AMD Radeon 6990+6970 CrossFireX / "TriFire" Review @ [H]

DASHlT said:
I don't see why not. My antec Signature Series 850w is having no issues running Tri-fire
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Great! Can you tell me your temps? My GTX 580's were supposed to run cool but it runs pretty hot. I'm thinking of returning them for a tri-fire set up. How does BF3 play for you if you have it?
 
refraxion said:
Great! Can you tell me your temps? My GTX 580's were supposed to run cool but it runs pretty hot. I'm thinking of returning them for a tri-fire set up. How does BF3 play for you if you have it?
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After playing 3 hours of BF3, My 6990's would stay around 76c, and the 6970 would stay around 71c.
 
refraxion said:
Do you have them sandwiched close together? or slot 1 and slot 3?
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Naw there is a space between them.

If you sandwitched them together, you could easily see 90-95c temps.

you need to make sure doing tri-fire that you have alot of airflow and a good distance between them.
 
So if I put it in slot 1 and 2, it's fine. Is that how you have it? It seems pretty close to touching would it not? Haha sorry for all the questions!
 
refraxion said:
So if I put it in slot 1 and 2, it's fine. Is that how you have it? It seems pretty close to touching would it not? Haha sorry for all the questions!
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Yap, Cause if you look at it now, there is a space when you put the 2 cards in xfire.

Something to think about, The 6990 will probably be a about the same temp as a 580 gtx (maybe hotter in some instances)

Then add in another 6970, you better have some good cooling in that case.

But the thing is, The 6990+6970 use as much power as 2x580gtx. So not only will you be pushing the same power, but you will get more performance, and have 2gb vram per GPU
 
I like how just when we get to the point of being able to max stuff out on our displays, we come up with triple monitors to kick our own asses! Now maximum quality at 60 fps is impossible again! I wonder if it will be feasible in the next generation of cards. I hope a Radeon 7900 or GTX 600 configuration will be able to get us high fps at triple monitor resolution. My aging 5970 is just plain not good enough on its own.

edit: I sound ungrateful. The 5970 does handle Source engine games at highest quality at 5760x1080 just great. I meant DX11 titles and other junk.
 
Well yeah, the source engine is pretty much bottom of the pack for hardware demand these days. In a list of 103 recent games, from most demanding to least demanding, Portal 2 ranks #101. Only the new Driver title and James Bond game sit lower (and even then, only just). As it stands now, with increasing stagnation of hardware advances and continuing trend of games becoming more demanding, I think it's going to be long time before anything available at the time would be sufficient to run every game at a 3-monitor resolution. Even in an unlikely best case scenario (80% increase over the HD6970 - it's more likely to be 40-50), four HD7970s with perfect scaling would still not be enough to max out Lost Planet 2, The Witcher 2 or Metro 2033 at 5760x1080, let alone higher resolutions, and this is an unlikely two-fold best-case scenario, 6 months from now. By that time some more demanding games might possibly appear. We're only aiming for 60fps here, nothing enormous.
 
refraxion said:
So if I put it in slot 1 and 2, it's fine. Is that how you have it? It seems pretty close to touching would it not? Haha sorry for all the questions!
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Just rememer if your going the SB route, which I have, the 6990 goes in the top as it's 16x and the 6970 in the 2nd slot for 8x... SB only accepts 8x8 when in x-fire... so that's what it will run at. GPU-Z will say 8x for all the GPU's, if you check Catalyst it will also say they are all running at 8x

Needless to say, I tried the 6990 on it's own in Eyefinity and I lost about 20-30fps without the 6970.

As DASHIT say's, make sure you have decent cooling!

My gpu1 runs around 70-80C depending on load, whilst the 6970 is at around 65, with gpu2 on the 6990 running at about the same.

I'm thinking a water block if the 7xxx series doesn't deliver though, so I can get these bad boys past 1k core clock :D
 
Unless you have an nforce 200 board - they're not strictly necessary but they do allow 16+16 with Sandy Bridge CPUs. The rule still stands though, because if you're using a 6990 and 6970, you want the longest cooler at the top for the best cooling potential (and reduced noise).
 
samuelmorris said:
Unless you have an nforce 200 board - they're not strictly necessary but they do allow 16+16 with Sandy Bridge CPUs. The rule still stands though, because if you're using a 6990 and 6970, you want the longest cooler at the top for the best cooling potential (and reduced noise).
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Dude, SB only has two 8x8 lanes to it in x-fire and SLI regardless, SB-E is a different story.

p67-block-diagram.png
 
samuelmorris said:
You don't type using your mouth.... <shrugs>
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There are no boards that can do 16x/16x, because the Sandy Bridge CPUs only have 16 PCI-e lanes. Some boards fake it by using a PCI-e bridge, which allows the manufacturer to claim the board is 16x/16x when it actually performs like an 8x/8x setup.

