Search results matching tag 'CrossFire'

Two mid-range GPUs or one high-end?

ClemSnide — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:12:36 GMT

I'm about to sink some major dough into a homebrewed i7 computer. Naturally, one of the big questions is graphics; I mostly play World of Warcraft and really dislike the lag in certain areas. The processor and memory are up to par, now let's consider the two-versus-one question.

For purposes of simplifying my life, I'm using Amazon's prices and stock, and am using the Sapphire line of ATi cards for this question. Yes, I know there are other options, but Sapphire has a solid midrange price and some decent cards. Please don't digress-- there re other places to argue the merits of individual varieties of cards!

I can get a Radeon HD 4890 for about the same price as two Radeon HD 4850s. Heat isn't really going to be an issue, I've learned from previous system builds and have chosen top-of-the-line cooling systems (though not yet liquid cooling). There will be one monitor of midrange size and resolution.

Since the prices are equal, would I get better performance by going to a Crossfire setup with the two cheaper cards? At the moment I'm leaning in the opposite direction, since (when the 4890 prices dtop) I could get another and Crossfire that way. But for the moment, what are your thoughts on my options?

User Review of the XPS 630i

kid007 — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:03:24 GMT

Mild OC raised the FSB to 1130 = 280*9=2.543g <-STOCK VOLTAGE, IN RAMS AND CPU!!!

13201 <- without any OC to the video card

3Dmark Vantage = 7816 <- without any OC to the video card, GPU = 7649, CPU = 8361

Here is my user review for my brand new XPS 630,

Since I open the box, everything was pack very neatly, very professional. what i mean by this is that the case was very well protected, fragile was on the box everywhere.

My XPS came with a pretty nice keyboard from Dell, very finger friendly, and very easy to use. it has a mini media player station so you can play,pause,open your media player,mute,stop and raise or lower the volume.

The Specs are Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Q6600 (2.40Ghz), 4GB DDR2 @ 800MHZ, 500GB 7200RPM/16MB Databurst Cache and my favorite part; a pair of ATI-3870 512MB

The case is pretty solid aluminum, it comes with LED's that you can change the colors using the NVIDIA Control Panel. The case has 2x 120mm fans one cooling the HDD, and the other one cooling directly the PCI-E (Video Cards) and they are adjustable from the NVIDIA Control Panel.

The CPU is cooled by a CPU Heatsink that for me is a pretty cool design, it looks like a Tuniq design which are supposed to be pretty good.

The Cons... after reading a lot about this system, i realize the biggest complaint is that the motherboard is powered by a NVIDIA 650i SLI, which is not bad, but the complaints consist of, that it only has 1-PCI-16X, and the other PCI-E is 8x.

"Customer statement - Dell modified the Nvidia 650i SLI chipset/motherboard to restrict it.
Dell’s products are unique and manufacturers build the motherboards to our specifications. The retail motherboard specifications frequently do not apply to the Dell proprietary product. There are many reasons Dell does this, but our goal is provide a reliable product to our customers and to provide to you the ability of having two video cards. When building the XPS 630, Nvidia gave us two 650i chipset motherboard choices:
* 16,1,1 = 1 PCI Express x16 slot (16 lanes), 1 PCI Express x8 slot (1 lane), 1 PCI Express x1 slot (1 lane)
* 8,8,1,1 = 2 PCI Express x16 slot (8 lanes), 1 PCI Express x8 slot (1 lane), 1 PCI Express x1 slot (1 lane)
We chose the second one to enable you to use either Nvidia SLI or Ati CrossFireX. The XPS 630i Owner's Manual clearly states the PCI Express lane configuration is locked in as follows:
- PCI Express x16 (SLOT1 and SLOT4) = connector size 164 pins, connector data width maximum 8 PCI Express lanes
- PCI Express x8 (SLOT3) = connector size 98 pins, connector data width maximum 1 PCI Express lane
- PCI Express x1 (SLOT3) = connector size 36 pins, connector data width maximum 1 PCI Express lane"

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/s ... #wp1104354

Apparently that is very bad for those extreme gamers except me: i could swap the mobo anytime which DOES NOT VOID THE WARRANTY!. that right there is a huge plus for anyone who likes the design and the way the XPS Systems are built...

