Be Excellent To Each Other

*boring techy geek mode alert*

So I've been doing a lot of reading over the past few days all about SLI and Crossfire. It's actually dead interesting really.

As I mentioned the 480x chipset divides the PCIE 'lane' speed when you use two cards. So you have a set of two PCIE 1.1 slots. If you're only using one card you put a terminator (any one who used RIMMS will remember the terminology) or as Asrock call it a PCIE switch into the first port and then a GPU in the second. Then you get 16x PCIE. If you use a second card in Crossfire the bandwidth over the lanes halves and you get 8x a port.

Thankfully before I placed my order for the board (because I'd researched all of this beforehand) I found a great article on Tom's where they ran some benchmarks on dual 8x Xfire vs dual 16x Xfire. The results were actually very interesting. You don't gain that much at all really using 16x. Well, you do but in most cases (especially the newer title they tested) there was hardly any difference. Why does that sound like DDR3?

Individual Crossfire Performance - World in Conflict

PCIe x8x8 vs x16x16 fps Percent

HD2900 XT (512 MB) CF PCIe 1.0a x8x8 80.0 100.0
HD2900 XT (512 MB) CF PCIe 2.0 x16x16 83.0 103.8
HD3870 (512 MB) OC CF PCIe 1.0a x8x8 90.0 100.0
HD3870 (512 MB) OC CF PCIe 2.0 x16x16 90.0 100.0
HD3850 (256 MB) OC CF PCIe 1.0a x8x8 72.0 100.0
HD3850 (256 MB) OC CF PCIe 2.0 x16x16 78.0 108.3

Very interesting if you're a total geek like me

You're a few pages late with that.

The motherboard I've got has to divide PCI-E up into two 8x lanes if you're using two graphics cards, it's a limitation of the P55 chipset. So I read that same article before making my purchase. I gather the only real problem is it limits you to dual Crossfire or SLI as shoving in a third card will actually decrease performace so much that you'd be better with just the one card in there.

To be honest, I'm playing Mass Effect 2 at the moment (when I get time - I started on Sunday and still haven't left Omega Station) and it runs silky smooth at 1080p, with everything set to their highest values and 4xAA. No idea what the frame rate is, but I'd imagine it was around 60FPS merely going on how smooth it runs.

Street Fighter IV I know for a fact runs at a very steady 60FPS with everything on maximum at 1080p (4xAA) and Dirt 2 at about 70FPS with everything at maximum. And this is running my processor at 3.2GHz, when I have it on good authority that my board and CPU combination can easily hit 4.2GHz with the proper cooling applied. So I'm pretty damn chuffed all in all.

Which means finally, at long chuffing last, I can stop pissing about with the hardware and start actually playing the games on it. Wonderful! In fact, I'm increasingly feeling like I may keep this PC after all and cancel the Alienware order, especially as Dell are properly trying my patience now.

Indeed. Thankfully I shall never get that temptation as the Xfire board I am getting (today by the looks of it too) only has two PCIE slots

SLI is far more dependant on full x16 lanes. It's also actually quite shocking just how many motherboards on the market that share the lanes out. Crazy really. The entire X3x series all do it !

I'm totally thrilled at what I paid for the board. I'm not too happy it's an Assrock but to be fair to them it has bios updates a few days old and even though they canned it a long time ago they're still fully supporting it and answering all tech questions about it via email so fair play for that.

It's only real bad downside and one I only discovered last night (and am utterly fucked off about) is that it only has 4 SATA ports. Which sucks bells because I'm now going to have to remove two hard drives Having said that with crossfire running something has to give (PSU wise) and I have plenty of space to be able to remove them. Oh well



Never played the first one.. *embarassed*. I must read about that game.



SFIV ran well for me when I played it briefly. I'll no doubt be reinstalling it very soon. As for Dellienware? I told you. I ordered a keyboard.. A fucking keyboard from them and had to go through that awful phasing system. It took nearly a month to arrive, I got a phonecall at 6:30 am from a robot telling me it was being delivered and then never got the invoice.

