The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Yes but also remember you are using quad GPU vs my dual. The new driver improves the scaling, but not really the individual performance. My 2 cards already scaled better than 4 so there was less room to improve.

Haha took my friend to the shooting range today. We fired my 7mm mag, his AK-47, and an AR-15 he bought and I converted to a pistol/mini AR. Fun times shooting up pumpkins

 

Wow! I have to echo Kevin. You definitely make the game sound more interesting than shaff saying it puts him to sleep faster than cricket.

I forgot that you love to be a Chinese sniper on that beautiful BF2 map - what is it - Dragon Valley? You pick off the GIs as they get into their trucks. Haha

Sounds like you have the right temperament for Far Cry 2, and I'm going to have to copy your assassination strategies, lol.

On the other hand, it doesn't sound right for Keith:

Sam, thanks for the explanation about the Big Bang board socket 1156, instead of 1366.

You're right - I know zero about i5. My gut tells me not to bother learning anything about it - that it must be simply a mid-range scaled-down version of the 900 series i7 processors - is that a fair way to think of it?

Wow - Vista goes into a shuffle that can take up to 17 minutes to give you back control of your laptop - I REALLY want to go ahead and get that operating system!! (NOT)

What are we hearing about Windows 7. Is it stable? Is it still in Beta? Are you guys using it - I know Kevin was messing with it.

Rich

 

I love the eye candy that is Vista/7 LOL! Nah, its interface does seem more productive to me. The bugs seem to be minimal. I would say its nearly as smooth as XP. And I hope it gets better, when the Board/Device manufacturers begin coding there devices to be "Windows 7 Ready". I see this operating system doing well in the next year

 

Actually i5 isn't scaled down at all. It's simply been refined for desktop use with a lower TDP and more well rounded performance. It actually performs the same as, if not better than, i7.

Actually it's been out of beta for a while. They are now on RC(release candidate). It's extremely stable, performs better than Vista, and so far works just fine with all of my programs and hardware. I'm just reluctant to use it now because when it goes final all the RCs need to be activated or they are invalid. It's going to release in a few months so be patient

Oh yeah turns out I can get a fully licensed copy Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit for absolutely FREE from school. Life is good

 

No, think of i5 as a cheaper version of i7 that's just as fast, better for gaming, and uses much less power.

 

If i5 is better, why does it cost less

 

Because it's just that awesome

It's meant for desktops and not servers which makes a difference. Server-class chips have always been much more expensive. i7 was never really intended for gaming, that's why they've released i5.

 

Excellent explanation. So i7 is like Opteron. Intel has i7 server chip, Amd has Opteron.

 

Huh? Well, does it overclock the same - I can overclock the D0 stepping 920 to 4 ghz with a good motherboard - can I do the same with an i5 chip?

Now you've got me curious, and I'm reading a long anandtech article about Lynnfield. It looks like the i7 860 with hyperthreading would be the processor to get at $284, versus the 870 at $556, for very little stock speed difference, 2.8 versus 2.93 ghz.

So the Lynnfield has an on-chip pci-e controller - direct connect to the gpus. That sounds good. I guess I'll have to completely re-think mobo - and it looks like P55 is the way to go now. (I am still wondering about overclocking.)

Edit: I was posting while several great comments were coming in:

Regarding my negative comment about vista - Jeff came up with some good news.

Lucky SOB!!

 

well if you want dual+ cards, you ideally still want x58, and you can disable HT which would put i5 and i7 the same for gaming.

 

Good point. That's right, I forgot that with that many cores, for gaming you are better to turn off HT.

So you're saying Shaff, that with multiple graphics cards, you still want 1366.

But wait - what about that that board you posted about, the MSI Big Bang P55 with the hydra chip, and two x16 graphics cards slots (for two 5870x2 12" long cards, right?)

Rich

 

i5s overclock if anything, better than i7s - the 2.66 i5 950 is good for 4.2-4.3Ghz.

 

Sam meant 750 there

And what's this about free Windows 7? Can I make use of it? I'm only in sixth form, not uni, so I dunno... What do they stipulate you have to be to qualify as a "student"?

 

6thform N00B


lol nop wait tillu hit uni. i hope i can get it

 

You have to be a student at my specific school. It's a major retailer of mass software and you just go to the site, enter your student ID, and a gives you a serial. I think I've done it about 6 times now installing XP on other machines.

 

Electronics and Computer Science at York will certainly do it, don't know about their other departments, and I obviously can't speak for other universities.

 

You lucky unis!!

Wow, amazing information. Ok, you guys have sold me on Lynnfield.

Look, regarding the 750, or the slightly more expensive 860, it appears to me that it might be worth an extra $90 to bump to the 860, slightly faster at stock 2.8 than the 2.66 750.

