The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

mmm yep saw that aswell. might have to get it, cant stand these hackers.

OcUK have at 1:30, for forum members, a special on a 2TB HDD for £80. yeah its a seagate, but id just want it for backup so itd make no difference for me, was going to get a WD green, but for about the same price, might aswell go for this. IF i can get it, 50 pieces only.

 

Well, cheap enough I guess, but if it were me, I'd buy it for the crazy cheap price, then sell it for a profit, then buy a drive I'd actually trust. That said, I'm still not 100% convinced by the 1.5TB WD Greens either. To be completely honest, I think the most convincing 1.5TB drive at the moment is the Samsung F2.

 

lolwut?

 

i thought that was a odd resolution also. but im sure there are settings where i can set it to 1920x1080 i know my monitor now i can do that. running at 1440x900 now with a boat load of options to choose from. the price it shows now and what i paid for is is almost $100 more than what i paid. it shows $319 i paid $209 thats the main reason i got that one. i was looking at the 2410 model but it didnt have the high contrast ratio and it had a 6ms response time.and it was $199

 

the whole ocuk site crashed at 13:29 and couldnt handle the laod of people refreshig/placing orders, i got to selecting the date and it jsut wouldnt load what so ever. looks like they are all gone now.

 

Yes you can of course set the monitor to 1920x1080 but because that's not a native resolution, it will look all blurry and weak. A native 1920x1080 monitor will display that resolution much better. Nothing uses 2048x1152 except the desktop.
6ms response time is absolutely fine (anything up to 12ms is fine, believe it or not) and contrast ratios are always fine these days. Most monitors, despite having 2000:1+ contrast ratios are "dynamic contrast", essentially a technical loophole that lets them lie about their specs. Most monitors will be 1000-1500:1 and no higher. I don't think you can buy a monitor from a decent brand these days and not get a good contrast ratio, so it's not worth considering when comparing choices.

 

I'm actually wondering myself if a 30" (2560 x 1600Res) is worth 1000+ dollars to me. When I could span 2 40" Full HDTV's for less. Something i'm gonna have to consider when it comes time.

 

The gaming picture quality of 30" monitors is streets ahead of what any TV can produce, and you'd need a lot of space to span two 40" TVs

 

You think there's a pretty big difference eh. Perhaps i'll have to see one on display before I make the decision. I'm picky, but I don't know just how picky in this area yet. I sure would like a GOOD graphics editing monitor(S-IPS). One that doesn't change by MY viewing angle LOL!

 

All 30" monitors are S-IPS to my knowledge

My new file server (before the hard disks are installed):
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/5465/s5000716.jpg

 

That's my proper graphics card!

 

Not quite, this is the HD4830 version

 

Belated Happy Birthday Andmill.

Wow, Corsair 5 year warranty has full integrity. They got my dead PSU last Saturday, 1/9, (I have owned the unit for 14 months) and without posting any messages at all on my case (in fact their standard message said they were 5 days behind on processing rma's, so I didn't expect to be back in business for a couple weeks) surprisingly a BRAND NEW vx450 showed up on my doorstep today! I ran the self test immediately - which it passed - so I'll install it sometime in the next few days ready for gaming day next Wednesday.

Yeah, certainly looks like crysis is now playable, 2560x1600, at the highest settings, but maybe without AA all the way through - or as you said Sam - maybe AA until last chapter. That's outstanding!

I bet when you crank them up to those kinds of overclocks, which as you say Sam are as much as 30% above stock, they pull a lot of power.

Even your 850 watt supply must be somewhat stressed Sam with your dual 4870x2 cards. The guy in this picture below with dual 4870x2 cards is recording peak system wattage draw of 915 watts - he's thinking his Corsair 1000 should be traded out for something beefier. He's running a 1366 DFI H8 with i7 920 at 4 ghz.



Notice that he's got a Raid controller card sandwiched between the 4870x2 cards.

Sam - what would be the effect on the 16x pci-e lanes of graphics card throughput he would normally get for each of his 4870x2 cards, by running that pci-e raid controller card? As I recall the DFI had 32 lanes available - but no more than that - not 36 lanes like the Biostar.

That was quite an interesting discussion about whether the 5970 is worth the $700 they want for it. When you take the cost of each 5870 card and double it - the value is there of course. Cincy made some good points - the plasma 50" at 1920x1080 is a very fine display.

