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Franco_cov

Franco_cov

Franco_cov

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Joined
7 Sep 2007
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547
I currently have an older Asus extreme ii MB and 2x HD4890's in crossfire with 6gb of patriot memory and an i7 920 o/c to 4ghz.

Now I was looking at either of the following but does anyone know which was is th best way to go and why?

Option 1:

Keep my setup and simply get 2 new 7970's in crossfire using old pci-e 2.0 slots.

Option 2:

Get a new mother board that will have my i7 920 and can o/c again to 4ghz and above and maybe get 6gb or more memory so that the board has the new pci-e3.0 slots for the new cards and just get 1 hd 7970?

Or if anyone has any other idea's my budget is around £800 - £850 and want it to last a good few years to come.

I do have the cpu and both gfx cards watercooled so will be thinking about removing the water cooling for the cards as gpu blocks aint cheap and is a pain to drain when you want to upgrade. However I will obviously need watercooling still for my cpu as its o/c to 4ghz so may get a sealed loop with an external fan?

Then I can remove my double and tripple radiator and 2 pumps from the case as I think its all a bit of overkill.

Everyone's feedback is very much appreciated as I would like to get the most performance and future proof wise with my budget :)
 
I think we can solve this pretty easily for you: There are no PCI-E 3.0 Socket 1366 motherboards that I'm aware of. Intel recently deprecated all the remaining desktop CPUs for the LGA1366 platform so I doubt there'll be any new motherboards with it.

So your only option if you want PCI-E 3 is to move to a motherboard using the new Sandy Bridge CPUs as some motherboards on that platform support PCI-E 3.

I believe the HD7970 can fill the bandwidth of a PCI-E 2 slot when it's overclocked.
 
Upgrading the board just wouldnt be worth it for you at the moment, especially if you are just doing it to get the PCI 3.0 slots and keeping the rest of your hardware. I could understand if you were jumping to sandybridge but otherwise no. Someone feel free to prove me wrong but i don't believe there is any graphics card configuration at the moment that would be bottlenecked by the available bandwidth on a PCI-e 2.0 slot.

The 2 hd 7970s would give you the more powerful machine of the two options you have listed. if you still wanted an extra 6gb of ram then you could add it anyway.

regarding the watercooling. replacing a custom loop with a sealed unit will probably see you a significant drop in performance. You would be better off keeping just your CPU in the loop and removing one of your radiators. The double alone should be enough if you are only cooling your CPU and you didnt want to keep the triple. but either would be fine.
 
I've done A LOT of research on a similar topic.

The best gaming CPU is the i7 2600K overall and for bang-for-buck.
This restricts you to socket 1155, which is 16x PCI-E lanes maximum and doesn't support PCI-E3.0.

Going to socket 2011 will allow you to get USB3.0, PCI-E3.0, SATA-III, 32x PCI-E lanes.

So it's a choice between:

'Best currently, and cheaper' vs. 'Most futureproofed for GFX'

I've held fire and am keeping my i2600K rig for the time being.

6970x2 6950x2 and 6990 are the best VFM setups at the moment when compared with the 7970.
 
Option 1. You'll see no benefit with pci-e 3.0 over 2.0, the latter hasn't yet reached its saturation point.
 
Last edited:
f00f1ght0r said:
I've done A LOT of research on a similar topic.

The best gaming CPU is the i7 2600K overall and for bang-for-buck.
This restricts you to socket 1155, which is 16x PCI-E lanes maximum and doesn't support PCI-E3.0.

Going to socket 2011 will allow you to get USB3.0, PCI-E3.0, SATA-III, 32x PCI-E lanes.

So it's a choice between:

'Best currently, and cheaper' vs. 'Most futureproofed for GFX'

I've held fire and am keeping my i2600K rig for the time being.

6970x2 6950x2 and 6990 are the best VFM setups at the moment when compared with the 7970.
Click to expand...

Best value for gaming CPU is the i5 2500k.
 
Hmmm so if i get a 7970 and i have a pci-e 2.0 slot doesnt that half the performance as the pci-e 3.0 is suppose to be twice the bandwith of 2.0 and that means that all these benchmarks etc are using the 3.0 slot?
 
Franco_cov said:
Hmmm so if i get a 7970 and i have a pci-e 2.0 slot doesnt that half the performance as the pci-e 3.0 is suppose to be twice the bandwith of 2.0 and that means that all these benchmarks etc are using the 3.0 slot?
Click to expand...

No.

IIRC, the difference is like the same as a crossfire rig 8x8 instead of 16x16. You loose about 2% FPS if that!
 
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