video card choices....go SLI and comprimise cpu performance, or forget sli.....

Leright

2[H]4U
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May 24, 2002
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and get a faster proc? I am having trouble determining what will make my money go the farthest...


Which config would suit me better?

config 1:
athlon 64 3700+ (or opteron equivalent)
dual geforce 7800gtx 256 meg cards.
asus a8n32-sli
2 gigs pc3200 corsair xms


config 2:
athlon 64 X2 4400+ (or opteron 175 quivalent)
single geforce 7800gtx 256 meg card
asus a8n32-sli
2 gigs pc3200 corsair xms

With config one I will already be over budget 103 bucks, but it looks tempting.


I would certainly like a 7800gtx 512 meg card, but I don't see this happening anytime soon. Even if it were out, I wouldn't want t odrop that much on the video card alone.

I have all of the other parts ordered.
 
JJU357 said:
why not a x2 3800+ or a opteron 165 and 2 7800GTs?

well, I suppose I could get dual geforce 7800gts, an opteron 175 and the a8n32-sli. Where would twin 7800gts fit in with twin gtxs (256 meg) and a single gtx. Is it much faster than a single 7800 gtx?

I'd rather go with the single gtx and leave the second slot free, in case I want to add a second gtx in the near future. If I got the two gts then I wouldn't be able to add a second card later.
 
A pair of 7800GTs is still a fair bit faster than a GTX512, to answer your question simply. The difference between GT-SLI and GTX-SLI is almost unnoticeable, since your processor will create a bottleneck long before your video cards reach anywhere near their full potential.

I'm seconding the suggestion to get an Opteron 17x and 2x7800GT.
 
Go with the X2, and buy another 7800 GTX when the price goes down. Easier to put in another video card than switch processors.
 
mavalpha said:
A pair of 7800GTs is still a fair bit faster than a GTX512, to answer your question simply. The difference between GT-SLI and GTX-SLI is almost unnoticeable, since your processor will create a bottleneck long before your video cards reach anywhere near their full potential.

I'm seconding the suggestion to get an Opteron 17x and 2x7800GT.

great. thanks a lot. I will look into it. I didn't think the SLI'd gts outperformed a 512 meg gtx. interesting. Do you know of any reviews that compare the sli gt to the 512 meg and sli gtx?
 
ok, for the mobo, proc and video card, I am thinking the asus a8n-sli premium (not the a8n32-sli, to save a few bucks...) twin 7800 gts, and an opteron 175 (2.2 ghz dual core).

Or do you think I should spend the 65 more bucks for the a8n32-sli mobo? Is the a8n32 worth the extra money?
 
also, another concern is I am only going to be running a 480 watt antec neopower, which worries me. This makes me think I should just go with a single card. I am going to be running one hdd and one optical drive.
 
The A8N32-sLi solution will certainly future proof you. It's probably a wise decision, as it'll be the "new" sli standard.

With the money you save, you should be able to buy a decent Powersupply (thermaltake) for cheap. Thermaltakes tend to be cheaper, but reliable. Same with coolermaster.
 
Genem said:
The A8N32-sLi solution will certainly future proof you. It's probably a wise decision, as it'll be the "new" sli standard.

With the money you save, you should be able to buy a decent Powersupply (thermaltake) for cheap. Thermaltakes tend to be cheaper, but reliable. Same with coolermaster.

I already ordered the 480 watt neopower. IT should be delivered tomorrow. Would I be ok in SLI mode with that psu?
 
Genem said:
With the money you save, you should be able to buy a decent Powersupply (thermaltake) for cheap. Thermaltakes tend to be cheaper, but reliable. Same with coolermaster.
BWAHAHAHAHAAHAH

that seriously almost made me spit up my cereal. Tt's current supplies are shit, espcially for running a rig like that.

OP: my 480Neo ran 6800GT SLI without a single hitch on an X2 with 1.5v at 2.4ghz. monitoring with a voltmeter, it just about never strays from 12.08v and 5.09v.
 
lithium726 said:
BWAHAHAHAHAAHAH

that seriously almost made me spit up my cereal. Tt's current supplies are shit, espcially for running a rig like that.

OP: my 480Neo ran 6800GT SLI without a single hitch on an X2 with 1.5v at 2.4ghz. monitoring with a voltmeter, it just about never strays from 12.08v and 5.09v.

and the 7800gts consume less power than the 6800gtx, right?
 