But 2560x1600 on a 30" monitor, with over 4 million pixels per frame, is almost twice as demanding, which is where the need for these kinds of powerful gpus comes into play.

I would just like to add, Sam, to your excellent points in your discussion with cincy about the quality of the picture at higher resolutions, such as 2560x1600 on a 30" monitor, especially since Kevin is considering forking out $1000 for a 30" monitor (I paid close to that for mine, Kevin), that you can't beat the immersive quality of gaming like that.

I sit up very close to the 30" Dell. The other evening a roommate passed a note to me - he laid it right down next to the keyboard. He must have somewhat slammed the door of the trailer on the way out - because I felt a jar - and came out of my headphone zombie-killing fixation for a few seconds and saw the note. I never knew anybody had stepped inside right next to me.

I have talked about trying to close the trailer window to reduce the draft and looking all around the Left 4 Dead safe house for the window and wondering why I couldn't find it. I have talked about seeing the Russian soldier comrade - the girl - a GIRL soldier - for the first time in COD2, although I have played the game 3 times before on a smaller monitor.

I have talked about the incredible beauty of the parrots and the tropical foliage in Far Cry at highest settings 2560x1600, which I don't remember noticing before at 1600x1200 playing through many times before. The immersive quality of the big screen is amazing! I own Crysis and Warhead and Far Cry 2 and several others that are already installed - but I won't play them until I have the graphics power to run them at Enthusiast settings. You and Jeff hooked me on supreme graphics excellence, and you, Sam, hooked me on gorging on pixels.

Now with dual 5970s at less than $1500, the power is here - SELL A HOUSE, RICH!

LOL

 

Corsair's warranty services have always got excellent reviews.
As stated, the HD5970 overclocks have a monumental impact on performance. Overclocking an HD5970 adds more power consumption than if you put a regular HD5870 next to it. You're looking at about a 60% increase to pull those clocks, which really does stress PSUs, you'd want a 1200W unit to run two 5970s at those clocks. Fortunately the HD5970 clocks amazingly well without needing to touch the voltages.
The guy below is running a similar system to me but for the fact that he has an i7 920 instead of the Q9550, which will draw anything from about 10W less (if it's stock) to 80W more, if it's heavily overclocked. However, if he thinks a draw of 915W is stressing a Kilowatt PSU, he obviously doesn't understand electronics very well. That 915W draw is a.c. input. Factor in the efficiency of the PSU and you're looking at around 800W d.c. draw tops, maybe 780-790. An 850W PSu would be stressed, but would be perfectly capable.
If he's running the RAID card in a PCIe 1x slot, it will have no effect on performance or bandwidth. If it's in a 16x slot, it will probably cut the bottom X2 to 8x bandwidth.

 

iicr there are 4 lanes form the SB, which if he has it in the right slow, i think will use the SB's PCIes. if not then one of his 4870x2s will be runnign in 8xmode.

 

Yeah guys, Shaff and Sam, I'm going through the DFI manual, and the slot just under where the top crossfire board goes, is the short pci-e 1x slot - which unfortunately is covered by the first board. That's where you guys are saying that the Raid controller could safely go without affecting graphics card bandwidth, if one were crossfiring single-slot-wide graphics cards.

So in the picture I posted of eva2000's dual 4870x2 rig on a DFI motherboard, the two slots between the two 4870x2 cards, are first of all, the middle yellow 16x full card slot for tri-sli, and then below that, a short green PCI slot. In his pictures, you can see that the small green pci slot is empty - so yes indeed - he is running the Raid controller in the middle tri-sli 16x slot, thereby reducing his bottom 4870x2 card to 8 lanes of pci-e. The dummy!

PSU POWER CONSUMPTION
Thanks for the clarification about DC and AC power, Sam. I think I understand.

If I follow you, eva2000 is recording an AC draw of 915 watts.

Undoubtedly he is measuring the wattage draw of the AC line in - that's what you are saying, Sam, right? That makes sense - how else would one easily measure the 915 watts?

If I am following you, so far so good.

So let's assume his Corsair is 85% efficient. That means what, exactly? That means that if, for example, the power supply is pulling 1000 AC watts in from the wall outlet, then it is converting that power, at an efficiency of 85% (losing 15% to heat) and supplying 850 watts of DC power to the components in his computer. Do I have that right?

