7950 GX2 -- who's to buy, and with conroe?

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: akshayt
get a 1900XT CF instead.

WTF are you even talking about? Is it your life's goal to crap every thread with "buy an X1900 card"? Please, shut up.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Originally posted by: nitromullet

Originally posted by: akshayt
get a 1900XT CF instead.

WTF are you even talking about? Is it your life's goal to crap every thread with "buy an X1900 card"? Please, shut up.

yeah i know. this TROLL TROLLS every thread saying buy ati. i swear he's even worse than rollo.

 

[Kyanzes]

My 7950 works perfectly an Intel 975XBX rev304.

 

[Nightmare225]

Originally posted by: tanishalfelven

Originally posted by: nitromullet

Originally posted by: akshayt
get a 1900XT CF instead.

WTF are you even talking about? Is it your life's goal to crap every thread with "buy an X1900 card"? Please, shut up.

yeah i know. this TROLL TROLLS every thread saying buy ati. i swear he's even worse than rollo.

I'd be fine if it was just ATI cards for the superior image quality, but all he recommends is cards starting with X1 and ending with XT. Is there ANY moderator aware of this troll?!?!?!

 

[adairusmc]

The overclocked 570 Mhz version has the model number "PV-T71U-ZDD9", but I cannot find it in stock at all on any online retailer. I got mine through work, through my companies distributor, D&H. Mwave.com and zipzoomfly both have the card listed, but it is not currently in stock.

 

[imported_trajan]

I did a search a couple of days ago on PriceGrabber I think and I turned up one mention of the 570 OC'd 7950, but it was quite a bit more expensive (something like $750) and being sold by what looked like an invidual seller.. a little sketchy. If anyone knows another source, please let me know. I'll do some more searches tomorrow using that product number, maybe something else will turn up!

 

[bob661]

Is there a performance hit running the 7950 on a non-SLI board? Thanks much.

 

[lodog00]

I have an eVga and an MSI card. The eVga was "only" $500 from Newegg, and I think that's a good deal. They also have a great warranty, the step up program, and they are the cheapest card you can get, so no complaints

I don't know how high this card can go by itself, but with both 7950's in my system, I can OC 550/750 and it's 100% stable as far as I can tell so far. This setting is much higher than the regular XFX @ 520, and either of the cards I mentioned are cheaper!

I'm not sure the extra $200+ the XFX OC'd to 570 is worth it....unless you're a framerate junkie, lol.

 

[adairusmc]

Originally posted by: lodog00


I'm not sure the extra $200+ the XFX OC'd to 570 is worth it....unless you're a framerate junkie, lol.

I didnt know that they are going for that much now, I only paid $575 for mine, about a month ago.

 

[lodog00]

oops, I meant $100+

I was thinking the eVga was $400, not $500.

In any case, the 520Mhz version of the XFX is $110 over the eVga. You could easily overclock the eVga to match the specs, at least if my own card is any indication.

 

[EROEIone2one]

We're going to run the Conroe/P5W/GX2 combination also. Hopefully the shakedown and burn-in period won't be too difficult. We plan to run conservative settings to start out with (no crazy overclock of anything).

E6600
P5W-DH
7950 GX2
OCZ TiAlpha VX2 DDR-1000

Any suggestions out there for settings/BIOS/drivers/etc? Thanks.

 

[imported_trajan]

That's the exact same system I'm building, except I'm using 667 Kingston Value RAM (had to save somewhere!). I'm still waiting on the processor, case and mobo, hopefully they are coming in this week.

I could definitely use some advice as well on BIO, drivers, etc. I'm going now to google "burn-in" and "shake-down" period, unless those are just expressions. Yup, I'm a newbie.

 

[EROEIone2one]

Originally posted by: trajan
That's the exact same system I'm building, except I'm using 667 Kingston Value RAM (had to save somewhere!). I'm still waiting on the processor, case and mobo, hopefully they are coming in this week.

I could definitely use some advice as well on BIO, drivers, etc. I'm going now to google "burn-in" and "shake-down" period, unless those are just expressions. Yup, I'm a newbie.

Heh, I think my friend (building the rig for him) was swayed by the blingerific ti-phosphate coating on the exterior, that and the anandtech review.

Forget googling for that, read this first:

Test your rig for stability

 

[imported_Silverturtle]

The ASUS P5B worked for me.

 

[Vikroda]

Originally posted by: EROEIone2one
We're going to run the Conroe/P5W/GX2 combination also. Hopefully the shakedown and burn-in period won't be too difficult. We plan to run conservative settings to start out with (no crazy overclock of anything).

E6600
P5W-DH
7950 GX2
OCZ TiAlpha VX2 DDR-1000

Any suggestions out there for settings/BIOS/drivers/etc? Thanks.