Shoddy experience in truth mate.

The 4 redundant pins are clip off and on-able to the other 20 on my PSU. A smart move, it seems.

Mine too. It's a Coolermaster model and was supplied with the case.

It's Black.

YEEEEEEEEEEEHAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Bloody hell. I don't think I quite realised how incredible two of these 5770s was going to be.

I just read a review (25 page) and it would seem that two £120 cards strapped together can quite easily outperform not only a 5870 but in most cases the 295GTX aswell.

Basically they're cheaper than one 5850 and outperform it almost (if not) always, and nearly half of a 5870 and outperform it at least 50% of the time. Scaling is so good that you can expect 1.7x the performance over one card.

I really was not expecting that.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd ... ew-test/13

Didn't you just get a new graphics card the other day? Now you have 2 more?

I brought one last week and got the second one today in exchange for the dead 280. Picked up a motherboard to do Xfire for £33 and just waiting on the thermal grease and cable extenders now

Well last night I discovered that a £33 full ATX motherboard does come with drawbacks.

Namely -

It only has two fan headers. I needed five. Thankfully my fans also have Molex connectors on them so with some good cable work it should work out OK.

The board layout is pretty disastrous and if I want good airflow and it to look tidy I'm going to have to lay out a fiver on cable extensions and sundries.

I think it's going to be a bit of a sod to fit and requires a lot of thought. Switching from the EVGA to the Asus was pretty easy really as they both have a similar feature set and layout. But this Asrock is a bit of a pain.

You love it, you masochist!

You can buy tubs of thermal grease on eBay for not much money, which saves waiting around.

Yeah, you're right of course. I think if it was easy to do I'd have gotten bored. As it is it's been a nightmare and I haven't even touched the bloody thing yet. I've had to shuffle all of the data around on my hard drives and partitions to get what I need left in the PC onto the drive that will remain (as two need to come out, fucking 4 ports?).

I also need to completely rewire the cables surrounding the board. And because the SATA connectors are the older "constantly fucking falling out type" I need to get locking cables. At least that gives me an excuse to get funky coloured ones. Then I want funky coloured molex extensions and of course cable ties and tidys.

I can see this getting expensive....

Grim. I ordered some TG a couple of days back and got an email last night to tell me it was shipping today. Bit strange, I mean usually you ship it and then tell the person. Mind you for 99p delivered I wasn't expecting them to hand deliver it

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/MW007-Alienware-A ... 5190009ab5

Wow, that's pretty sick.

Even more sick that on Alienware UK it adds up to £3100

From a related link


Wow! A 5.6GHz CPU?

Don't.. That has to be THE most annoying, faggy fucking thing in the world.

A few months back a guy on Ebay was desperately trying to sell a fake Alienware. He kept listing it as an Alienware @ 9ghz. All it was was a shite pentium D overclocked in a tacky case that he had added all the cores together on.

Four times his auction got closed before he gave up.

Does any one have an old PCIE card I can borrow? I need it for about a minute. I will pay both way's postage.

*holds head in hands* What have you done this time, JC?

Nothing. That's the thing, I can't do anything until I get a card

The motherboard has been sent with bios 3.30 which is 2 bioses ago. I need it on 3.70 to support the Radeons.

I can't risk spending an entire day building the new set up and using up precious thermal paste if it's not going to work. I would have to switch the entire bugger back

So basically I need a jizzpile old GPU to put in merely for the bios flash.

I mean there's every chance the 5770s display a picture but I can't take that chance. I didn't buy a lot of thermal paste, literally enough to do the job twice if I had to but I would need to fit the new shit, take it out, fit the old shit and then refit the new shit again later on.

Way too risky. I really don't want to have to spend £25 (cheapest) on a graphics card just to use for a bios flash

As for the bios? I'm not worried at all in any way. This board has a pop out bios chip and Asrock provide any bios ver of your choice on a chip for $15. I have a mate in the states who does me good rates

i have a hd2400pro on pcie, but I'm not back at home until monday

Well there's no rush. This is one of the few times I have a fully functioning PC aswell as a pile of parts

Well I have my answer.