I think I do, and now I see the point you are making. His PSU capacity is 1000 watts, meaning that his PSU can put out 1000 watts of DC output - mostly on the 12 volt rails. To do that, the input line wattage that he would record would be more than that - something like 1150-1200 watts coming in from the wall.

So in this case, where he posted that he noticed that he was pulling 915 watts AC in, (and assuming his Corsair 1000 is roughly 85% efficient) he is putting out, as you said, about 780-800 or so watts worth of DC power, well within his 1000 watts of capacity.

So eva2000 has nothing to worry about - he just needs a lesson from Sam on how all this works, lol.

1200 WATTS FOR DUAL 5970s
So now let's go back to the 5970s and the power that they draw when overclocked.

First of all, you're saying, Sam, that to crank them back up to the 5870 clocks generally doesn't require increasing voltages, so therefore we won't need something like the XFX card's overvolt software tool. Great!

But you are saying that they draw A LOT of power when you do that - more power than if you had two 5870s running side by side.

Okay. In that case - what are the 1200 watt power supplies that we should be looking at for a dual 5970 rig clocked to 5870 speeds?

Rich

 

Running his RAID card in the 16x slot doesn't necessarily make him a dummy. All high-end RAID controllers will only fit in either PCIe 4x or 16x slots, not 1x slots, simply because 1x wouldn't be enough bandwidth for a high end RAID array. Only small controller or RAID cards (4 drives or less) will typically fit in 1x slots.
You understand efficiency correctly, however, it's best to think of it in reverse, since it is the PC setting the amount of power required, not the mains. A DC requirement of 100W means an a.c. input of 100x the inverse of the efficiency - i.e. at 90%, 111W, at 85% 118W, at 80%, 125W. This highlights the importance of PSU efficiency, and also means you know what you're looking for when calculating the actual power drain on your system.
If PSU efficiency were perfectly linear, you could just say oh, I'm using 500W at a.c., my PSU is 84% efficient, therefore I'm using 420W. The reality isn't like that, the more DC output you have, the more (at low loads) or less (at high loads) efficient the PSU becomes. You need to have some idea of the DC draw, ironically, to be able to work out what the actual DC draw is. Fortunately, other than very tiny loads (<10%), efficiency tends not to vary that much for a given PSU.

The main source of the increased power with the overclock is the voltage increase. Don't use it (and most of the time you don't need it to reach 5870 clocks, only to exceed them) and you keep the TDP relatively reasonable. Clocking the cards up does still increase the heat & power, but not by anywhere near as much. Generally, since HD5970s are pretty efficient overall plus the fact that dual cards rarely run at 100% load on both GPUs unless you run a stress test, you can get away with a lot on an 850W PSU. If you're going for huge numbers on a Core i7, due to their 130W standard TDP versus the 95W of Core i5s and Core 2 Quads, I'd recommend a 1KW unit for quad graphics. However, on an i5, you can still make 4Ghz with an 850 just fine, with room to spare (There'd be room to spare on an 850 with the i7 too, but not very much, running a PSU at 92-95% of its maximum rating on a regular basis isn't something I advise)
Unfortunately the PSU market becomes a bit of a grey area beyond the 1KW 'safe area' where you find the ZM1000-HP and HX1000 as no PSU manufacturer I fully trust produces PSUs any more powerful. All I can really suggest is the Monumentally expensive Enermax Revolution 1250W. They seem to be reasonably reliable, but are incredibly expensive. That said, a lot of dual HD5970 users with i7s probably have money to burn anyway.

 

"Dummy" was probably a strong word - but in view of the fact that by running the raid controller on the middle slot, he is dropping the DFI pci-e bandwidth on his 4870x2 down to 8 lanes, I wonder if the Raid controller is really worth it - he's got to be bogged down by the 8-lane pci-e bottleneck, wouldn't you think? (I guess it depends on which game he is playing.)

Thanks for the tip about Enermax Revolution 1250 watt power supplies. I read some reviews - they seem to get top marks for quality.

I'm on the Enermax web site, and I see that the Revolution goes to 1250 watts, only I can't find anybody in the US who sells it. The top-of-the-line Revolution has a max efficiency rating of 91%, while the slightly lower-priced Galaxy version has a top efficiency rating of 89%.

