Do I need CF for 1920x1200?

Killa|3yte

2[H]4U
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Dec 22, 2002
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I'm getting close to pulling the trigger on this system: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=12613154

Right now, my bottom line is $1,188. I'm thinking about going for 2x6950 instead of 1, but that pushes the bottom line a little past $1,500 (needs 1KW PSU in addition to the extra video card).

I'd like to play Crysis, Crysis 2, Rage, Battlefield 3 on high settings, and I'm wondering what you guys think of the value of the extra GPU?

Thanks!
 
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No. A single 6950 should be plenty for 1920x1200 for every game on the market today. Its only when you step up to multiple monitor gaming that you would need a second 6950.

BF3 is still a little of an unknown though. The GDC footage of single player gameplay was confirmed to be played on a single GTX580. I would assume that they used a gtx580 as overkill though to make sure they didn't have a single hiccup or frame rate decrease during the demo. I bet a single gtx470 or 6950 will be sufficient to max it out 4xAA 16xAF at 1920x1200 resolution.
 
Need to post a screenshot of the items in your cart in order for us to see it. We don't have access to your account.

1 6950 should be more than enough, especially if you unlock it to a 6970. Also, not really sure why you need to upgrade to a 1 kw power supply to add the extra card, a good 750 watt should provide more than enough power for most crossfire 6970 systems.
 
get the 2600k not the 2600. I would also suggest 8gb of ram instead of 4gb since ram pries are so low right now.
 
2600K is just unlocked, right? I wasn't planning on OCing the system. I'm getting 16GB ram.
 
get the 2600k not the 2600. I would also suggest 8gb of ram instead of 4gb since ram pries are so low right now.

Yeah if you want to OC at all, which SB chips are great for, do this, and get a good HSF.

Also the 8GB suggestion is worth considering since it is so cheap.
 
2600K is just unlocked, right? I wasn't planning on OCing the system. I'm getting 16GB ram.
oops didnt realize you had 4 of the 4gb kits selected. for just 13 bucks more it would be silly not to get the2600k. any monkey can oc sandy bridge because all you do is increase the multi. you can literally have 4.0 and probably even 4.2 without touching another setting besides the multi. of course you would want a better cooler but even for a stock 2600 i would recommend a better cooler.
 
Right now, my bottom line is $1,188. I'm thinking about going for 2x6950 instead of 1, but that pushes the bottom line a little past $1,500 (needs 1KW PSU in addition to the extra video card).
No it doesn't. You could run a pair of 6950s off a 650W unit easily.
 
Get the 2500 or 2500k. Why pay a 100usd more for a feature not used in gaming.
 
No it doesn't. You could run a pair of 6950s off a 650W unit easily.
please stop low balling the power consumptions in every thread. a 650 watt unit may be fine for stock 6950 crossfire and stock cpu but with overclocking it would be really pushed at times. its much better to have plenty of wiggle room than to be pushing a psu close to 85-90% at times. although a 1000 watt psu would not be necessary, a very high quality 750 or 850 watt psu would be better for a 6950 crossfire setup. I don't want to debate every possible scenario but its best to have plenty of wiggle room since most people keep their psus for 2 to 3 years or more.
 
Well, if you unlocked the 6950s to 6970 spec, clocked them further, and then clocked the CPU to the max then maybe you'd reach 85% load on the 650W unit. That would still be fine with me. People frequently overestimate how much power PCs actually use.
Mine for instance, which has a fairly sizeable overclock on the CPU, and runs two full 6970s, with +20% powertune only draws about 610-620W DC out of the unit in an OCCT stress test (one that includes stress-testing the CPU).
 
16Gb is conpletely useless for your use. 4Gb would be plenty, even 8Gb is overkill and most of it will go unused. The Cryengine hands you mention are probably the most memory intense games on that list and they won't use much over 2-3Gb on maxed out 1920x1080 settings.
 
Well, if you unlocked the 6950s to 6970 spec, clocked them further, and then clocked the CPU to the max then maybe you'd reach 85% load on the 650W unit. That would still be fine with me. People frequently overestimate how much power PCs actually use.
Mine for instance, which has a fairly sizeable overclock on the CPU, and runs two full 6970s, with +20% powertune only draws about 610-620W DC out of the unit in an OCCT stress test (one that includes stress-testing the CPU).
its better to have an extra 150 watts of wiggle room so the psu is never overly stressed and can last a few years and handle possible upgrades. my psu was clearly overkill for my system when I built it but it cost a miniscule amount of money more than a 450-500 watt unit when looking at the total build cost.
 