Quote upon quote!
 
samuelmorris said:
Then how dis happen?
image004.png
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Is that a Sandy Bridge chip? I think not...

X58 sets support 1366 pin chip am I correct? that would make it Gen1 for the i7? which does support 16x16.

If you read correctly I am distinctly talking about Sandy Bridge's pci-e lane setup. As he wanted to go down that route.
 
Subsequently all P55 1156 chips support 16x16, it's up to the chipset to provide that support.
 
You try putting an LGA1366 chip in a P55 board and see what happens. Why do you think the X58 test is there? For a comparison. Know what a comparison is?
Wait, why am I even wasting my time with this? I'd have better luck training a chimp.
 
samuelmorris said:
You try putting an LGA1366 chip in a P55 board and see what happens. Why do you think the X58 test is there? For a comparison. Know what a comparison is?
Wait, why am I even wasting my time with this? I'd have better luck training a chimp.
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Why they hell would I put an 1366 in a P55 board? that is strictly for 1156 correct?

You anger towards me tonight I believe has skewerd your head, please get back to the task at hand of helping the guy out, instead of blowing your frustration towards me.

Get laid much? I think you may need it.
 
There's no anger here, just merriment. It's light comedic relief to watch people like you wriggle around. Just a bit of housekeeping really, keeping the place clean and tidy in case anyone else catches braindeath. It's contagious right?

I'll spell it out in simple terms.
1. both P55 and P67 chipsets have had boards manufactured that contain the nforce 200 chip.
2. both P55 and P67 chipsets are 16x maximum bandwidth by default (8/8)
3. The X58 chipset is a 32x maximum bandwidth setup (16/16)
4. This means the P55 and P67 boards stand to gain from using the nforce 200, which doubles the number of PCI express lanes they have.
5. To assess what sort of difference this makes, we compare the P55 boards without nforce 200, the P55 boards with nforce 200, and an X58 board that has 32 proper lanes, to see how well nforce 200 fares.
6. As the graph shows - for two cards (where the difference between 8x and 16x is minimal) the nforce 200 doesn't do much.
7. As the graph also shows, once we use three cards, where slots on P55 and P67 drop to 4x, the gains are substantial - 80% in one instance.
8. Thus, the following statement is false:
you said:
Dude, SB only has two 8x8 lanes to it in x-fire and SLI regardless
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9. The following statement is also false:
you said:
There are no boards that can do 16x/16x, because the Sandy Bridge CPUs only have 16 PCI-e lanes. Some boards fake it by using a PCI-e bridge, which allows the manufacturer to claim the board is 16x/16x when it actually performs like an 8x/8x setup.
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10. Since statement 3 is true, this statement is false:
you said:
Subsequently all P55 1156 chips support 16x16, it's up to the chipset to provide that support.
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Ah you see, this is the really clever bit, pay attention now...

The official Intel specification for P55 and P67 is a maximum of 8+8 PCI express lanes. However, the use of an nforce 200 chip is an additional piece of hardware that goes beyond Intel's specifications. The use of this chip allows an additional 16 lanes of PCI express bandwidth to be offered to the slots on the motherboard. Since 16+16 = 32, the use of this chip means that P55 and P67 boards that use it, have the same amount of bandwidth available to them as X58 boards do now, and X79 boards will do when released.
 
mantic69 said:
There are no boards that can do 16x/16x, because the Sandy Bridge CPUs only have 16 PCI-e lanes. Some boards fake it by using a PCI-e bridge, which allows the manufacturer to claim the board is 16x/16x when it actually performs like an 8x/8x setup.

Quote upon quote!
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Are you really that stupid?
 
You're quoting yourself now? Wow, even I wasn't expecting to get you to end up talking to yourself. This should be fun to watch...
 
mantic69 said:
There are no boards that can do 16x/16x, because the Sandy Bridge CPUs only have 16 PCI-e lanes. Some boards fake it by using a PCI-e bridge, which allows the manufacturer to claim the board is 16x/16x when it actually performs like an 8x/8x setup.

Quote upon quote!
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Why do you think they are releasing SB-E? to give more lanes, christ almighty, where on earth are you pulling a forced chip bridge of 16+16 that is actually 16x16? A SB will only accept a maximum of 16x PCI-E from graphics...

You show me a benchmark and proof that has a SB running at 16x16, I don't care about 1156 or 1366 as they are driven by chipset only.
 
mantic69 said:
Why do you think they are releasing SB-E? to give more lanes, christ almighty, where on earth are you pulling a forced chip bridge of 16+16 that is actually 16x16? A SB will only accept a maximum of 16x PCI-E from graphics...

