So in the quest for more FPS I was thinking that maybe I’d try an i7 but 1st I’d have to show in someway a cpu could actually help so I need to establish what my bottleneck was. My goal in 1st person shooters is to achieve 60fps then after to establish the highest low possible. Any game averaging over 80fps is a deal breaker I don’t care if I can go from a 100 to 200fps that would only be good for benchmarking. So my tests where demanding games and DX11 except of course I had to throw in Crysis Warhead no benchmark is ever complete without one of the Crysis’s. So the games benched where AVP Benchmark tool, Lost planet 2 benchmark, Metro’s benchmark, Stalker COP benchmark and of course Warhead’s benchmark. Control panel setting where maxed except for AA which was set to 2aa so I wouldn’t run into any VRAM maxouts. All games where run at max setting except 2aa Metro 2033 was run at max except 2aa and DOF off and average of 2 runs. Warhead was ran on 64bit avalanche flythrough 3 times for average. Stalker was the average of all 4 tests. LP2 was average of all 3 scenes. So here is my short Nvidia complaint: you would think for $500 They could at least use as much VRAM as a much cheaper AMD card? I know for 100 dollars more I could get a 3gb card but that’s $300 for the setup and 8aa is not worth that much cash. The thing I dislike so much about Nvidia is that top end cards are over priced. Which is why I went to AMD last time with tri 5870. Had AMD came out with their cards on time I’m sure I would have bought them instead. When they got delayed I figured it would be 6 months before they came out and I’m kinda of a impulse buyer and **** happen’s, lesson learned. Anyway as you can see in the graph my CPU and motherboard is not the problem, I need more graphic’s power! So I need to either go with water or get the i7 with 4x16 lanes and get another card, No way! I’ll go water and OC 1st. I don’t trust 4 GPU’s the only problem I ever had with AMD was 5970 in xfire didn’t really work all that good so I not gonna ever try 4 again until I see that drivers are good to go. Also as you can see LP2 is over 80fps so I really didn't need that benchmark. All test run at 5760x1080
Did you catch this current article on 3-way SLI and CF: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-sli-3-way-scaling,2865.html
I would try water and OC first like you said. Atleast you are trying to get the most with what you have before trying to ditch those 580's. At the very least if you do end up having to change to three 5980's(better scaling) or two 5990's or two 590's, you will have the cooling ready for them. Then again if you go with two 5990's or two 590's your cpu will be a bottleneck and you will probably end up needing a i5 2500k or i7 2600k to overclock anyway.
he's running a triple monitor setup. his CPU wont be much of a bottleneck if at all. upgrading to a second gen i7 and overclocking probably wont bump up his average framerate. but if he runs a second gen i5 and oc's the hell out of it, it should bump up his minimum fps a little.
The review on this site about 5990 x-fire said that at the very high end the cpu was a bottleneck. And I was talking more about water and OC for the vid cards not his cpu. Edit: " Remember though to pair a card like this with an appropriate PC. Even our Core i7 Nehalem based quad core processor overclocked at 3750 MHz still will run into some CPU limitation with the somewhat aging games." And they only tested at 2560x1600 not 5760x1080. I could be wrong, but like I said if he starts with what he's got, then upgrades his cards and benchmarks again, he can see if then his cpu is a limiting factor.
I understand what your saying but if you read my 1st post you'll understand what I consider a bottleneck. I did find another guy on the net that has three 580's water cooled and a 2600k oc'd to 4.9 and he has a i7 980 (i think) oc to 4.5 and says the i7 1366mb is 5% faster. yoo but 5% man whoop tee ****en doo man! I'll try and find his tread and post it.
Yea you said you need more graphics power. So I agreed that you should water cool and OC your cards first. If that wasn't enough then you might need to upgrade to two or three 5990's or 590's. In which case, according to the xfire review of the 5990's your cpu will become a bottleneck. Unless I am missing something. With three 580's no cpu bottlneck, with 2 or three of the higher model cards, cpu bottleneck. Maybe I'm just tired, been up all night. :bang:
We'll no @ 5760 res there will be no CPU bottleneck. Here is that guy I was talking about http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=266367
