Long time Nvidia user takes plunge into 3 x R9 290 Trifire

Ah no they're audio in/line in thank god. Or the normal "green" connector. It's a good headset, I wouldn't bother getting one with USB. Although I know there are better headsets around for better music quality.. (enthusiast level headphones..). But I saw the ones I wanted were so expensive (a few Senn ones) so I went with the Sibera V2 at last. This uses normal connectors so that's fine.

But then.. I should be good for a sound card right?

sorry for the topic derail (on behalf of me and eclap. )

 

I know this thread has got totally off topic but the whole sound card thing is something that i have been thinking about. So prior to going with 3 cards. i had a X-Fi Forte sound card installed , but now all my PCI slots are gone with 3 dual slot cards. So i had to remove my sound card.

Sounds cards have been something i have always felt very subjective. I have bounced back and forth between onboard and dedicated over the many years of various builds and really struggle to tell the diff. I think this is mainly due to the X-Fi Forte not being a top notch sound card.

What do you guys recommend ? are the external USB sound cards good? will i hear a difference from the onboard?

 

It all boils up to device which vibrates at end to make sound.
I personally like stereo over 7.1 because good 7.1 system costs about 1000$+ while good stereo headphones go for 300$. And truth to be told you have 2 ears and if sound has proper frequency shift you get better 3D perception from stereo than 7.1.

For both stereo and 7.1 you can even use your onboard audio as long as it has digital/optical output and then you use appropriate amplifier.

I guess that with TrueAudio your GPU will do hard work and sound card will get final sound and will not do anything else than forward it out.
For others it is usually done via CPU, on high end sound cards work is offloaded to card.

And then your output method takes over. If it's going out directly as form of analog vibrations then sound card needs good amplifier and high signal to noise ratio +be resistant to noise from PCI/PCIe slot.
If you send out digital signal then previous requirements are moved to external amplifier (not affected by PCI/PCIe since it's not connected to it).

External amp. can be pretty costly too and there are not many external sound cards with built in amp which limits you in case you want to use stereo headphones.

Last thing is your feeling. When you listen to music on your current sound system and close your eyes. Do you feel like being on stage with band around you? Singer walking around? Do you hear them breathing, hissing? Can you recognize other subtle sounds there like distinct each instrument?
If yes, you will not benefit much from good dedicated soundcard or digital output coupled with amplifier.
But in case you do not get those things above you can clearly benefit from proper sound system.

 

I am currently on 3 x GTX 680 4GB cards and can't keep my mind of thr r9 290x cards !

I'm really not happy with the over all experience on nvidia cards since the drivers are a missed up sh!t using triple monitor setup with these cards.

I mean If I want to play Civilization 5 or watch a movie on my PC using media player classic I'll have to downgrade the drivers to ver. 326.8x and with theses drivers I can't play BF4 which forces me to reinstall the latest and keep swaping between drivers. :bang::bang::bang::bang::bang:


Any one done a triple crossfire setup r290x or 290 review ???

 

I have had my trifire 290s for since last weekend but have been away for work the past week. From my experience so far I have not run into any major driver issues. I will be posting 2 vs 3 card scaling tomorrow for those who are interested in seeing how well the R9 cards scale from crossfire to trifire.

 

Yeah that would be cool to see.

 

Now that the 290/X both come with AMD's TrueAudio, doesn't that make using a soundcard nearly totally pointless? I haven't used a sound card since 2006.

 

how does this TrueAudio work? Does it use your existing sound card? There are obviously no audio connections on the card . I have been working this but have not been able to find an answer.

 

Awesome, I'll be waiting for that, could you please use BF4 and BF3 and in this comparison.

 

Having seen this on google I thought it was a post referring to one of my many rants on the nvidia forums lol. I spent 10000 on the first rig I built in 6 years. A dream setup for ffxiv. I made the abysmal choice of going with nvidia and purchased 4 titans.

Long story short; to this day due to their pathetic surround drivers, I get 25fps in ffxiv and due to this I was going to quit and move over to wildstar. I was regretting my purchase and watching my PC age, all while getting abysmal performance and even arguably damaging my cards (they all run at 100% load 100% of the time in surround due to SLI not working and I get awful performance and sky high temps even with the fans at 100%. (We won't even get into the power requirements).

Needless to say, I have been in contact (albeit largely ignored) by nvidia this entire time. The mods have admitted it was reproduced in the lab, however refuse to put me in contact with anyone who knows a damn thing. I've saved all pms (mostly attempts at pms) going back almost a year. Apparently due to surround being niche it's simply not important. Even though ffxiv is one of the most critically acclaimed and active mmos we've seen in years.
Almost a dozen driver releases and I still have to play on the lowest setting for a reasonable framerate.