You show me a benchmark and proof that has a SB running at 16x16, I don't care about 1156 or 1366 as they are driven by chipset only.
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If you wanted to be perverse, it's so Intel can sell you those extra lanes, rather than nvidia.
The real reason for Sandy Bridge E is so Intel can release a 6-core processor based on the Sandy Bridge design, which they have not yet done, and so that they can use PCI express 3, which even the nforce 200 can't deliver.

It amazes me that a piece of technology thousands of people have been using for several years, you still don't even believe exists. Just shows you doesn't it, some people really are that retarded.

mantic69 said:
I don't care about 1156 or 1366 as they are driven by chipset only.
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Shame that's false, eh?
 
The nforce 200 works by multiplexing the lanes. There is still only a 16x feed to the CPU - that cannot change. What the nforce 200 does is take some of these 16 lanes, and then multiplex them, which allows a higher rate of bandwidth for the GPUs to communicate with the controller.
What this does, is allow the cards to communicate with themselves at full speed. This is all that's needed most of the time with crossfire/SLI, because they aren't being fed any more data, they're just rendering the scene three times over. When you use crossfire and SLI you don't actually need any more bandwidth to the CPU, all you need is bandwidth for the cards to communicate with each other. The nforce 200 provides this, and as a result negates the problem of not having enough bandwidth to the CPU. As the benchmarks show, it isn't perfect, but it does go a long way to fix the problem.
 
samuelmorris said:
The nforce 200 works by multiplexing the lanes. There is still only a 16x feed to the CPU - that cannot change. What the nforce 200 does is take some of these 16 lanes, and then multiplex them, which allows a higher rate of bandwidth for the GPUs to communicate with the controller.
What this does, is allow the cards to communicate with themselves at full speed. This is all that's needed most of the time with crossfire/SLI, because they aren't being fed any more data, they're just rendering the scene three times over. When you use crossfire and SLI you don't actually need any more bandwidth to the CPU, all you need is bandwidth for the cards to communicate with each other. The nforce 200 provides this, and as a result negates the problem of not having enough bandwidth to the CPU. As the benchmarks show, it isn't perfect, but it does go a long way to fix the problem.
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You change your story like you change your undies... First you say there isn't a limit on the chip, now you say there is. I said this from the bloody start!

All NF200 does is allow triple cards to run...

I have 6990+6970 and it forces 8x8x8 all it is, is a hack, NF200 again only allows this but in triple card setup... your still banked by the 1x16 pci-e lane, hence why I said SB-E will get rid of that limitation.

I think you like to fight for the sake of filling up time.

Good day to you sir!
 
If by 'fighting' you mean 'correcting false information' then it seems like the right thing to do. Can't have noobies wandering around spreading lies now can we? Sometimes when you encounter noobies that really have no idea what they're talking about, if the discussion goes on long enough what tends to happen is they realise they're in the wrong. What happens then is they look for an escape route, to try and justify everything that they've said over the last few messages/pages/closed threads. There are a few methods by which they do this, and one of them is the 'changed story' method. Put simply, this relies on the confusion/ignorance/lack of care of any of the other forum visitors not following the conversation, and states that the case put forward by the experienced member has changed. Because the noobie has realised they are in the wrong, they pursue a different line of argument, and because of this, the illusion can be created that it is the experienced member who has changed their position, and not the noobie who is causing the discussion in the first place. It can fool a fair few visitors because of the confusion or lack of interest generated by the previous argument, so it can sometimes be a reasonably effective strategy for getting support on the noobie's side. Ultimately, however, it usually fails as the noobie will rarely have either the knowledge, experience and/or intelligence to make a well-reasoned case under this false pretense.
 
Mantic is right, its impossible to have 2x 16X on SB even with the NF200, you can't make additional artificial 16X lane, no matter what, not if the cpu don't meet the requirments.
 
I don't recall ever saying that -
me said:
some of these 16 lanes
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- usually I believe it's 8 of them, so you get an 8x master slot, and an 8x secondary slot - which becomes multiple 8x secondary slots, with a single 8x feed to the CPU. Hence why the nforce 200 never quite matches up to the performance of a true 16+16 chipset.
 
psyside said:
Mantic is right, its impossible to have 2x 16X on SB even with the NF200, you can't make additional artificial 16X lane, no matter what, not if the cpu don't meet the requirments.
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Easy way to check it - have someone with SLI on a NF200 check GPU-z and see what the cards think they are running at - and I'm guessing that both cards are going to report they are running at PCIe 2.0 x16 (even though it is only x16 to the NF200, not to the CPU).
 
Only page one of this review loads for me...the rest are offline. Do other folks encounter the same problem?
 
All of HardOCP's articles have been dodgy for the last few weeks, they seem to have some server issues.
 
Ahh, okay. I am curious to read the conclusion, and to know if trifire is still a superb option for running games across 3 monitors (5760 or 7680 horizontal res)
 
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