5770 crossfire 16x/4x

[lemonadesoda]

UNLESS you are going to run 3 or 4 monitors at the same time, then DONT crossfire 2x 5770. It's silly. It uses more electricity, generates more heat and more noise, than a 5850. Price performance ratio is worse.

NOTE this wasnt true of the 4770, where 2x 4770 crossfired for BETTER performance that the 4850. Not true on the 5xxx series.

PS. You've got a good GPU there already. Do you really need to upgrade? What will you do with this? Why not put the money into a decent i7 or dual processor Xeon system. There was an EVGA mainboard news yesterday. Start it up with ONE processor, and add the second when funds allow. It will massively outperform your (dinosaur, lol) Core 2 Duo.

Well, horses for courses. It all depends what you use your machine for.

TBH, I think you would be happier with a new Nehalem based system, even a lower end one, and one 5770. It will run quieter and give you a lot more performance.

And I agree with the others, get more RAM. H3ll, I run my Atoms with 2GB (nettops) or 4GB (desktops). How can you think of running a "performance" desktop with less than 4GB?

Depending on your budget, my suggestion is one of the following:

1./ Upgrade RAM to 4GB
2./ Upgrade RAM to 4GB and CPU to Core 2 Quad
3./ Change platform to i5 and 4GB
4./ Change platform to i5 and 4GB and upgrade GPU
5./ Change platform to (single) xeon and 3GB
6./ Change platform to (single) xeon and 3GB and upgrade GPU
7./ Change platform to dual xeon and 6GB and upgrade GPU

I'm not so sure about upgrading your GPU yet keeping your other system components the same.

PS. Oh, just noticed:

0./ Get yourself a decent HDD. Like a Samsung F1 or F3 or latest WD. It will be much faster than your old 160GB clunky thing.

 

[finndrummer]

UNLESS you are going to run 3 or 4 monitors at the same time, then DONT crossfire 2x 5770. It's silly. It uses more electricity, generates more heat and more noise, than a 5850. Price performance ratio is worse.

NOTE this wasnt true of the 4770, where 2x 4770 crossfired for BETTER performance that the 4850. Not true on the 5xxx series.

PS. You've got a good GPU there already. Do you really need to upgrade? What will you do with this? Why not put the money into a decent i7 or dual processor Xeon system. There was an EVGA mainboard news yesterday. Start it up with ONE processor, and add the second when funds allow. It will massively outperform your (dinosaur, lol) Core 2 Duo.

Well, horses for courses. It all depends what you use your machine for.

TBH, I think you would be happier with a new Nehalem based system, even a lower end one, and one 5770. It will run quieter and give you a lot more performance.

My system changed, see specifications

 

[InnocentCriminal]

I think his post may have been directed at metafan.

 

[Jody2k]

Well...Thermal paste won't make such big difference, your cooling does But there are not many good coolers on the market right now for socket 1156

I know that Noctua and the new cooler of zalman(cnps10x) are very good coolers for that platform, there are maybe also other brands but don't get mislead by the size of the cooler because it doesnt really matter, I suggest you read some reviews before you buy one of them, because you have also alot of bad coolers for almost the same price

 

[InnocentCriminal]

Well...Thermal paste won't make such big difference, your cooling does

I beg to differ, having decent thermal paste can make a pretty big difference and is, essentially part of cooling and therefore an integral part to OC'ing for 24/7 use.

 

[finndrummer]

???????????
Why you talk about that here ?

 

[Jody2k]

???????????
Why you talk about that here ?

because you asked if your system will overclock well

 

[finndrummer]

i have see some reviews about my "arctic silver pro freezer revision 2" it has some good performances. if i will overclock, then i will not push over 3.2Ghz even if it can go over 4Ghz with a voltage bump i think

 

[newtekie1]

I'd like to comment on a few things in this thread:

1.) Most of the reviews showing little to no performance loss by putting a card in an x4 2.0(or1.1) slot don't talk about crossfire at all. Crossfire causes more communication over the PCI-E bus, so having one card in a x4 slot will show more of a performance loss than just a single card in the weaker slot would. Yes, a lot of the communication is done over the Crossfire bridge, but there is still some done over the PCI-E bus as well.

2.) W1zzard's review wasn't CPU bottlenecked, certainly not at 2560x1600, perhaps at some of the lower resolutions on some of the games, but certainly not at 2560x1600. There are some easy ways to spot CPU bottlenecking. The framerates will stay the same, even with lower resolutions and lower graphics settings. However, this doesn't happen in W1zzards review, the numbers go up with the resolution and graphics settings are lowered. Which is a very clear indicator that there wasn't CPU bottlenecking involved.

 

[Mussels]

I'd like to comment on a few things in this thread:

1.) Most of the reviews showing little to no performance loss by putting a card in an x4 2.0(or1.1) slot don't talk about crossfire at all. Crossfire causes more communication over the PCI-E bus, so having one card in a x4 slot will show more of a performance loss than just a single card in the weaker slot would. Yes, a lot of the communication is done over the Crossfire bridge, but there is still some done over the PCI-E bus as well.

2.) W1zzard's review wasn't CPU bottlenecked, certainly not at 2560x1600, perhaps at some of the lower resolutions on some of the games, but certainly not at 2560x1600. There are some easy ways to spot CPU bottlenecking. The framerates will stay the same, even with lower resolutions and lower graphics settings. However, this doesn't happen in W1zzards review, the numbers go up with the resolution and graphics settings are lowered. Which is a very clear indicator that there wasn't CPU bottlenecking involved.

goooogle.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-pci-express,2095.html

personally i find it odd their old results had it slower than one card om P35, as i never experienced that at all. ignore that blaming old drivers.


However you can see the difference between 8x/8x and 16x/16x in the P45 vs x48 results