Leright said:
and the 7800gts consume less power than the 6800gtx, right?
than the GT, yes. no such thing as the 6800GTX :p

you have nothing to worry about.

*EDITS*

im also running the SLI-Premium. terrific board. This is actually the first time ive been happy with my comptuer since i left my Barton rig behind..

BTW, if youre getting 7800GT's, get the EVGA 256-p2-516 at newegg. have one personally, awesome card. plenty fast at stock speeds (mine came at 470/1200 due to a bios mixup on EVGA's part) and has a pretty beefy stock cooler, its the CO version :)
 
Genem said:
The A8N32-sLi solution will certainly future proof you. It's probably a wise decision, as it'll be the "new" sli standard.

With the money you save, you should be able to buy a decent Powersupply (thermaltake) for cheap. Thermaltakes tend to be cheaper, but reliable. Same with coolermaster.

Or you could save even more money and go with a nice Chiefmax PSU. The site below has a decent deal on a good 550 watt supply.

http://www.pcdirect.com//product.asp?Sku=550WCHIEF-24P

I honstly don't understand the whole obsession with power supply brands. Either it supplies power or it doesn't as I see it. Put your money where it makes a difference IMHO and foget all the PSU trolls.

I saved money on my PSU and got a nice deal on a sub $10 Aspire PSU. With the extra money I was able to get a nice X2 4400 and two sticks of 1GB OCZ Platinum DDR500. Just my $.02.
 
Hvatum said:
I saved money on my PSU and got a nice deal on a sub $10 Aspire PSU. With the extra money I was able to get a nice X2 4400 and two sticks of 1GB OCZ Platinum DDR500. Just my $.02.
do me a favor and hook up a DMM to that and tell me how much your voltages are fluctuating.

i do hope you are still happy with the system when it blows up due to dirty power.
 
lithium726 said:
do me a favor and hook up a DMM to that and tell me how much your voltages are fluctuating.

i do hope you are still happy with the system when it blows up due to dirty power.

I've had it for a month and it's still going strong. If the PSU does actually blow up then I'll just RMA it and get a new one.

Only one time have I had a problem with one of my cheap power supplies. It was a steaming hot day and my system was running over at my friend's house who sadly didn't have any AC. I slowly began to smell acrid burnt smell but my computer was running fine. I figured I'd let it keep running and checked all of my components - sure enough the fan on the power supply was dead.

I immediatly shut down the machine and removed the PSU for inspection. It was some generic chinese brand which I'd taken from an old beige-box PC. A few of the capacitors and the like looked a bit bent over and charred but everything was otherwise fine. I soldered in a new fan and booted the thing back up. Right now amusingly enough that PSU is running in my Linux router and hasn't had a single problem since then.

If I ever actually get a serious PSU failure then I'll put some stock in all of these fancy PSUs but until then I'll save my money. :D
 
youre playing with fire, man.


i had a Tt PSU surge the 5v and take my motherboard with it.
 
you didn't tell us what native resolution you plan to game at.

without that info, can't give you a real videocard recommendation, imho.
 
Hvatum said:
I've had it for a month and it's still going strong. If the PSU does actually blow up then I'll just RMA it and get a new one.

RMAing a PSU doesnt replace your motherboard, and possible fried videocard.. And about your chinese psu thats running your linux router, Im not to sure that would even make the crappiest of crappy PSUs flux in their voltage, with the system hes going to be running, you need clean power, otherwise it'll increase the possibility of a surge or a bad flux and yada yada.. Sure, sometimes your lucky and its just the PSU that fries (my generic PSU that came with my case blew it self, luckily nothing else went), but other times you arent as lucky. And really, you dont replace a power supply with every new system.. or at least I dont. But a beefy PSU, sure, you may not need that much power AT THIS moment, but you will down the road, thus saving a couple bucks.
 
eastvillager said:
you didn't tell us what native resolution you plan to game at.

without that info, can't give you a real videocard recommendation, imho.

I use a CRT, so I won't be confined to a native resolution, but I hope to be able to run at 1920x1200.
 
lithium726 said:
BWAHAHAHAHAAHAH

that seriously almost made me spit up my cereal. Tt's current supplies are shit, espcially for running a rig like that.