I just spent three hours fitting the Asrock only to get no signal. I thought it might be that the 5770 would work but not work properly in Windows for games etc. Seems not. With it connected the mobo spacks out beeping like mental and the DVD drives refuse to open and everything.

Good thing is I realised I have a stock cooler with thermal paste on it, so I still have enough to refit everything. Ive not even put it back together properly, no point as it all needs to come apart again next week.

God I'll be glad when this shit is over...

Sooooo, again if any one can send me a shite PCIE card I will pay the postage to and fro. I literally need it long enough to boot from Win98SE with CDROM support and run ASRFLASH.

And you buy a 360?

KIDDING! I do admire your dedication to this pursuit.

*awaits inevitable Zarzation of that into 'fursuit'*

This will be the end of it. Seriously.

When my wife left and I had to sell my car I promised myself a cutting edge PC. I had always had one before I met her and I'm not new to bridging graphics cards. Back in the day I had a 8mb 3dlabs Octane or something and two 8mb Voodoo 2 cards strapped.

So yeah.. got the CPU I wanted (3ghz quad core) got the limit on ram, plenty of hard drives etc. I was either going to SLI my 280 (before I got it, as soon as I realised how hot it was I went off that) SLI some lower spec cards (250s, glad I didn't as triple scaling is fucking crap and they perform worse than 2) or what I have done.

This will give me so much speed and power it'll be insane. So once this is done the PC is pretty much at it's limit. Water cooling, Blu ray.. Everything I could possibly wish to fit and then I'll leave it to grow dusty and old.

Then I am going to move onto machine 2. I have a SATA DVDRW (Ive fitted an IDE back in here its better for flashing and it works perfectly) a pair of 250gb baracudas, Terratec sound card, Noctua cooler, Asus Crosshair SLI, more fans that I can wave a shitty stick at etc, etc.

All I need is a el cheapo Athlon 2 (£40 new) 2gb DDR2 (Ill pick up cheap shit for about £30) and a case and PSU (buying in 2 weeks) and I am laughing. I have onboard on the crosshair, but my cousin has said I can have his leftover 8600GS.

That's basically what I need. A complete spare machine. I wish I had one today, becuase then I could have just put everything away and not felt forced to have to rebuild everything just to get on the net etc.

I'm surprised you don't have a spare old thing knocking around. I still have my PII-400 and Celeron 433 that could be hooked up and operational in about ten minutes.

I don't really have the room tbh to store it. Thing is, Im fucking going to now.

I gave away a nice machine about six months ago. Core 2 Allendale 1.8ghz, 2gb DDR2 MSI motherboard and Rad 1650 pro. Lian Li case too. Thing is, at the time PC parts were so cheap it wasn't even worth selling.

Now? fucking hell, it's a nightmare !

Argh. For fuck's sake. Why is it you can tell you're having one of those days for fuck's sake?

I see a GPU on Ebay for £9.99 delivered. I hit buy it now.

Then I get this fucking shit.



So I can't paypal anything to any one unless I verify. And verifying means signing an agreement and giving Paypal full reign over the bank account so they can sieze funds etc. Thing is, it's not my bank account or paypal account so I can't do it any way (and I wouldn't because I fucking hate Ebay and Paypal).

I should have stayed in fucking bed

get verified man! It takes seconds if you have online baking access!

ah. INRxP

<Insert poor joke about cookies>

Go to the pub and have a beer.

I would love to go and get absolutely fucking hammered right now. I can't afford it though but next week I am going to drink myself into a fucking stupor

I have a spare not great graphics card I am looking to sell, an HD3450.

I can't pay for it. So Im going to have to pray that my cousin shows up sooner rather than later. Ho hum.

Ok, well if anyone else wants it, I am thinking like £25. It's basically brand new, I only used it the once.

Fuck it, I think I am ordering this, they are not far from here, so I could pick up in person.

Good idea/bad idea?

That's the card I have - runs everything I chuck at it at 1920x1200, maxed out. Although admittedly I've never tried Crysis on it.