Last but not least is the NVIDIA Control Panel, it is a pain in the butt to get it to work the way that you want it, if anyone gets an XPS 630, feel free to PM me because it took me about a 5-6 days of reading and playing with it!, so i could get it to work the way that it is supposed to work.

Microsoft Vista Home Premium, not bad for an OS that is a little easy to get used to once you start customizing the views and killing a few of the applications that come with it. What I don't like and I told this to the lady at Dell is that Vista Home Premium is not able to recognize more than 3g of rams, but she still put in 4g's. Dell does not sell Vista Ultimate 64bits why? Don't know, maybe because they are DUMB!

The Pros-

Looking past the issues, this is a sweet machine coming from the laptop world. My God this thing moves and handles like nothing I have seen or used so far. the highest temp i get with folding 2 clients and 2 gpu clients, is 47C in core 0

I'm not a gamer but the few games that I played which are Unreal Tournament, Unreal 2, Unreal 3

and ND4Speed Most Wanted, and Carbon. They Run smooth at high settings. My Monitors consist of 1280x1024. i don't have widescreen; don't like them as much as regular 17" monitors...

Other than that, I give this system a solid 4 1/2 stars, putting aside the stupid Nvidia Control Panel and the fact that the mobo runs in a 650i chip which is about to be 2 years old...

Re: AMD Launches ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

THEODOROS321 — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:39:07 GMT

Hi there,

I have a 17 inch LCD monitor 1280*1024 32bit, Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 3.262GHz 466FSB ORTHOS,PRIME,OCCT,SANDRA,AND OTHER FULLY STABLE (1.86GHz Default) with Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 Motherboard (Rev. X.X WITH F7 BIOS) with 2GB Kingston Hyper-X 800MHz Memory modules in Dual Channel Mode (128bit - 64bit*2).I'm using ATI GFX-Cards FOREVER and the reason is because i don't know what the Bench sites are saying or doing but every time that i was trust any of the benchmarks i was pissed off because is like they are saying lies to me at least.Finally i want to make something about the ATI HD3870 clear and not for the ATI HD3870 X2 is that in any game i'm playing the frames are about 60F.P.S.(Frames Per Second) and up, not at least in any time of the game drops below of that at ALL FULL GRAPHICS and all Details Cranked Up - AA16X,HDR and so on...... and something else those 55nm babes and not 65nm are so easy overclockable ~1000MHz+++ core (stock cooling- within VGA BIOS modifications).

Re: ATI Catalyst 8.3 Sneak Peek: CrossFireX and More

prayeruk — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:25:03 GMT

hi guys ,do you think that my 2900xt in crossfire will run better,with these new drivers?

3.0GHz AMD Phenom Quad-Core & 3-Way CrossFire

Marco C — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:32:25 GMT

Just in case you missed the news today regarding Phenom, here's a link:

http://www.hothardware.com/News/30GHz_Phenom_and_3Way_CrossFire_Spotted

Re: OK.....I have my first SLI setup....and probably my last!!!!

Marco C — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:33:33 GMT

I'm surprised by this post. The X1800 XT is still a decent card, but in comparison to 8800 GTS SLI, it's not even in the same league. It sounds like it's not necessarily average framerates that have you disappointed, but image quality and potentially minium framerates (based on your 'smoother' comment).

The only time an SLI rig may have lower framerates than a single X1800 XT is in 100% compeltely CPU-bound circumstances, because there is some CPU overhead associated with SLI. In games like this, I doubt you could consider any video card truly "smoother" than another, however.

With the kind of horsepower you've got now, have you tried increasing the image quality and making your comparisons again. If your single X1800 XT was getting 60fps in your favorite game and the SLI setup is now getting 120fps, and they're both configured for 4xAA and 8x aniso, try raising the settings on the SLI rig to improve image quality - maybe you can now run 8xs AA and 16x high quality aniso at a higher resolution and still get 60+fps. You should also turn on the high-quality filtering mode in NVIDIA's drivers for the best image quality on the SLI rig. And also make sure V-Sync in enabled when playing your games to prevent shearing or other artifacts in situations where the SLI rig it putting out a higher framerate than your monitor's refresh rate.

Lastly, if you don't like SLI, you're not going to like CrossFire.