OP: my 480Neo ran 6800GT SLI without a single hitch on an X2 with 1.5v at 2.4ghz. monitoring with a voltmeter, it just about never strays from 12.08v and 5.09v.
Meh, running fine with a purepower 500 Watt. It was handling two 6800 GT's fine in SLi with my A64 3200+. Not sure how much more of a strain the 7 series video cards have though.
 
Hvatum said:
I honstly don't understand the whole obsession with power supply brands. Either it supplies power or it doesn't as I see it. Put your money where it makes a difference IMHO and foget all the PSU trolls.

"7800? Why would I want that? See, this card has a higher number: 9600. It must be better!"

Congrats on not knowing what the hell you're talking about. Saying a PSU just "supplies power" is like saying a fuel injector just "supplies fuel". Thing is, if that fuel injector decides to throw way too much, or too little fuel, or flux between the two, you're gonna have some major troubles.*

I used to think like you. "A PSU is a PSU, if its $120 or $12! They're just trying to rip me off." Then my cheap no-name PSU *exploded* and took my mobo with it, as well as seriously damaging my CPU (It was a 2700+ that wouldn't run above 1.3GHz). Guess what? I learned something. Too bad those guys at a LAN I went too didn't learn that. Oh well, their PSUs (all three of them) made great smoke machines. :)


*NOTE: I don't know too much about cars. This is just a guess from what I've heard from gear heads and what not.
 
I don't know about eh a8n32...my a8nsli premium is fantastic...and its cheaper. The dual x16 is cool but I don't know if its worth it. And my 7800GT SLI beatsjust about all the single GTX card benchies...i don't have any idea on how much seeing as i have lost the numbers i wrote down but lets not forget its also cool to have SLI =)
 
You guys are welcome to talk about power supplies in the power supply forum. I suggest that you guys make an effort to keep the discussion on topic.
 
DougLite said:
You guys are welcome to talk about power supplies in the power supply forum. I suggest that you guys make an effort to keep the discussion on topic.

well, it is sorta on topic. It involves the discussion of whether my psu will run twin gts in sli.
 
i just upgraded to 2 7800s from 2 6800s and had the choice of either 1 512gtx, or 2 gt's. The 2 gt's actually made more sense to me. It plays at a slightly higher framerate, and when I need to upgrade next gen, I figure I will sell both 7800s independently and get more money for the GT's as I would a single GTX. The 7800gtx will become obsolete pretty close to the time a GT will. More people will buy the GT as opposed to the GTX. my .02
 
terminator02 said:
i just upgraded to 2 7800s from 2 6800s and had the choice of either 1 512gtx, or 2 gt's. The 2 gt's actually made more sense to me. It plays at a slightly higher framerate, and when I need to upgrade next gen, I figure I will sell both 7800s independently and get more money for the GT's as I would a single GTX. The 7800gtx will become obsolete pretty close to the time a GT will. More people will buy the GT as opposed to the GTX. my .02

good point. I will go with twin gts. Thanks.


btw, I bought my a8n32-sli today. Now I just need my video cards and proc. As of now, I will have around 410 dollars for the processor, after buying the dual 7800gts....That's kinda tight.
 
Leright said:
great. thanks a lot. I will look into it. I didn't think the SLI'd gts outperformed a 512 meg gtx. interesting. Do you know of any reviews that compare the sli gt to the 512 meg and sli gtx?

512 GTX is almost equal to GT SLI, as I've heard. The [H] review compares it, as I'm sure almost every review does.

I'd get a single 512mb and a opty 165 (or 170 or whatever one you want, that's not the important part). Just because it seems cooler to have a 512mb than plain old GTs. And there's not much performance or price difference. Also, in more recent games where you need 512mb, it will greatly outperform 256mb GT SLI.

O, and you won't be able to get the cpu to be a bottleneck, especially dual core. In recent games, the graphics card is just about always the bottleneck, no matter what it is.
 
Russ said:
512 GTX is almost equal to GT SLI, as I've heard. The [H] review compares it, as I'm sure almost every review does.

I'd get a single 512mb and a opty 165 (or 170 or whatever one you want, that's not the important part). Just because it seems cooler to have a 512mb than plain old GTs. And there's not much performance or price difference. Also, in more recent games where you need 512mb, it will greatly outperform 256mb GT SLI.

O, and you won't be able to get the cpu to be a bottleneck, especially dual core. In recent games, the graphics card is just about always the bottleneck, no matter what it is.

I want to order this within 2 weeks, and I don't think I will be able to find a 512 meg card in 2 weeks.
 
