Interesting results with an x58 system in BF3

[dmoney1980]

Hello gang,

A friend of mine was upgrading from an i7 920 / x58 setup to a haswell rig. He hates dealing with CL so he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Which is funny because not 3 months ago I parted out my sandy bridge setup so I could focus on school. With BF4 around the corner I had the PC gaming itch. I have a ps3 at home but I just can't do FPS on a console...So let this be a lesson to all the readers here - you can't quit PC gaming, it quits you!

Anyway, here is what he sold me:

EVGA x58 SLI LE motherboard
i7 920 DO (currently on a mild 3.4ghz OC)
Asetek 240mm AIO cooler
XFX Radeon 5870 1GB GPU
1kw PSU
Cooler master HAF case

Reason for the mild OC is that I'm keeping this beast in my office closet. My wife hates the look of this case and frankly so do I. I purchased 4 new fans for push / pull and the temps seem good - around 44 on idle and low 60's on load using IBT. I know that I could OC higher here but temps go up like crazy since this is in a closet.

So I fired up BF3 multiplayer just to see how well it could do on my Dell 1440p monitor. I was shocked at how well this thing did with the limited GPU power...

Custom presets- all high - no AA - no motion blur - FOV 90 - HBAO
64 player map Operation Firestorm

2560x1440 - avg 34 low 24
1980x1080 - avg 50 low 29

GPU hovered between 97-100% all the time
CPU utilization was between 28 - 40% most of the time at both resolutions
CPU temps maxed at 64 degrees
GPU maxed at 71 degrees

Overall I am impressed with how well this CPU / GPU is holding up in this game. I thought for sure that 1440p would be unplayable, but it's not the case. It's smooth for the most part other than an occasional dip into the low 20's.

I do plan on upgrading my GPU once AMD drops their new line of cards, and I'll either get one of those or pick up a used current gen card here.

It also goes to show you that the i7 920 can still hold it's own in gaming. Yes it's a power hungry space heater, but the money I paid on this entire setup wouldn't cover a i7 haswell CPU by itself. I don't expect this CPU to bottleneck me even if I splurge on a top of the line GPU, and I don't plan on running SLI (unless I find a killer deal) so maybe SLI will create a CPU bottleneck. I plan to keep this beast until the next major intel release, when they bring DDR4 and replace the agining SATA interface.

I just wanted to share these results with you here. As I stated earlier, I was shocked that this GPU could run BF3 MP at 1440p!


Anyone else out there still rocking socket 1366?

 

[Maximilian]

Hello gang,

A friend of mine was upgrading from an i7 920 / x58 setup to a haswell rig. He hates dealing with CL so he made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

Your friend look like this?

And yeah the first gen i7's are still beasts in gaming, they wont be obsolete for a while yet, with all of them pretty much able to hit 4ghz at reasonable volts they will likely last as long as the old Q6600's did.

 

[dmoney1980]

Your friend look like this?

And yeah the first gen i7's are still beasts in gaming, they wont be obsolete for a while yet, with all of them pretty much able to hit 4ghz at reasonable volts they will likely last as long as the old Q6600's did.

LOL yes pretty much.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Wonder if I can find a similar rig for a bargain? Even without a GPU, love to find me a 1st gen i7 system in a couple months.

 

[wasabiman123]

Yeah I'm still running X58 and a 980X @ 3.8 ghz. I'm leery of going to haswell if 6 real cores beats 4 in better threaded games like BF4. I know there's other benefits to current DT gen, but maybe the only worthy upgrade will be Haswell-E. I'm honest to goodness confused :/

 

[FalseChristian]

My i5-2500K still rocks at 5GHz!

 

[Zodiark1593]

My i5-2500K still rocks at 5GHz!

Wrong thread.

The first-gen mobile i5 (dual core, 2.53 GHZ) at least doesn't bottleneck my Radeon 5470M in even 64-player games. :awe:

(I average about 24 fps on low settings and 800x480 btw, just fast enough to show my parents whom gave the game to me not even looking at the specs)

 

[RaistlinZ]

1366 FTW baby!

 

[venkman]

i7 920 is still a beast. I could run 1080p with almost everything maxed out with no major issues on the Proc and a 4890 until the summer/fall games came out last year. I upgraded to a 670 around last Christmas and now everything is butter smooth at max. I don't see a single reason for gamers to upgrade to Haswell from a first gen i7, especially if you can get a solid OC out of it. I also run mine at 3.4 as well.

 

[Kitlope]

This is the perfect thread to discuss my "dilemma".

