficient cards so will need to see how that plays out.