Hm, my dual 7800gts from evga seemed to beat the 512MB Gtxes on all benchmarks by a decent margin. 3dmark05 for me at slightly above stock (455/1100 versus stock of 445/1070) is 13050 while for the single 512MB, about 10500...Don't have the other benchies off the top of my head...but the differences are noticeable.
So, get the dual 7800gts..it should last you a while.
I don't know about the A8N32 SLI though as from what I have read, the current video cards are not able to utilize the 16X PCI speeds off the SLI slots when the cards are in SLI...Actually, they barely use up the 8X currently on the A8N SLI. The newer Asus is only future proof if one day you decide to stay with the non M2 CPUs...if you upgrade in a year or two, newer video cards will be out and newer motherboards will be out to fully utilize those vid cards and the M2 processors.
So, to me, it really is not worth it.
As for PS, with dual 7800s, get a decent PS for sure...the wattage is not as important as what are coming out of the rails (12V rails).
CPU wise, get an opty 170 and overclock it...Just remember though, Asus makes good and stable motherboards but they don't overclock as well as the Abit or DFI. I had an Asus A8N-SLI and although it was stable, whatever chip I threw at it (no matter how good the core was), it would constantly overclock around 100Mhz lower than what I discovered the DFI could do.
 
magnuspah said:
Hm, my dual 7800gts from evga seemed to beat the 512MB Gtxes on all benchmarks by a decent margin. 3dmark05 for me at slightly above stock (455/1100 versus stock of 445/1070) is 13050 while for the single 512MB, about 10500...Don't have the other benchies off the top of my head...but the differences are noticeable.
So, get the dual 7800gts..it should last you a while.
I don't know about the A8N32 SLI though as from what I have read, the current video cards are not able to utilize the 16X PCI speeds off the SLI slots when the cards are in SLI...Actually, they barely use up the 8X currently on the A8N SLI. The newer Asus is only future proof if one day you decide to stay with the non M2 CPUs...if you upgrade in a year or two, newer video cards will be out and newer motherboards will be out to fully utilize those vid cards and the M2 processors.
So, to me, it really is not worth it.
As for PS, with dual 7800s, get a decent PS for sure...the wattage is not as important as what are coming out of the rails (12V rails).
CPU wise, get an opty 170 and overclock it...Just remember though, Asus makes good and stable motherboards but they don't overclock as well as the Abit or DFI. I had an Asus A8N-SLI and although it was stable, whatever chip I threw at it (no matter how good the core was), it would constantly overclock around 100Mhz lower than what I discovered the DFI could do.

The A8n32-sli is the best ocing 939 board out there...does better than the DFI lanparty boards.

And the dual 16x SLI of the a8n32-sli isn't the only reason I got the board...in fact, I realized that current video card technology wil not utilize the added bandwidth, and by the time cards are released that will take advantage of it, there will be newer processors using different sockets. The main reason I am getting this board is because of the 8 phase power, which is doing wonders for its overclocking performance. This board isn't anything like the A8N-SLI series boards, which you seem to be confusing this board with. This board is the best socket 939 board out there right now.

However, you are correct, the DFI boards are great OCers too, but I still feel more comfortable with an Asus board in my computer, as opposed to a DFI board. Even if the Asus was a worse overclocker, I would feel better having the asus than the DFI. Stability is always more important the OC ability, to me.

The PSU I am getting should certainly be sufficient to support SLI geforce 7800gts.

As for the processor, I plan on either going with an Opteron 170 or maybe even a 165, and if the budget becomes tighter than I originally thought, then I may opt for the athlon 64/athlon 64 X2 equivalents. I am not THAT worried about overclocking, but if the opteron is not much more expensive, then I will go with that.
 
My .02c would be to get the dual 7800GT's and a X2 or Dual core opty. Dual core and SLi is where it's at performance wise. Nothing currently runs better. I'd get 2 7800GT oc cards and SLi them and with the new drivers a x2 would be sweet in Cod 2, Fear etc...
 
Lord_Exodia said:
My .02c would be to get the dual 7800GT's and a X2 or Dual core opty. Dual core and SLi is where it's at performance wise. Nothing currently runs better. I'd get 2 7800GT oc cards and SLi them and with the new drivers a x2 would be sweet in Cod 2, Fear etc...

that is what I am thinking. I am looking at the albatron 7800gts. I can get 2 for 600 bucks (300 a piece) on newegg.
 
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