Currently playing Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2 beta and they're lovely.

Keeps nice and quiet under load as well.

I think that might be out of the question now sadly, I have realised I will be needing a new power supply too

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/700-watt-Alienwar ... 27aca92de4

Ignore their stupid pic of an old AT PSU. It's the same as mine but with 50w less. Be warned, it's probably the same size though !

However. If you want cooler, calmer, quieter and far less power usage then get a 5770. Now admittedly on it's lonesome the 5770 isn't as fast but it does offer full DX11 support.

The 4890 is the quietest 'proper' graphics card I've ever had, I've had a play around in CCC with manual fan speeds, and by my estimation, the fan never spins above 35% when left to its own devices, even during an intensive gaming session, or in other words, I can't hear it above my case and CPU fans - at stock speeds the 4890 is about 15% faster than a 5770 at stock speeds.

I can max the 4890 out in CCC at 1GHz core and 1.2GHz RAM and it's entirely happy, but the fan does get audible when gaming - at that level it's kicking out polys over 25% faster than a 5770, and whilst the 5770 overclocks nicely as well, it can only narrow the difference back down to around 15%. (With pretty nasty diminishing returns at high resolutions due to a lack of memory bandwidth.)

DX11 is neither here nor there in my book, we've scarcely got any games with noticeable DX10 enhancements, let alone DX11 (Custom PC took a close look at DIRT 2 recently and basically said, 'Ummm, yeah, it says it's running in DX11 mode, but it looks the same and runs about 30% slower than if you leave it in DX9 mode') - considering pretty much all games are derived from console code these days (the 360 essentially being a five year old DX9 PC), don't get too excited about DX11 enhancements in games any time soon.

(The games I've played with DX10 modes, I've ended up going back to DX9 mode for speed and stability, even a brand new game (still in beta) such as Bad Company 2, the official advice when it comes to performance and stability is, 'Edit the ini file to force DX9 mode, even on DX10 capable hardware.')

All that said, the 5770 is a bit cheaper than the 4890, and it's certainly a pretty capable card, so either would be a reasonable choice IMO.

Here's one of many similar quotations you can find on various tech sites, the 1GB 5770 is slower than a 1GB 4870, let alone a 4890, and it's also lacking memory bandwidth, which will hurt in the most demanding games and/or at high resolutions: (This comment refers to a 4870, which is a fair bit slower than a 4890),

"The value of the 5770 in particular is clearly not going to be in its performance. Compared to AMD’s 4870, it loses well more than it wins, and if we throw out Far Cry 2, it’s around 10% slower overall. It also spends most of its time losing to NVIDIA’s GTX 260, which unfortunately the 4870 didn’t have so much trouble with. AMD clearly has put themselves in to a hole with memory bandwidth, and the 5770 doesn’t have enough of it to reach the performance it needs to be at.......

So here’s the bottom line for the 5770: Unless you absolutely need to take advantage of the lower power requirements of the 40nm process (e.g. you pay a ton for power) or you strongly believe that DirectX 11 will have a developer adoption rate faster than anything we’ve seen before for DirectX, the 1GB 4870 or GTX 260 is still the way to go"

Funny how reviews differ really. I read a review of the 5770 overclocked and it beat the 260. Thing is, with the reviews as they are they don't mean very much really. What counts is what it does when you actually put the card in your actual P.C. Like Zio I thought the 280GTX was incredibly underwhelming. It's not suprising to me that reviews said it was a tip top card, because when you look at their test rigs they're running the top of the pile parts for everything.

I mean, in my P.C a 5770 is pretty much as good as a 280 GTX. Infact, for some reason some things seem to run better. I am strongly thinking now that there could have quite probably been something wrong with the 280 from day one but I can't swear to it.

I agree to what they're saying about memory bandwidth and so on but that isn't going to be a problem once I strap two together. I'll pretty much go from a very capable little card to something other worldly.