I recently built the same system except with the OCZ Pt DDR-800 RAM. How is your system? The 3D Mark 2006 score was very disappointing (~6000?). I removed my BenQ 1655 burner and got about 10% higher. I expected much better results with this combo. The E6600 was overclocked to about 3GHz and the evga 7950 was at stock settings.
It might be a motherboard problem; I was going to post in the motherboard forum but for some reason I can't. The evga site linked above still doesn't list the P5W DH as an "approved" MB. Maybe after Asus tweaks the bios...
I used the evga drivers and stayed with the Asus 1101 bios; however, Asus released 1301 (see the MB forum sticky) but I haven't tried that yet.

 

[Nightmare225]

Originally posted by: Vikroda

Originally posted by: EROEIone2one
We're going to run the Conroe/P5W/GX2 combination also. Hopefully the shakedown and burn-in period won't be too difficult. We plan to run conservative settings to start out with (no crazy overclock of anything).

E6600
P5W-DH
7950 GX2
OCZ TiAlpha VX2 DDR-1000

Any suggestions out there for settings/BIOS/drivers/etc? Thanks.

I recently built the same system except with the OCZ Pt DDR-800 RAM. How is your system? The 3D Mark 2006 score was very disappointing (~6000?). I removed my BenQ 1655 burner and got about 10% higher. I expected much better results with this combo. The E6600 was overclocked to about 3GHz and the evga 7950 was at stock settings.
It might be a motherboard problem; I was going to post in the motherboard forum but for some reason I can't. The evga site linked above still doesn't list the P5W DH as an "approved" MB. Maybe after Asus tweaks the bios...
I used the evga drivers and stayed with the Asus 1101 bios; however, Asus released 1301 (see the MB forum sticky) but I haven't tried that yet.

It works with mine. Try going into display properties, advanced, Troubleshooting, and decheck write combining.

 

[Vikroda]

Originally posted by: Nightmare225
It works with mine. Try going into display properties, advanced, Troubleshooting, and decheck write combining.

That gave me about 10 more 3Dmarks. What's your 3Dmark 06 score for your system?

 

[Nightmare225]

9138 3DMarks after overclocking to 3.1 Ghz. Hmmmm, try erasing the drivers using Driver Cleaner Pro, and then download Xtreme-G's modified 91.45 drivers. The EVGA drivers are slightly old and could not be compatible with the P5W.

 

[Vikroda]

Thanks for the suggestions. I removed the evga drivers and installed the XG91.45 drivers, but that didn't improve the 3DMark score. I'll see if changing the MB bios to 8.01 or 13.01 will help.

 

[Nightmare225]

Upgrade your BIOS, I did that too. I'm not really sure what enabled the 2nd GPU. Is SLI mode enabled in the drivers?

 

[Vikroda]

Updating my bios decreased my scores. (All at 330FSB) I might have forgotten to change a bios setting that I tweeked with 11.01.
11.01 - 7641
12.01 - 7282
13.01 - 7292

SLI mode was enabled. When I turned it off I got 4430. Overclocking the video card with the 13.01 bios increased the result to 7859. I wonder what the overclocked score with the 11.01 bios would have been.

 

[Hal0]

What about the 7950GT ?

 

[Madellga]

Originally posted by: Silverturtle
The ASUS P5B worked for me.

Really? Why do you report performance problems (very low 3DMark2005) on this thread?

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=31&threadid=1913835&enterthread=y

That's 3 days before you post this.

 

[octop8]

Originally posted by: Vikroda
Updating my bios decreased my scores. (All at 330FSB) I might have forgotten to change a bios setting that I tweeked with 11.01.
11.01 - 7641
12.01 - 7282
13.01 - 7292

SLI mode was enabled. When I turned it off I got 4430. Overclocking the video card with the 13.01 bios increased the result to 7859. I wonder what the overclocked score with the 11.01 bios would have been.

Those scores are low...I have an E6600 (FSB OC'd to 333) with Inno3d 7950GX2, Corsair C3 DDR2-800 RAM and I scored 9,159 on 3D Mark 06. Looks like something may be wrong on your system. Did you clean out your old drivers properly? I am now using the 91.47 WHQL from Nvidia. Something is holding your system back.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Originally posted by: adairusmc
XFX also has another overclocked version at 570 Mhz core, and the memory to 800Mhz (1600 DDR). This is the version I have, and the stock overclock does make a big difference. You could overclock the other cards with no problem, I bought the 570m edition of the 7950 because it was just ready to go at a much higher core speed than stock, rather than doing it myself. Its all up to you what you want to do though. You never know though, a BFG or a eVGA, or even another XFX standard 7950 may or may not achieve that high of an overclock and be stable.

holy mother. that almost 7900gtx clocks.