In June of 2010 I upgraded my old socket 775 to 1366 and put together a new pc from the ground up, mostly to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2. In Oct 2011 I upgraded the processor from a 920 to a 3.33 Ghz 6 core 980 (not the "X" version). I also added a SSD drive for booting/apps. BF3 played decent,, first with a NVidia 570, then a 670. This summer I have upgraded to 2 780 GTX's in SLI in preparation of BF4. A few weeks ago I overclocked the processor to a mild 3.7 Ghz thinking I now may have a bit of a cpu bottleneck. I picked up a 120 Hz monitor (with lightboost enabled) so have it defaulted to 100 Hz which is what my frames are 75% of the time (I get the ol' Bf3 fps dips and I don't think there's anything that can be done about it, I've even read about players running absolute kickass rigs that get this issue too. Gulf of Oman, and Back to Karkand maps, seem especially succeptable).

I love this socket 1366. I mean - it has lasted me almost 3.5 years now and as much as I would like to upgrade to a Haswell with everything I read it doesn't really seem worth it. Going to Ivy Bridge-E would be a big performance gain but the $1000.00 for a chip/motherboard is just too expensive, especially after just buying 2 780's. So I'm holding out for Broadwell.

So what's your thoughts? Stick with this 980 or upgrade to a Haswell 4770K for the bit of performance gain?

 

[Techhog]

This is the perfect thread to discuss my "dilemma".

In June of 2010 I upgraded my old socket 775 to 1366 and put together a new pc from the ground up, mostly to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2. In Oct 2011 I upgraded the processor from a 920 to a 3.33 Ghz 6 core 980 (not the "X" version). I also added a SSD drive for booting/apps. BF3 played decent,, first with a NVidia 570, then a 670. This summer I have upgraded to 2 780 GTX's in SLI in preparation of BF4. A few weeks ago I overclocked the processor to a mild 3.7 Ghz thinking I now may have a bit of a cpu bottleneck. I picked up a 120 Hz monitor (with lightboost enabled) so have it defaulted to 100 Hz which is what my frames are 75% of the time (I get the ol' Bf3 fps dips and I don't think there's anything that can be done about it, I've even read about players running absolute kickass rigs that get this issue too. Gulf of Oman, and Back to Karkand maps, seem especially succeptable).

I love this socket 1366. I mean - it has lasted me almost 3.5 years now and as much as I would like to upgrade to a Haswell with everything I read it doesn't really seem worth it. Going to Ivy Bridge-E would be a big performance gain but the $1000.00 for a chip/motherboard is just too expensive, especially after just buying 2 780's. So I'm holding out for Broadwell.

So what's your thoughts? Stick with this 980 or upgrade to a Haswell 4770K for the bit of performance gain?

Fyi, Broadwell is skipping desktops based on rumors.

 

[Kitlope]

Fyi, Broadwell is skipping desktops based on rumors.

Really? What's supposed to come after Haswell for the desktop?

 

[Techhog]

Really? What's supposed to come after Haswell for the desktop?

Next year, we just get "Haswell Refresh"

 

[RayTheKing]

This is the perfect thread to discuss my "dilemma".

In June of 2010 I upgraded my old socket 775 to 1366 and put together a new pc from the ground up, mostly to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2. In Oct 2011 I upgraded the processor from a 920 to a 3.33 Ghz 6 core 980 (not the "X" version). I also added a SSD drive for booting/apps. BF3 played decent,, first with a NVidia 570, then a 670. This summer I have upgraded to 2 780 GTX's in SLI in preparation of BF4. A few weeks ago I overclocked the processor to a mild 3.7 Ghz thinking I now may have a bit of a cpu bottleneck. I picked up a 120 Hz monitor (with lightboost enabled) so have it defaulted to 100 Hz which is what my frames are 75% of the time (I get the ol' Bf3 fps dips and I don't think there's anything that can be done about it, I've even read about players running absolute kickass rigs that get this issue too. Gulf of Oman, and Back to Karkand maps, seem especially succeptable).

I love this socket 1366. I mean - it has lasted me almost 3.5 years now and as much as I would like to upgrade to a Haswell with everything I read it doesn't really seem worth it. Going to Ivy Bridge-E would be a big performance gain but the $1000.00 for a chip/motherboard is just too expensive, especially after just buying 2 780's. So I'm holding out for Broadwell.

So what's your thoughts? Stick with this 980 or upgrade to a Haswell 4770K for the bit of performance gain?

If you plan to OC, a 4770k will give you a beefy performance increase. However, the 980 is still pretty powerful and should be able to last you a good bit more time. That is, if you can live with 100 FPS and a few dips.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

5870 has got some OC headroom too. Crank it up.

 

[glugglug]

Really? What's supposed to come after Haswell for the desktop?

Skylake.

 

[dmoney1980]

This is the perfect thread to discuss my "dilemma".

In June of 2010 I upgraded my old socket 775 to 1366 and put together a new pc from the ground up, mostly to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2. In Oct 2011 I upgraded the processor from a 920 to a 3.33 Ghz 6 core 980 (not the "X" version). I also added a SSD drive for booting/apps. BF3 played decent,, first with a NVidia 570, then a 670. This summer I have upgraded to 2 780 GTX's in SLI in preparation of BF4. A few weeks ago I overclocked the processor to a mild 3.7 Ghz thinking I now may have a bit of a cpu bottleneck. I picked up a 120 Hz monitor (with lightboost enabled) so have it defaulted to 100 Hz which is what my frames are 75% of the time (I get the ol' Bf3 fps dips and I don't think there's anything that can be done about it, I've even read about players running absolute kickass rigs that get this issue too. Gulf of Oman, and Back to Karkand maps, seem especially succeptable).

