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Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore

Soldato
Joined
20 Jul 2009
Posts
4,885
Location
The bleak North East arm pit of Britain
Im looking to go into the realms of "the fastest money can buy" territory but im at a loss really.

I am currently running 2x gtx295s with a gtx285 dedicated physx card.

Would I be better off looking at 2x 5970s or wait for the fermi details?

If 480sps is going to be the top end of the gtx480 then going buy estimates I can see the card being similar speed to a gtx295 (ie 5-10% faster than a 5870 which makes sense). With this in mind and the fact i am probably looking at an horrendous £450 per card that makes around £1350 for 3 units. 2x 5970s can be had for £1100 which if far nicer on the wallet (a saving of £200 before anyone says "£1100? easy on wallet!").

Any food for thought would be brilliant.

Im selling the 3 cards I have now on other forums (cant on here it would seem until i have more posts so itll have to wait lol)



Thanks in advance


Andy
 
Lol.. logged back on after almost an hour and no response... This is a legit question. The reason why I am I at a loss is because its a hell of a lot of money! I'm no millionaire, I need guidance!


Andy
 
Seeing as Fermi is coming next week I'd wait for some reviews. Another option you might want to consider would be 3x 5870 - cheaper, cooler and still pretty awesome.
 
Its a bit of an open question heh...

In the real world I doubt 2x 5970 will be much different to 3x GTX480, except in the case where your running say 6 displays or something, infact I'd hazard the tri SLI setup to be faster in the larger proportion of cases.

I struggle to see why you'd go for either setup unless your are planning on a massive multi display setup... if its purely epeen save your cash no ones that easily impressed any more :D
 
I am in the same position, I wish i`d kept my 295s a bit longer now!

I think im going for a triple single card solution this time.

Drivers for Quad Sli were a bit all over, Only boost was in Crysis!
 
Not e-peen no. More hwbot and gaming at high(v) res :P

I was planning on holding out but the longer I hold out the more bench with said kit making it harder to get any points up etc.

I game at 2560x1600 (3008wfp) and am looking to buy 2x 19" or 20" (depending on how they match the sides of the 3008) 1600x900 monitors to run vertical down either side giving a resolution of 4360x1600 res.


I was thinking of hitting the 980x route but I seriously cant see the point in that as itll only effect my vantage scores and will add nothing to a current set of 295s etc.


Andy
 
At the moment 2560x1600 (will be 4360x1600 at some point in the near future) however with AA I hit a drop in frames massively as the 295s only carry 896mb of usable vram. Going for a card that has 1gb on each gpu could be a bonus having said that the 480 will have 1.5gb (supposedly) which could mean 2 cards would be more than adequate..

Andy
 
Your going to need more than 1gig of VRAM for res over 2560x if you want AA, I'd say 1.5gig would be minimum to really use those kinda res with AA.
 
Ahh, I see why you'd need a fair amount of horse power then. Personally I'd look at a three gpu / card set-up, that is the sweet spot. A fourth card / gpu can actually lower performance. So something like 3 x 5870's // 3 x fermi // 1 x 5970 + 1 x 5800 card should be adequate. Whatever you choose it'll certainly be some beast of a rig! :)
 
Thanks for the help, any other suggestions etc from anyone else welcome.

I shall get some images up of the rig at some point, but for the time being I will drop in a taster :P

1260553477.jpg


If anyone is interested in my cards you can always add me to msn (delete that bit if out of rules)


Thanks

Andy
 
1. Multi-GPU scaling drops off rapidly, and a 3-GPU solution is often faster than a 4-GPU solution. 3 x 5870 would probably be the fastest setup you could buy today.

2. Wait for nvidia's Fermi before making a decision. Benchmarks will be available on Friday (March 26th)

3. Are you sure you can run at 4360*1600 as you want to? There was discussion on this a couple of months back, and it turned out that you can't mix landscape and portrait screens with eyefinity, as you would need to with the setup you suggest. Perhaps ATI have enabled these options in their drivers since then? Certainly we don't know whether or not nvidia's 3-screen equivalent will support these configurations yet, and we won't until Friday at the earliest.
 
Duff-Man said:
1. Multi-GPU scaling drops off rapidly, and a 3-GPU solution is often faster than a 4-GPU solution. 3 x 5870 would probably be the fastest setup you could buy today.

2. Wait for nvidia's Fermi before making a decision. Benchmarks will be available on Friday (March 26th)

3. Are you sure you can run at 4360*1600 as you want to? There was discussion on this a couple of months back, and it turned out that you can't mix landscape and portrait screens with eyefinity, as you would need to with the setup you suggest. Perhaps ATI have enabled these options in their drivers since then? Certainly we don't know whether or not nvidia's 3-screen equivalent will support these configurations yet, and we won't until Friday at the earliest.
Click to expand...
I never knew that about the eye finity and ladscape portrait etc... I am only going to be using one screen to start (the 3008). It needs to have the power for that so Im in need of replacing gpus anyway. the 5870 may be the quickest set up but my worry is still the 1gb of vram available and will this be enough? If the 5870 cam in 2gb variants I would hammer on and get 2 of them and call it done as I should think I would have enough horse power for as little as £800. The other option I had looked at was the 4gb variant of the 5970.. It would probably be just as effective and wouldnt cost the earth to water cool providing the pcb design remains generic.

Andy
 
The 480's and their 1.5 GB of vram look like a good choice then, and hopefully NV can get all three GPU's to scale with three monitors unlike ATI where at the moment only two GPU's/cards scale.
 
Its something I need to mull over that is a fact. Having said that when the time comes I shall just look at what the nvidia offerings are like and then go from there.

Andy
 
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