ASSUMING THE 860 OVERCLOCKS AS WELL AS THE 750, those benefits should be worth the few extra dollars imo:

i7 860 IS MAYBE WORTH THE EXTRA $90 OVER i5 750 BECAUSE:
1. It DOES of course, have HT. If you want to turn that off for gaming, you can, but for other things, HT DOES improve performance.

2. It has a faster "un-core" of 2.4 ghz, compared to the 2.13 of the 750.

This is where I am right now on page 6 of the anandtech article about the LGA-1156 chips.

The uncore, as they explain it, is a big chunk of the chip - about 400 million transistors worth, or slightly more than half of the total 775 million transistor package. The uncore is not as significant for performance, they mention, and therefore they use slower, and less power-leaky transistors, to keep overall power usage down. The uncore has its own multiplier and doesn't run as fast as the core.

So the uncore is the part of the chip that is NOT the 8 actual virtual processing cores. But the uncore DOES include the Pci-e controller in the case of the new Lynnfield LGA-1156.

Anyway, as I mentioned, the 750 uncore runs at 2.13ghz, whereas the 860 uncore runs at 2.4ghz, faster than all of the i7 900 series Bloomfield uncores, which are also stuck at 2.13, except for the very pricey 965 and 975 whose uncore runs at 2.66.

So, Sam, as far as you know, does the 860 overclock as well as its little cousin the 750?

Edit:
Oh, I finally got to the part that Shaff was talking about - scaling with multiple gpus, and the Lynnfield limitation of only x8 per graphics card if there are two cards. In fact Anandtech, bless their hearts, used two 4870x2 boards, with 4 gpus, and quad cf suffered greatly versus x58.

So I guess I'm back to the 920 D0 stepping, depending on what new developments surface in the next few months.

 

Really I get the basic idea of how they differ from Core 2s but i7 still has me largely confused. Lots of new technologies. I have a feeling that it will either die out in favor of more traditional styles or change how we think about computers forever...

Also i5 doesn't seem to kill dual card too bad. It absolutely fails in Crysis though which I also noticed about my X8/x8 780G board. Performs fine with 2 cards for most games but in Crysis it takes a large hit.


Also, I just bought Resident Evil 5 for PC today. Just like Capcom's other smash hit shooter Lost Planet, they have made an excellent port. More than makes up for the RE4 port abomination. Awesome graphics with razor sharp textures, amazing performance, full AA support, and full 360 pad support. My 9800GTX can run it at 60+ FPS maxed w/ 4xAA often going near 100 or so. Never drops below 40 even in the most intense spots. The built-in benchmark gives it 70FPS average. My Crossfire rig murders it. I'm not sure about Crossfire support but if it's anything like Lost Planet, Crossfire works just fine. I know that I'm over 100FPS average maxed @ 1920 x 1200 w/ 4xAA.

I really don't mind ports if they are as polished as this one. It performs, looks, and works like it was made for PC. NICE GOING CAPCOM YOU MAKE ME PROUD TO BUY YOUR PC GAMES!!!

I have the same sentiments for FEAR 2. It was designed to run on consoles but its PC pedigree is preserved absolutely faithfully.

 

6th form FTW in fact I'm sat in sixth form right now on the *lowest* resolution EVER! There's someone lent over my shoulder wondering what the hell I'm doing .

7RC's cool I had trouble with the 64-bit version at first but it seems to be fine now...

 

The i7 860 has hyperthreading and the i5 750 doesn't, true - but that's all it has apart from a slightly higher clock speed, and it costs $90 more at $289.99 vs $199.99. On a few occasions the i7 860 can be seen clocked to 4.3Ghz or so, but ultimately it's unlikely to get you much more than 100, maybe 150mhz more than the i5 750 when overclocked, which means it's quite steep, and you have to consider, HT is almost always detrimental to gaming. Not saying the i7 860 is bad by any means, it's still miles better than the i7 920 for value, but the i5 750 is likely to be by far the most popular chip, potentially becoming "the next Q6600"
Rich, have you not been paying attention? What suddenly made me interested in i5 was the Lucid chip, which adds PCI express bandwidth, enough for quad crossfire and beyond. I wouldn't consider i5 for a high end system otherwise due to the bandwidth.

Jeff: I too noticed a performance boost in Crysis from P45 to X48 with the same drivers. I've played all of Resident Evil 5 on the 360 and would definitely be interested in playing a PC version of it. By the looks of things it doesn't have the stupid Warhead-style hardware demands of Lost Planet (CF being its only saviour, but early drivers still saw me with 18-19fps with Quad crossfire)
FEAR 2 was awesome from a technological standpoint - I don't consider it a port, because as far as I'm aware it was a PC game from the outset also coded for consoles. However, I played it on my X2 before it had a crossfire profile so was basically playing with a single HD4870 1GB, at 2560x1600 with max AA and everything else, and there were very few occasions where it wasn't silky smooth, and the game looks excellent too - though I've found recently that the motion blur is a bit buggy, don't remember that from the first time round...