The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

sam the 2900 was 80nm im sure. Tsmc couldn't make it at 65nm, that they wanted, even though they were 6 months late, leading to the very hot card that guzzled power, and wasn't as powerful as they could make it.

then instead of doing the refresh to 65nm they jumped to 55nm, but called it the 3 series.

 

Ah yes you're right, what confused me was the HD2600 and HD2400 series were 65nm, but the HD2900 was 80nm.

JohnnyBoy: For £170 you could upgrade to an HD5830, but for £150, the 5770 is the best you'll get. As for memory, 4GB of Corsair XMS3 (1600mhz) is typically about £105, and is what I recommend people buy. The board is fine, but a better buy in my opinion is the similarly priced Gigabyte P55A-UD4.

 

"won't be incompatible" - Sharp-eyed kevin catches sam in a double negative - english is set up like mathematics.

But in spanish - which I've been studying like crazy for a good while - you use double, or triple negatives, and the sentence still stays negative - Latin doesn't care about the mathematics. Sam could say "No puedo ni robar un 4 gig 5970" - and he would still be saying "I can't even steal a 4 gig 5970."

- which brings me to "Trying decide what to get as a replacement, have to consider the possibility of not upgrading to the 5 series because nothing is suitable to buy :S "

Now wait a second, Sam - if you're not out front on the bleeding edge of hardware, who is going to keep us abreast of the latest and greatest?

Shaff: "**** it and save up to get the crowning glory of the 6 series?"

From Jeff: "I like this setup the best. A 5870 + a 5970 with the single 5870 as the master is by far the best idea I've heard. That ensures the best single card performance. And when you run Crossfire the scaling will matter much more than the single GPU performance, so the potentially lower clocks of the 5970 will have less of an impact."

So maybe Sam will have a 3 gpu setup fairly soon when his refund check shows up. Hmmmm.

Rich

 

That's the current plan. There's no sign of the refund coming any time soon though. I need to do some reading about what the maximum term is for processing a refund, but I'm pretty sure it's 28 days, by which, who knows what finances will look like by then. £810 on graphics is still pretty nuts, though I keep reminding myself it's a net expenditure of £400-£450 or so on an upgrade, which I'm more comfortable with. It is pretty tragic though, that I'm spending 50% more than I did back in 2008, just to get a raw performance increase of 16-22%, even if I am doing it with one less GPU and using slightly less power while I'm at it. That's the difficulty really, I'm paying for scaling, which is a benefit that's really difficult to measure. Few games I play really seem to use 400% on the GPUs though a fair few come close. Plenty of games I play see the benefit of quad crossfire, but realistically, they'd run on two of the 4 GPUs with very little lag. Bad Company 2 is one of the few that scales well but doesn't run well enough (any AA and the performance drops off a cliff). Upping the performance of the master card by 80% is, in my opinion, worth the cost of an individual 5870 that would otherwise be required to do it, and that's almost all of the net expenditure taken up, with the rest being slightly better scaling and slightly better raw performance.
It makes sense, and yet it doesn't? Were the cost of this upgrade immaterial, I probably wouldn't think twice about this decision, but with such a vast initial outlay, I'm anxious that I'm doing the right thing. So depressing the initial outlay went two weeks ago, and I still might not have anything to show for it for another month... Benefits of credit cards folks, chargebacks. Sadly, nobody would give a credit card to someone unemployed, so fat chance of that. The thought has crossed my mind several times to use the money to instead buy an SSD, 8GB of RAM, and some redundant disks for my server, leaving the DX11 upgrade on a conditional to me getting a job, else leaving it until the autumn term. Risk there of course is me buying something in september/october, only to find its sucessor arrives in December. Last word from inside ATI was allegedly that Southern Islands was on track for a 2010 release. Couple this with the fact that I will have 14 weeks over the summer with no academic work to do, prime time to catch up with the huge pile of games I never played, be it either annoyance at crossfire scaling, or simply putting off for other things. DX11 upgrade before the start of the holiday still seems logical to me.

 

that has to be the shorest post from rich, ever!

 

Has to counteract my posts, I've got 4 textwalls on this page alone

 

Some hopefully good news, CCL called me yesterday in response to my request for an update on the RMA. After having spoken seemingly at length with the distributor, they've authorised the card for replacement, and have another 4GB 5970 from Sapphire arriving Monday, and will send it off to CCL for arrival on tuesday, who will then send it off to me to arrive on Wednesday. I have asked CCL to test the card themselves before sending it on to me, so hopefully can avoid similar aggro. Here's hoping this card works. If so, 4 days until I finally see the result of my missing £840!