If you think you might upgrade in the future then yes you should consider a bigger PSU. Right now, with an overclocked quad core CPU, of the order of around 150W TDP, using a 650W with two 6950s gives you approximately 200W of wiggle room, which is ample.
 
Even for gaming I'd say go 8GB. It's absurdly cheap now so there's no reason not to, and 4GB is a bit cramped for some games nowadays, you have to start closing background applications. You shouldn't be making sacrifices like that with a new build.
 
Updated wishlist, added 2600K and a good cooler

Good, because seriously man, not overclocking at this stage in the game is irrational. It has become so simple and the benefits are very significant. Some boards even have a dummy overclock option which works just fine for many people who don't want to dive deeper into the tweeking. Just ask around here a bit and you'll have that build OC'ed in no time.
 
Even for gaming I'd say go 8GB. It's absurdly cheap now so there's no reason not to, and 4GB is a bit cramped for some games nowadays, you have to start closing background applications. You shouldn't be making sacrifices like that with a new build.

What are you talking about? I run all of todays games, the ones I play anyways maxed out and never run into any memory shortages. I've never even seen over 3Gb usage and that's windows 7 x64 and the game and all the other stuff like maybe winamp and chrome.
 
Crysis, Crysis Warhead, GTA4 and a couple of others all ran into trouble as I had 1MB free of memory and the page file usage started jumping enormously.
 
I'd save money on the CPU and go with 8GB RAM. Then, I'd add on an SSD or 2. There is no way I'd make a new build without making at least the system drive an SSD. Personally, I'd dump the Lian-li case for a cheaper make, too, but, whatever floats your boat I suppose.
 
Crysis, Crysis Warhead, GTA4 and a couple of others all ran into trouble as I had 1MB free of memory and the page file usage started jumping enormously.

Sam, you play MWLL right? Its run on the Cryengine2 gamesbut is even more demanding than Crysis or Warhead. I play it maxed out at 1920x1080 with 16xAA and everything just cranked and I never see more than 3Gb used. BFBC2 and other games don't even use that much but even then with 1Gb free memory your swap file shouldn't be going nuts.
 
What are you talking about? I run all of todays games, the ones I play anyways maxed out and never run into any memory shortages. I've never even seen over 3Gb usage and that's windows 7 x64 and the game and all the other stuff like maybe winamp and chrome.
with ram prices there is no reason not to get 8gb over 4gb for a gaming pc. and I have seen plenty of cases where all my ram is being used up and I have to hit the hard drive. not everybody wants to close down every application just to play a game for a few minutes. tomshardware even mentioned that for a high end gaming pc, 8gb should be the amount of ram to use. they got some artifacts in GTA 4 when only using 4gb of ram that were cleared up using using 8gb of ram.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-6.html

In a 64-bit system with a powerful graphics card, 8 GB of RAM really is a must if you're going to play demanding games. This is the case regardless of whether you're using 32-bit or 64-bit applications. However, even more than 8 GB of RAM can be subjectively noticed while playing. There is no real need for 16 GB of RAM, though. Going with 8 GB is quite enough unless you're running some taxing application in the background. We’ll comment more on this subject later, because the problem is often overestimated, as shown in our 64-bit gaming benchmarks.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-9.html

Based on our measurements and impressions (and taking falling prices into account), we thoroughly recommend a minimum RAM size of 8 GB. Using 12 or 16 GB only makes sense if you're planning on using 4 GB of more of this higher amount as a RAM disk, helping accelerate the reading and writing of temporary files. This applies equally to file compression, video encoding, and heavy image editing.

Other than this, you might want more RAM so the graphics card can allocate more system memory for its own use. We saw this pay dividends in GTA IV, for example. You won't see an overwhelming performance increase unless you're using very memory-hungry programs, but you will get a system with enough RAM for the foreseeable future.
 
Sam, you play MWLL right? Its run on the Cryengine2 gamesbut is even more demanding than Crysis or Warhead. I play it maxed out at 1920x1080 with 16xAA and everything just cranked and I never see more than 3Gb used. BFBC2 and other games don't even use that much but even then with 1Gb free memory your swap file shouldn't be going nuts.