Anyhow, back to the point of the thread. As I mentioned I was going to jump ship to enjoy my PC a bit (I'm an mmo aholic and don't make such choices lightly). I got Into the wildstar beta and wouldn't you know it... Identical problem. 25fps. (To be fair, it mostly works in wow - assuming you don't mind invisible landscape features in the distance for that normal performance)

At that point I was done with nvidia. SLI, surround.. These are mature technologies. Technologies that have been around for the better part of a decade. However it's obvious nvidia isn't concerned with ensuring things they advertise are functioning properly do just that. They are concerned with releasing over priced, un artificially handicapped versions of hardware already out to milk fanboys and the wealthy for more and more based on nothing other than their name. (Arguably better performance, lackluster software support, and plain bad customer service certainly doesn't account for a nearly 50% price premium on almost all cards!)

Anyways, I built a new rig to multibox out of my tax return. I knew going in I wasn't going nvidia. I have used them explicitly for 15+ years, bordering on fanboyism. This time I had reason to broaden my horizons behind getting more for my money.

Anyhow, in closing... I'm finishing up the build today. Mostly just wiring. The build is almost a 1:1 with my main machine apart from 1 less card (due to the flagship asus board only supporting trifire) and less storage. I'm willing to bet, and bet confidently/safely, that I'm not going to have any problem running eyefinity relative to how awful surround is ATM.

Have no fear! They did add some 3D updates for uber aaa titles like.. Thunder birds?

Signed - ex nvidia fanboy

PS - don't say I didn't warn you. If you absolutely refuse to take my advice and convince yourself I have no idea what I'm talking about, or it's obviously my fault, do yourself a favor and run an older OS (windows 7 drivers seem to work more often)

 

I don't understand why Nvidia's audio drivers (for 5.1?) would suffer with 3 Titans... That makes absolutely no sense to me; I thought Nvidia had better drivers & support compared to AMD.

And what cards did you buy as replacements for your 3 Titans, you got vague near the end of your post. I'm somewhat confused here :3eyes:

 

Color me curious, I kind of want to know myself!:nerd:

 

Dude 4 Titans? Even if it did work, don't you think that's a complete waste of money?

 

I have ordered 3 R9 290X on ebay.

Open Box never used Sapphires for 333 $ each !!!!!!!!!!!!!

3 more days and I will say bye bye to the 3 GTX 680 uke2:

I will order some water block for the r9 290X today....probably start converting the AMDs to water later next week :infinity:

 

Sorry, it's 4 titans and nvidia did have superior software - in the past. No longer the case. Many people have surmised that they've simply bitten off more than they can chew and people are assuming much of upper management isn't even aware of some of these issues (which makes me wonder why they are avoiding putting me in touch with anyone)

Anyhow, I attempted to sell my titans for awhile, actually trade them for amd cards. It didn't pan out. After my tax return I built a second PC using 3 amd 290x cards. Decided to go amd period and bought an amd chip and ram as well. I initially wanted to add 2 more displays but if surround won't work half the time on 3, 5 would have just been tossing more money at it. Id imagine the problem will be fixed at some point... Hopefully now considering the delay in driver release. I assume this is due to new hardware being stymied and not because of any obligation to rectify the issue. After all, SLI and surround even Moreso are a small peice of a big pie.

Anyhow as I mentioned I'm completely confident that upon firing up this new PC (hopefully tonight, have to assemble desk today) that the problem won't exist on the eyefinity platform.

 

I'll have to re dig thru my post, not sure where you got audio drivers out of any of that.. Unless I'm confused and this entire post is about audio drivers and not nvidias graphics drivers

 

Amazing deal cards are hard to come by especially at a reasonable price courtesy of mining. 350 bucks for performance In the titan area.. How could you not go that route really

 

No because I wanted to go surround for the first time. And I've used over 3GB of frame buffer with wow at this resolution so it was partially out of necessity, partially because a new PC was long overdue, and partially because I only build a new PC once every 4 years or so.

But as I mentioned, I do regret it now. It rarely works and when it does it doesn't work well. I score high on benchmarks though /sigh

And of course now they still don't function properly in a scenario that requires that kind of frame buffer, and now cards are coming out that aren't artificially gimped (all 16 units) and have 6gb of VRAM. (Had assumed the next generation of cards might have 4, didn't expect them to make the titan irrelevant so quickly. Lesson learned.

 

LOL OH!! Your associating surround with audio LOL!

Surround as in multi display technology /bonk

 

Well good on getting the AMD's, bad on the AMD CPU. Currently for that kind of money I'd be using an LGA 2011 CPU with 32GB or 64GB of ram supporting the Trifire. Personally would have gotten Sapphire's instead of Asus as they can be quadfired and the Asus cards are now only name not necessarily quality. You pay a premium for the Asus branding which to me is a no go.

However currently Asus do have the best of the OC Mobo's so I would shell out there, the Gigabyte's just aren't as good.