 

Best of luck sam, I hope that one works flawlessly

 

Here's hoping. Just in case, it's going in my Q9550 first, I highly doubt the broken latch on my P55A caused a fault with the 5970, but I'd want to check first. Assuming all is OK, I'll test the P55A with an older, less valuable card before I stick the 5970 in.

 

and who was wanting people to loan him £700+ so he could buy other cards? Lol

 

Well, considering until then nobody knew if Sapphire were even making any more cards, I don't think that was an unreasonable course of action
Sapphire, needless to say, never replied to my question.

 

Ahh so there's still hope

Good luck Sam.

Sorry for my lack of posting lately people. Attending graduation parties

 

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Minimal: Radeon X850XT/X1800 series/HD2900 series/HD3650/HD4550/HD5450 or above, Geforce 6800GT/7600GT/8600GT/9500GT/GT220 or above
Reduced: Radeon X1900XT/HD2900 series/HD3690/HD4670/HD5570 or above, Geforce 7900GTX/8800 series/9600 series/GT220 or above
Moderate: Radeon HD3870/HD4700 series/HD5700 series or above, Geforce 8800GT/9600GT/GT240 or above
Good: Radeon HD4860/HD5770 or above, Geforce 8800GTX/9800GTX/GTS250 or above
Optimal: Radeon HD5850 or above, Geforce GTX285/GTX465 or above
Extreme: Radeon HD5870CF (93%) or above, Geforce GTX465 SLI (93%) or above
Not too bad this one, room for 8xAA at the top end on non-crazy hardware setups. Quite heavy bias toward nvidia though, an HD5870 competing with a GTX465? ouch!

 

mihgt just be drivers?

 

Might make some difference, but remember these dual GPU results are still based off speculative dual GPU scaling, they do not consider any problems that may arise with SLI/CF.

 

Replacement 5970 is in, seems to work OK, though it did cause some strange errors in my BIOS when I was connecting from displayport. Run it through 3dmark, and to all but the silentPC nutcase, the card is literally silent through all of it except canyon flight, during which it's tough to say if it's much noisier than a 4870X2 at 2D idle, let alone 3D idle or an actual game! Capacitor whine is more pronounced than the fans which, for the most part (tests 1,2 and 4 of 3dmark included) seem to be running around 900rpm, not a lot for 92mm fans. Impressive to consider at this speed the card is idling in the low-mid 30s Celsius (36 atm), with all but my rear 140mm case fan turned off, and the side open.

Card's performance will be held back initially as I'm sticking with my Q9550 for the first couple of days before I switch back to the i5, but the cooler at least really is deserving of all the praise it received. This is one of the quietest cards I've owned on a par with my XFX HD4830 (probably better, since I don't have to manually force the fan speed to keep it silent). With my Q9550 at 3.4Ghz, 3dmark06 was 19466. Seems pretty decent score for a CPU at that level, so looking forward to seeing how it does with the bottleneck (at least partially) removed. Now time to put my side fans back and try out some real games

 

bench some games for us on the q9550 and the same for the 750. I wanna see how many fps it adds.

 

Some examples then? I'd like to make sure the benchmarks are the same. I'll do a quick normal difficulty playthrough of Left 4 Dead 2 on the first level of The Parish.
I'll run through the first minute section of Crysis Warhead (from where he gets out of the VTOL until when he recovers from being EMP'ed). Anything else?

Given that I would want things to have been up and running for at least a day before fragsoc, I will probably make the i5 switch tomorrow if I can. I'm quite tired today so I won't risk any more hardware changes!

 

umm the pretty much covers it. Metro if you have it. A dx11 title?

battlefeild?

 

Could run BBC2, but not sure how I'd test it. Suppose I could find a fairly linear sequence in the beginning of the SP campaign. I think I have Metro 2033 but not installed. That should be a laugh.

Managed to get the card's idle temp down to 32C with the A/C on - forcing the fan speed to 100% for curiosity's sake does work, but manual fan speed control on it works a lot differently to normal cards, once you reduce it, it applies cooldown mode (where the fan speed is reduced by a fixed amount after a fixed interval, regardless of temperature), same as the X2s used to do but only if on automatic.