• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Upgrading Recommendations

T

ThePro

n00b
Joined
Dec 5, 2010
Messages
2
Hi all. New here. I have visited the forums a couple of times throughout the last couple of years, but I never actually registered until today.

I had to upgrade my GPU recently (about 1-2 months ago) cause my old one 'died'. I went from a 280GTX to a 480GTX. I was able to get another one for 'free' recently so I now have 2 EVGA 480 GTX in SLI (first time doing SLI).

These are the rest of my specs (they are kind of old since its a build from late 2007) ...

EVGA 680i SLI mobo
Intel Core 2 Extreme Q6850 @3.67 (stock is 3.0; I OC just a few weeks ago after I did the SLI)
Corsiar 4GB 2x2GB DDR2 800MHz (my current mobo doesnt support DDR3)
Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB
CoolerMaster Haf-X (got it a few weeks ago as well)

I'm getting good peformance in most games (unless it's a poorly optimized game to begin with GTA4/BlackOps2/etc), but I'm sure I have a bit/huge? bottleneck cause of my old hardware. I'm definitely getting a new mobo/cpu/ram in the next few months cause I'm eager to see what the SLI setup can really do with newer hardware to match. I notice my card barely hit 50-60 usage in most games (like Crysis), but I'm not sure if it's the game, drivers or my old hardware (bottleneck). In BlackOps I'm getting 60-90+ fps in MP which is good, but GPU ussage is around 25-33. In SP it hits 25-30fps sometimes, but I'm pretty sure thats the game cause many ppl are having the same issues; the game is poorly optimized.

I was thinking of something like this ...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...3188069&cm_re=evga_x58-_-13-188-069-_-Product (EVGA 141-GT-E770-A1 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Extended ATX Intel Motherboard)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115211&cm_re=i7-_-19-115-211-_-Product (Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor BX80601950)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m_re=corsair_dominator-_-20-145-289-_-Product (CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMP6GX3M3A1600C7)

First of all. What do you think of my current setup? Don't know much about bottlenecks, do I have a huge bottlneck in my system? Should I be getting alot more out of SLI setup with newer hardware?

Do you think I should take the plunge now or wait for the new "Sandy Bridge"? (I'm really itching to see what a newer cpu/mobo and faster DDR3 RAM and do) Is the i7 950 enought for those 2 cards in SLI? Would love a 980, but its just way to expensive IMO and most games dont even use the full power of 4 cores (so why bother with 6?) at the moment.

Thank you.

PS: I run all games at 1920x1200 (Native).
 
Last edited:
I think that you will not be seeing many games max out your GPUs at 1920x1200. And according to this, there will be no penalty at all from running SLI on a Sandy Bridge platform.

So your choice comes down to: do you want/need to upgrade to a 6 core CPU down the road? Do you benefit from that 3rd channel of RAM? If not, waiting a month (even just to see how SB pans out) sounds like the best option. You'd probably end up saving 50-100 dollars on an equally high end motherboard, too.
 
You will not get bottlenecked by an i7. Also, if you are only looking for performance and not for show, you could get a cheaper set of 6gb ram! Ram speeds/latency have been shown to have less than 1% performance difference, besides ram benchmarks
 
Thanks for the replies.What do you think of my current system? Is the old hardware (mobo, cpu, ram) a bottlneck for the sli cards?
 
At 3.6 the bottleneck shouldn't be too bad, but if you can go higher it will only improve things. Black Ops isn't optimized well so that's why you're not getting that much GPU usage.
 
A Core 2 Quad at 3.6GHz really shouldn't be much of a bottleneck at all.
 
And "bottleneck" doesn't mean bad performance either. Again, at 3.6GHz, it should be pretty close to the top of that list.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top