SLI vs Single Card

[juneau]

I have a question, bit off topic, but which 4 people are overclocking their typewriters?

[imlittlev]

erm, maybe not ,maybe me. OC'ed to 250 Chz (clickahertz

[darth_nevus]

i did because i am undecided

[WalkinTarget]

Here's what a lil digging turned up:

Budget Conroe build

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 - Zipzoomfly - 339.00
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 - Zipzoomfly - 153.99
XFX e-Geforce 7900 GT KO 256MB - NE- 228 (After Rebates)
NEC 3550 with 512MB pen drive - NE - 29.99
Enermax or CoolerMaster Case - Newegg.com - 51.99 (Includes Shipping)
Rosewill single 12V rail 26A 550W - NE- 39.99
OCZ OCZ2G8002GK 2GB Kit DDR2-800 - Outpost- 120 (After Rebate)
TT Big Typhoon - Zipzoomfly - 49.99

Total $1,009

HD excluded, s I assume you can carry them over to the new build. Keep in mind that revised P965 chipsets come out in late September which should bump performance/OC'ing by a smidge.

[Gremlin_flg]

Walking target get the evga 7900 GT I am serious they are better company than XFX.

Darth good point. I would start from a fresh system built. Buy a decent card that will handle both the bf's and than go the dx10 card.

[Quamin]

Honestly, I'm thinking about just waiting for the dx10 cards and using my money from my rma'd card to get my motorcycle. Sure I'll have an expensive computer sitting here for a bit but you have to think is that $500 investment worth the $100 a month till the new stuff comes out? Why get two cards if you aren't going to run a super-high resolution that most people can't use without expensive monitors? I am probably going to wait and just play bf2/2142 on this here laptop that for some reason runs better than my friggin $1700 pc...

[darth_nevus]

Here's what a lil digging turned up:

Budget Conroe build

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 - Zipzoomfly - 339.00
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 - Zipzoomfly - 153.99
XFX e-Geforce 7900 GT KO 256MB - NE- 228 (After Rebates)
NEC 3550 with 512MB pen drive - NE - 29.99
Enermax or CoolerMaster Case - Newegg.com - 51.99 (Includes Shipping)
Rosewill single 12V rail 26A 550W - NE- 39.99
OCZ OCZ2G8002GK 2GB Kit DDR2-800 - Outpost- 120 (After Rebate)
TT Big Typhoon - Zipzoomfly - 49.99

Total $1,009

HD excluded, s I assume you can carry them over to the new build. Keep in mind that revised P965 chipsets come out in late September which should bump performance/OC'ing by a smidge.

I love the list with a few exceptions. the gigabyte ds3 board will not take the OCZ ram, or so everyone so far i have run accross has to say. i also cannot find said ram you are reffering to.

Gremlin, the evga version of the 7900gt ko is no longer available due to high failure rates, but i think a superclocked version is available as they finally figured what the modding community was reffering to about the 7900gt cards running with too little voltage on the core.

the cooler i'd change to, i have developed an affinity for the scythe infinity. anything that can have 4 120mm fans strapped to it would be awesome.

hd and a version of windows would need to be added unless i decide to go with windows vista beta. hd would need to definately need to be there as the current 480gb of storage i have is almost full.

last but not least, i need the faster ram for a reason. i am going to oc the crap out of this core. the ds3 or a newer asus board would be great for this, but as it stands, no asus boards have out of the box conroe support. that i've found for under 200.

good point quamin, keep the ideas coming.

[WalkinTarget]

Wow ... I was unaware of the OCZ's problems with the Gigabyte board. DoH !

Well, if you want maximum OC, then might I suggest ...

BIOSTAR !!!

Haha, now that you are done laughing, I read earlier this week that the guys at HardOCP got this board up to 501 fsb !!!!


*snipped*
We headed down to Fry?s last week and picked up two more E6300 processors to do some more overclocking with since our one sample was out with another motherboard editor. Now the kicker here being that we are using a fledgling Biostar motherboard, the TForce P965 Deluxe. Yes, I did type that correctly, we are using a Biostar motherboard for overclocking. Biostar sold a small run of these boards into the US that quickly sold out but is promising more by the end of the month. We were able to obtain a huge 501MHz front side bus with the TForce P965 that was solid as a rock with a little extra northbridge cooling. This awarded us a 3.512GHz clock speed from our lowly 1.87GHz stock rating.

link to thread - http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.ph...&postcount=468

link to board website -
http://www.biostar.com.tw/t-series/p...ct_details.php

[Gremlin_flg]

EVGA fixed the problems with the 7900gt by replacing the mrmory chips. And the drawback was you can OC it good enough as before. Not heard of any problems with the upgraded chips except for not OCing.

[darth_nevus]

EVGA fixed the problems with the 7900gt by replacing the mrmory chips. And the drawback was you can OC it good enough as before. Not heard of any problems with the upgraded chips except for not OCing.

Memory chips were one fault, but thats what they get for using inferior chips. but...

Evga's problem, as well as everyone elses for the 7900gt series wasn't so much the chips as it is the voltage. the clock speeds they were pushing needed more voltage. thats why there is so little overclocking capability. a majority of the communities all agree on this, especially since its so easy to volt mod this card. all it requires is a conductive ink pen. a great deal of these same folks swear their volt modded cards actually run cooler than the stock version.

albeit i don't recommend doing it yourself, as it voids warrenties, but it seems very odd to me that someone increasing voltage to the core by .1v is able to increase the core frequency by 120+mhz, and still be able to keep the same temps. a few got 60+ with just the stock cooler.

Between that and the fact that the fans were not variable speed on most 7900gt's contributed to a very high failure rate with these cards.

You'll notice that the new 7950gt has passivly cooled brothers from xfx, albeit they run HOT, 90+ degrees under load, with much higher clock rates than stock and 7900gt's. i would not be surprised at all if they listened to the modding community, and upped the core voltage a tad. looking at the back of the 7950gt reveals alot more components, especially in the section you would need to alter to up the voltage.

the high failure rate makes evga and bfg look like really good companies because of their return policies. these are the companies i was looking at for a card.

[darth_nevus]

Haha, now that you are done laughing, I read earlier this week that the guys at HardOCP got this board up to 501 fsb !!!!

Now i am curious as to know what memory divider, and memory timings they had to push to reach that...

latency, when not as bad with core 2 chips, has to be insanely high.

fyi, the asus board's new bios goes up to 650 fsb. lol.

[WalkinTarget]

meh .. I admit to being a big EVGA fan (I own 3 EVGA cards), but I wouldn't kill my budget unless I really had to for Darth's particular build. Tell ya what .. I do like that rig for that price !!



Whatever happens, I'm hoping he is satisfied with the overall rig. I obviously tried to stay as far down the budget ladder as possible (I wouldn't normally recommend Rosewill PSUs) but for the money, its not a bad start. I just love putting it all together from a parts list then actually assembling it.

Edit to answer Darths fsb question: I'd guess 5-5-5-5 from reading other posts on the DDR2 RAM that was being tested by other users. That's quite sloppy, but apparently the Conroe's core architecture is not noticeably bothered by the higher latency timings. Truthfully, AMD isn't moving to DDR2 to get huge performance gains at this point, they are just progressing to DDR2 to follow Intel's roadmap.

[Grisu]

In my opinion SLI/CF is a waste of money.

[Gremlin_flg]

Same here. I agree with Grisu. SLI and crossfire is waste of money

[juneau]

Same here. I agree with Grisu. SLI and crossfire is waste of money

+1

Grisu is a very wise dragon