Also, it's a little unfair really to compare the 5770 with the 260GTX. The 260GTX costs at least £30 more and right now ATI don't really have something in the same price bracket. The 5770 should be compared to the 250 GTS (because it costs pretty much penny for penny the same) and the 5770 wipes the floor with the 250 GTS. Maybe they'll come up with a 5800 or something for around £150-£170 that will be on the same price marker as the 260? not sure.

I also had nothing but trouble with Dirt 2 on the 280. It constantly fucking stuttered and so on. I also had the same issues with NFS : Shift and blamed that on my core 2 duo (infact that's what caused me to replace it). Now whether the 280 was already starting to die or whether it really was as crap as I remember it to be? I don't know. What I do know is that the 5770 is nippy as fuck in Dirt 2 (even though it benches at 20fps less it never stutters and feels far faster) and is a very good card over all.

As for fans spinning up? the 5770 NEVER spins up the fan. No matter how hard you game, or for how long (and I'm talking 13 hour Fallout 3 sessions) I have never heard it go over what could be considered as stock speed, even when I had used the CCC (which is fucking AWESOME BTW) to clock it faster than the XXX edition costing £30 more. It's also never risen above 52c even after 13 hours of solid battering. Fuck sake, the 280 *idled* 4c more than that and quickly flew to 80s every time.

I'm fucking glad to be shot of it in honesty.

Last thing to say again. The 5770 is a nice little card. However, it doesn't truly shine until you strap two of them together. And when I say shine? I mean, shine. It turns into a two headed beast and shits on pretty much everything within £100 above it. 5850? slaughtered. 5870? It takes that's head too. 285 superclocked? fuck off and sit behind me. 295? Well it actually gives that a bloody nose too.

Check this review out. You'll see why I'm beside myself with excitement at getting this stuff in and running. It is pretty long winded but the figures speak for themselves.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd ... iew-test/1

The problem with Crossfire (and SLI) is that you're relying on drivers and/or game support on a case-by-case basis.

When it shines, it's great, when it works poorly or not at all, you're screwed - you're really at the mercy of the coders.

Crossfire (and SLI) also eliminates the 'less power and heat' argument, and probably the 'less noise' one as well.

My take on this has always been to buy a strong single GPU card rather than bolt two mid-range GPUs together with a flaky software solution.

For the money you'd spend on two 5770s, why not just get a single 5850?

Because the 5770s are faster than a single 5850 by quite a margin.

The support issue isn't really an issue any more. I mean if you look at the benchmarks I posted it pretty much sums up my entire game collection hehe.

As for heat? well I don't see how two 52c graphics cards sitting side by side can produce a lot more heat than one really. Noise? again, maybe 1db over one. And power? Even two 5770s at idle use far less than a 4890.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing what you decide to go with next as an entire PC package as it goes

Also. I think the flakey driver argument is pretty much at an end. I mean yeah, the 5970 has it's teething problems but don't all new cards and hardware? That was pretty much going to be a given (and I assume you read the same review in Custom PC as I have )

But when you look at it both Nvidia's current top end card (the 295) and ATI's (the 5970) are both SLI/Crossfire. They both have dual GPUs, both have two sets of everything and both need full SLI/Xfire support to run. I can't see either company not supporting their flagships which will have a knock on effect for everything to do with SLI/Xfire, including support from game manus.

I know you're slow to adopt new technology dude (just something I have noted after the decade I have known you) but sooner or later just like XP and some other stuff you're going to be doing a Uturn I do see the sense in your stance (same with the SSD argument) but the usual actual fact is that these things really are all that. Speaking of SSD I know you have your reservations but seriously, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and swear to god I could never EVER go back now. It would be like having broadband and going back to dial up. Seriously, it really does make that much of a difference.

Your knowledge of physics is flaky at best, though.
What would you say to someone who said that they "don't see how two graphics cards sitting side by side can produce much faster frame rates than one" because it's a similar argument. If it does more work (e.g. better frame rates) then of course it's going to chuck out more heat unless there's a different architecture.

So if two things are exactly the same temperature sitting side by side they both get warmer?

A radiator gives off heat & warms a room. If you installed a second radiator in the same room would you not expect the room to warm faster than before?