I'd never even heard of it until you mentioned it just now. This is vanilla crysis/warhead. With 8GB in the system I measure memory usage in games of between 4.5 and 6.5GB.
 
with ram prices there is no reason not to get 8gb over 4gb for a gaming pc. and I have seen plenty of cases where all my ram is being used up and I have to hit the hard drive. not everybody wants to close down every application just to play a game for a few minutes. tomshardware even mentioned that for a high end gaming pc, 8gb should be the amount of ram to use. they got some artifacts in GTA 4 when only using 4gb of ram that were cleared up using using 8gb of ram.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-6.html

In a 64-bit system with a powerful graphics card, 8 GB of RAM really is a must if you're going to play demanding games. This is the case regardless of whether you're using 32-bit or 64-bit applications. However, even more than 8 GB of RAM can be subjectively noticed while playing. There is no real need for 16 GB of RAM, though. Going with 8 GB is quite enough unless you're running some taxing application in the background. We’ll comment more on this subject later, because the problem is often overestimated, as shown in our 64-bit gaming benchmarks.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-9.html

Based on our measurements and impressions (and taking falling prices into account), we thoroughly recommend a minimum RAM size of 8 GB. Using 12 or 16 GB only makes sense if you're planning on using 4 GB of more of this higher amount as a RAM disk, helping accelerate the reading and writing of temporary files. This applies equally to file compression, video encoding, and heavy image editing.

Other than this, you might want more RAM so the graphics card can allocate more system memory for its own use. We saw this pay dividends in GTA IV, for example. You won't see an overwhelming performance increase unless you're using very memory-hungry programs, but you will get a system with enough RAM for the foreseeable future.

Useless second hand information. Ramen noodles are cheap, I rarely eat them. Does that mean I would go buy 8 cases instead of 4? No. 8Gb is fine....I'm not saying its not able to be used, I'm saying for a gaming pc there aren't any games out there I know of that even use 4Gb fully. I can say my experience has been that I have never not even once seen a situation where I needed over 4Gb of ram. My system never gets maxed out as it is. The op stated he has other plans other than gaming though. So maybe he needs it for his use, which up until that post was just gaming, which doesn't need 8Gb of ram.

I'd never even heard of it until you mentioned it just now. This is vanilla crysis/warhead. With 8GB in the system I measure memory usage in games of between 4.5 and 6.5GB.

How are you measuring? How can this be? I'm running the MWLL mod which makes vanilla Warhead look like childsplay, wide open, never exceeds 3Gb and that's total system memory being used, not just the game.
 
Useless second hand information. Ramen noodles are cheap, I rarely eat them. Does that mean I would go buy 8 cases instead of 4? No. 8Gb is fine....I'm not saying its not able to be used, I'm saying for a gaming pc there aren't any games out there I know of that even use 4Gb fully. I can say my experience has been that I have never not even once seen a situation where I needed over 4Gb of ram. My system never gets maxed out as it is. The op stated he has other plans other than gaming though. So maybe he needs it for his use, which up until that post was just gaming, which doesn't need 8Gb of ram.



How are you measuring? How can this be? I'm running the MWLL mod which makes vanilla Warhead look like childsplay, wide open, never exceeds 3Gb and that's total system memory being used, not just the game.
why don't you actually read the article instead of arguing? for those using high end cards it can help in demanding games. is it 100% necessary? no but when building a high end gaming pc from scratch it makes sense. just like the 2gb vs 4gb argument two years ago when building a comp.
 
I'm all for the RAM discussion happening, but like cannondale06 said, I have other uses for this machine that will definitely utilize all 16GB of RAM.
 
How are you measuring? How can this be? I'm running the MWLL mod which makes vanilla Warhead look like childsplay, wide open, never exceeds 3Gb and that's total system memory being used, not just the game.
Pertelian X2040 system stats plugin, and Windows 7 resource monitor.
 
i wouldn't say so. i plan on putting a 6950 to 6970 in my server later this year at the end when new video cards are out and it will be enough for a long time for 1920x1080 :). the other i will give to my friend as a wedding present since he games at 1080p ;).
 
LOL @ the people arguing for 4GB of RAM instead of 8GB while the OP is getting 16GB.
 
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