I love this socket 1366. I mean - it has lasted me almost 3.5 years now and as much as I would like to upgrade to a Haswell with everything I read it doesn't really seem worth it. Going to Ivy Bridge-E would be a big performance gain but the $1000.00 for a chip/motherboard is just too expensive, especially after just buying 2 780's. So I'm holding out for Broadwell.

So what's your thoughts? Stick with this 980 or upgrade to a Haswell 4770K for the bit of performance gain?

Kilop,

I remember people posting here recently about their cpu bottlnecks with dual cards. One of them was on a newer gen intel, and I do remember one specifically having a bottleneck with a x79 rig, but that was with 3 cards.

All in all, I think most cpu's today will bottleneck multi-GPU setups. I agree with you, $1k is a tough pill to swallow for marginal gain. Hell, i just purchased a 6 core Xeon for this mobo for $83, I plan on messing around with it and see how far it can OC. If it works out, I'll sell my 920 here and I'll be set with a 6 core / 12 thread chip for about a week's worth of lunch n coffees.

 

[Qianglong]

LGA 1366 is legendary! My i7-980x is still holding up well despite its age!

 

[Kitlope]

Kilop,

I remember people posting here recently about their cpu bottlnecks with dual cards. One of them was on a newer gen intel, and I do remember one specifically having a bottleneck with a x79 rig, but that was with 3 cards.

All in all, I think most cpu's today will bottleneck multi-GPU setups. I agree with you, $1k is a tough pill to swallow for marginal gain. Hell, i just purchased a 6 core Xeon for this mobo for $83, I plan on messing around with it and see how far it can OC. If it works out, I'll sell my 920 here and I'll be set with a 6 core / 12 thread chip for about a week's worth of lunch n coffees.

See, the kicker is that I could sell the 980 quite easily for around $400.00 on ebay and probably get another $150.00 or so for the motherboard (Asus P6X58D-E). With that, I could easily upgrade to a Haswell 4770k with a Asus Maximus Hero VI m/b. So that's what's kinda panging me, knowing I could upgrade for little too no cost. And why shouldn't I? Take the money while the CPU is still worth something. However...

I love the fact of having a 6 core Intel processor since as we all know they're rather rare. And it does still hold it's own, as I have spent a couple dozen hours researching. It's sounding like BF4 will utilize all cores thrown at it (according to the recently released specs) so having a Intel 6 core *should* give me a edge, even compared to a higher clocking 4 core. There hasn't really been a vast improvement in speeds since Gulftown and some of the newer features with Haswell doesn't really apply for my uses, and apparently not much has been written software wise for these new features anyway. Single threaded use, Haswell kills the 980, multi threaded the 980 holds it's own, which is 90% of what I do (Battlefield 3, soon to be 4).

I guess I should just enjoy the purchase I made. I wanted it to last, and it has in spades, thus the extra money the 980 cost. It's also helped that overall generational speed increases has limped along since Sandybridge, which has helped my cause in sticking to the 980. Regardless of what chip I get, cpu bottlenecking could very well be an issue because of these 780 GPU's. So I guess it's moot point. And as we know, Haswell doesn't even OC so well (not that the 980 does - because it doesn't. So I guess it's an even playing field in this regard).

Anyhoo, I thank everyone for the responses. This has turned into a bit of a brainstorming post for me, as much as I want to upgrade (for the sake of upgrading) I think it would be a bit foolish as I still have a great chip that continues performing.

LGA 1366 is legendary! My i7-980x is still holding up well despite its age!

Couldn't agree more.

 

[tweakboy]

Sell the 980 that is a hell of a good price. How much did you pay for it ?

 

[nenforcer]

Skylake.

Haswell Refresh is next year, 2014, with Skylake coming in 2015 w/ DDR4 support.

That is probably when most people will consider switching to a new platform to be considered. an "upgrade".

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Anyone else out there still rocking socket 1366?

Yes. Three sets of i7 920 D0 on EX58-UD3R (Rev 1.6) with 3x4GB 1600 CL9 and Xigmatek Dark Knights.

Been running at 4GHz from day one (all using the exact same settings - guess I lucked out at the MN Microcenter). Damn things are tanks - never get above 76C under Prime95 load, ran DC for a couple of years, and never BSODed.

Retired them to the folks' (so I can game when I visit and plug in 7970s) and replaced them with identical setups as in my sig. Sad to see them go

@Kitlope : Dump that i7 980 and get a L5639 for ~$75 on eBay

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

1366 FTW baby!

this, what a legendary platform