Help a frugal spender...Crossfire wanted

[imported_Gelfling]

I presently have a DFI NF7-Ultra (I think, its been 2 years since I got it). Its run wonderfully, is moderately overclocked, and has 2 gig of ram. RAM is A-Data, but runs very well in the system and is highly overclockable. The CPU is a Opteron 165, which when I got the system, was a bit of a splurge. Keep in mind that at that time, dual core was really new. I upgraded my video card about 6 months ago from some kind of Geforce (the number escapes me) to a Radeon 3870. I recently got a 2nd 3870, which with rebates and some gift cards I had lying around, came to ~$100 out of pocket expense.

So, I thought, lets get some crossfire going. I do some research, and find that Crossfire is still very tricky. The Intel Crossfire boards all run at 16x/4x, which seems silly to me. Of course, the newer Intel boards will do 16x/16x but are REALLY expensive.

So I looked that the AMD Crossfired. I found one (DFI UT 790FX-M2RS) that will do 16x/16x and is about $130, which is about all I am willing to spend on a MB. If I go with this, its a bit of a toss up between getting a Phenom or an X2. I see merrits of both processors. I do mostly gaming and a fair amount of video encoding. Pricing things out, I see a 6000+ is $153 while a Phenom 9750 Quad is $215. Thats a pretty big difference. Any thoughts on what to do?

I am making all these upgrades because I am presently playing AoC and I like to run at my monitor's native resolution which is ~1950x1080. My FPS are just not cutting it at that resolution with just a single 3870. Thanks.

 

[Negronpope]

Go with that motherboard and buy an X2 5000+ black edition processor instead. Newegg just upped their price on this by over $40, but it can still be had for $96 from antaresdigital.com. It's got a retail warranty of 3 years and your current cpu cooler will probably work on it. You can overclock this processor (at stock voltage) to 3.1 MHz and it may do 3.2 or 3.3 at higher voltage. It should perform about as well as a 6000+ and you can save the extra money to upgrade to a Phenom when the 45nm processors are released.

 

[themisfit610]

If you encode video and plan on going AMD - go Phenom. There's no question whatsoever.

None.

x264 encoding in particular is one area where Phenom does relatively well. It still gets _stomped_ by the Q6600, but you've made your decision

Keep in mind that x4 / x16 makes _very_ little impact in real world performance. PCIe has scads of bandwidth!

my $.02

~MiSfit

 

[imported_Gelfling]

Keep in mind that x4 / x16 makes _very_ little impact in real world performance. PCIe has scads of bandwidth![/quote]

If you were to make this comment about 8x I would agree, but I think that at 4x, there IS going to be some bottlenecking of the PCIe bus.

On another note, I would love to go intel and get a q6600, but in "real world" performance, justifing that kind of money for a MB/CPU combo is hard for me (~$500 for the 2).

 

[themisfit610]

You think, or you _know_

I haven't seen any benchmarks that actually show x4 to be any kind of hindrance.

I understand your feelings about cost. $500 is a bit high actually... A Q6600 is about $230, and a P35 board is about $100. The real world performance is massive, especially in things that the Phenom royally sucks at, like basically everything besides x264 encoding

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14756

Here's a great read..

~MiSfit

 

[imported_Gelfling]

Actually, i do know in this case. I read an article this am where they compared 16x/16x vs 8x/8x and 16x vs 4x. Thhere were gaming benchmarks with several games. There was a bottleneck at x4. I can try and find the link again if that would be helpful. I did need to do quite a bit of diggint to find the articloe in the first place, so it seems that it was not something that is easy to find.

 

[imported_Gelfling]

Here's the link

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardwa...intel_x38_versus_p35/1

 

[themisfit610]

Interesting.

The difference is there, but it's not consistent. In some cases, the 16/4 was actually faster - probably due to chipset differences.

I think a faster CPU would offset any differences, but still - an interesting read. Thanks!

The decision is up to you. I would go for the P35 / Q6600 combo any day

~MiSfit

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Gelfling
I do mostly gaming and a fair amount of video encoding.

How about going used? I'm sure some enthusiasts out there will be upgrading their x38 to an x48 sometime soon because as we all know 48 is a larger number than 38, so it must be better.

Alternately how about this 975x chipset board for $60 shipped that can do 8x/8x Crossfire? Only limitation is that Foxconn isn't the best overclocker (far from) and no 45nm chip support.

Anyways, I'd still go with a 16x/4x solution. Some $100 motherboard with a $135 E7xxx series chip will give great value.

 

[heyheybooboo]

MSI K9A2 CF-F V2 AM2+/AM2 AMD 790X $102

Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz BE $87

You can reuse the Opty HSF. I'd go ahead and purchase DDR1066 and underclock it. Bumping the cpu multi up to 14 will get you 2.8GHz and bring the ram into DDR800 spec.

PCIe1.1 4 lanes = AGP 4x bandwidth = 1 GB/sec

The PCIe2 in the MSI mobo will run x8/x8 in Crossfire (which is effectively x16/x16 in the Intel P35 PCIe1.1 mobos)

I have a MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX which - for $15 more - I think is a better mobo than the DFI but the price is not going in your 'frugal' direction. The onboard Realtek ALC888 audio on the MSI's is tree-mendous.

I'd be frugal (and wait for the 45nm AMD Quads for your video) and be on the lookout for the sb750 updates to the 790fx chipsets - hopely will increase the OCs on the Phenoms ...

btw - Crossfire on my 790fx is sweet with no problems (2 x 2900 pros) - should be a slam dunk with your 3870s

 

[Negronpope]

Bingo! Thanks for the second on the processor, BooBoo. Phenoms should overclock much better at 45nm.

 

[jaggerwild]

Hello All!

Just wanted to post if you need GPU'S best buy has a special on 3870, online are all sold out but in store is still going strong. I hear around $125.00 or so.
Thought I'd post it for you,
Regards :thumbsup:

 

[imported_Gelfling]

I just wanted to thank everyone here for their advice. I ended up getting a K9A2 Plat with a 5000+ BE, 4 GB PC1066 and a decent heatsink. Should work well with the twin 3870's.

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: Gelfling
I just wanted to thank everyone here for their advice. I ended up getting a K9A2 Plat with a 5000+ BE, 4 GB PC1066 and a decent heatsink. Should work well with the twin 3870's.

Nice :thumbsup: your rig is similar to mine, you won't end up disappointed.