Newegg carries the 1050 watt version of the Revolution, and the 1250 watt slightly less-efficient Galaxy version, both with big $80 rebates, pricing them at or below the Zalman 1000 and the Corsair 1000. What we may be seeing is possibly at attempt by Enermax to clear out inventories to make way for the Revolution 1250 watts, a better choice as you say, than their Revolution 1050, for crossfire with overclocked HD5970s.

The Enermax "Revolution" 1050 watts on Newegg costs $216 after $80 rebate, while the "Galaxy" 1250 watts runs $240 after $80 rebate. The $80 rebate brings down the cost of the Enermax Galaxy 1250 on Newegg to the same price-point of the Zalman 1000, currently priced at $241 with no rebate, and the Corsair 1000, currently priced at $240 after $20 rebate.

As I mentioned, I cannot find the Revolution 1250 anywhere in the US - but I have a feeling that when it shows up, it will be priced, without rebate, in the $320-340 range. Still I wouldn't feel that bad about paying an extra $100 (beyond a $240 corsair or zalman) to pick up the extra 250 watts of safety margin, considering the $1400+ investment in the two HD5970 cards. Would it be worth $100 more than a Galaxy model at the same 1250 wattage? I don't know. In addition to a 2% gain in max efficiency (max 91% vs max 89%) I couldn't see much of a difference - a few extra features that I didn't really understand. But maybe in the long run the extra 2% efficiency would pay for itself in lower electricity costs.

All this just to run crysis at 2560x1600 on gaming day - which by the way I just moved to Saturday - no more middle of the week. I got on Left 4 Dead yesterday, Saturday, early afternoon to test the new replacement Corsair 450 PSU, and I was so impressed with the high-quality level of play of the random Advanced team that I jumped on, that I decided to join the rest of the world on a Saturday day off instead of middle of the week, lol.

By the way - from that team captain I learned a better way to do the Parish bridge finale. Don't go around the tank - go over the tank! The leader of the team had a tag (he said it's now saved somewhere in my Steam folder) that he sprayed on the safe house wall just before the bridge crossing. He explained to the rest of the team his plan.

It showed the first rally point on top of the first gas tanker. Okay, nothing new there. Then the diagram showed a brief rally point in the ammo van - or at least one player triggering the tank by hitting that ammo van.

Then the new interesting idea, was for the team to then move backward, back to the base of the incline (on the opposite side from the tank to avoid being hit by a car) to wait for the tank to show up. Then we all went up and over - the brief retreat resulted in the easiest way up and over the tank that I have ever experienced. It executed beautifully - I even remembered to grab and toss a pipe (there are two of them there) from on top of the jeep at the bridge exit to the helicopter. The whole team made it out without any problem. One guy typed "Piece of cake."

As we chatted during the credits, the guy with the diagram said that his experience with other strategies of going around the tank on the construction rigging usually ended with somebody getting incapped and left behind. I have to agree - it's a little tricky, whereas the up and over was totally painless. Sam do you have any idea of in which 250kb cache file in Steam might be stored that new tag? If I can find it, I'll post it.

Rich

 

8 PCIe lanes for a 4870X2 does make a difference. How much of a difference really varies on a per-game basis, it wasn't a huge amount for a lot of the games I play often, but I'm sure there will be some exceptions. However, the important thing to note is that even if it doesn't limit an HD4870X2 too badly, an HD5970 will be worse.
The Enermax Revolution units get good marks for quality (I should bloody well hope so, given their absurd price!) but given the quality of Enermax's other units I wouldn't say top quality. I would still place Corsair above them. What's more important is that while the Revolution units are alright, the Galaxy units were quite poor. Ridiculously loud and prone to premature failure. Be warned. Now this goes for the original Galaxy (850/1000) I don't know if the newer version is any better, but I see the Revolution unit as less of a risk.

 

Thanks. I'll note that and look for the "Revolution" 1250 instead of the Galaxy when I finally start buying serious hardware (which probably won't be for at least another 6 months) unless by then Corsair or Zalman have a 1250 watt psu out.

Just out of curiosity, Sam, given the time that it took to move from retail boards based on the RV770 to retail versions of the RV870 (pretty near 18 months wasn't it?) how long would you expect the 5870 RV870 architecture to remain at the top of Ati's gpu offerings before the next leap forward?