EVGA 8800 GTS SLI 320s, 2600k P8Z68 Deluxe Gen3

Hi everyone. Obvious Noob here. I Just dismantled my AMD fx62 A8n-SLI Deluxe with EVGA 8800 GTS 320 SLI setup,

and got a 2600k with Asus P8Z68 Deluxe Gen 3.

Should I even bother with the SLI of the 8800 GTS 320 setup, or just use one in conjunction with the Z68 setup? And of course save for GTX 560 TI

Use:
Moderate Gaming, Moderate HD Movies and Conversions

Windows 7 Sp1
8GB Corsair 99924
Corsair 650w modular PS

Any advice is appreciated. Links for me to study, even better....

 

Try it for teh lulz.

I have mad fun when i can do that sort of stuff (like snapping an Athlon heatsink to my old Ge Force 8600 GT lol )

 

I suppose it wont hurt, but them 8800gts 320mb are going to run badly in any newish games..

 

Wow, for those tasks you should have bought a 2500k, a much cheaper motherboard and a 560Ti - for the same price!

Your going to see no benefit from the extra layout you have incurred yourself :/

A single 8800 320 is going to be very poor in todays games unless you run @ low settings/resolution....so yes, SLI them.

 

About old gear... I am still on an 8800 GTS 640, running in a PCIe 4x slot (weird dual AGP-PCIe mobo) and powered by a lowly E4500 CPU. I like the challenge of tweaking the OS, drivers, chipset (pci registers), and game to get still good graphics in spite of my gear. Without resorting to low-res and poor quality, I run Skyrim with enough FPS to enjoy myself.

Not all that long ago I was still running Oblivion on a 7600GT on a PIII Tualatin system. OK, poor grass, but all else was really fairly good.

In both cases, the monitor is an old 1280x1024 multisync CRT, using a modded EDID to run games and HD media @1920x1080.

So, don't feel bad about oldish gear... it's a fun challenge!! Anybody can buy their way to performance... provided they've got the cash... but tweaking has that nice, nerdy feel!:grin:

 

Yes, long live the s775! I've had my motherboard for about 4 years! Been on three different CPU's (E4300,E5200,Q8400), and i can still run the newest games at high settings. Tweaking makes a huge difference!

 

This guy has it right. Do it for the fun.

 

uhh... good cards, pitty about the VRAM.

My guess is they are still very usable for plenty of games.

 

still usable but anything majorly new is going to suffer big time from lack of vram and dx11.
I actually had dual 640's at one time but honestly i hated them.

 

SLi 8800 GT lol ,,, thats a 5 year old technology. SLI not gonna help much.

thank you

 

refurbish the athlon and sell it for the price of a 560ti.

 

I bet he would swap that "fun" for a SB rig with a lot of ram, ssd and a hd 7970 any day.

 

I thought that this forum was for discussing Nvidia drivers.

 

Had I the means, for starters I'd have a dual socket mobo running Xeons and a bunch of Tesla cards for folding@home, and stick that in the closet next to my new 16TB NAS. I'd see them only on the network while surfing on my T1 connection. Then I'd get started on planning for Ivy Bridge and Thunderbolt in order to jerry rig a component per case HTPC. Something like a mini-itx box & mobo, external boxed vid card, external boxed RAID, all stacked and matching, controlled from my pad.

Then I'd tweak my cloud setup...:nerd:

 

I got a almost new GTX260 laying around here thats better than a 8800 and barely plays new games.

 

was gonna post something yesterday as I considered the same upgrade (sandy bridge,G3 mobo,mem) and too also have a geforce 8 runs skyrim fine... but I read the sandy bridge accelerates your gpu could be wrong...

 

Users can benefit from a free GPU performance upgrade via two simple methods using iGPU. The first method is through the on-board GPU Boost switch and the second method is via the easily adjustable settings in the friendly UI. Users can enhance GPU performance by a massive 34%*. The ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3 features LucidLogix® Virtu, which is specifically designed for the Intel® Sandy Bridge platform's powerful integrated graphics. Its GPU virtualization dynamically assigns tasks to the best available graphics resources, providing greater flexibility and efficiency.

just an example, says could speed up a discreete gpu/gpus?

 

@smokey163,

IIRC Virtu's performance upgrade consists of switching from the IGP (on CPU) to the discrete GPU (card), so it doesn't imply boosting the discrete card itself. Good stuff, nonetheless, for saving power.

Like to be proved wrong, tho. If there are tasks that can be profitably offloaded to the IGP and so boost the GPU's performance, and Virtu can do that, well, nifty!

OTOH, the performance of their earlier hybrid SLI/CF chip never seemed to catch up to dedicated drivers & non-hybrid SLI/CF, so who knows. They at least seem to have mastered intercepting DirectX calls, p'raps one day they'll surprise.

 

What! Currently the price difference on Newegg between the 2600k and 2500k is only $90 USD while the cost of a 560 Ti is $209.99 (and that's the just the cheapest one). What you're basically telling him to do is build a crappy system. The 2600k has 4 cores with hyperthreading for 8 logical cores with 8mb of cache, where the 2500k simply has 4 cores and only a 6mb cache. That $90 price difference is easily worth it (especially for my own 2600k which is currently running at 4.8ghz and it looks like I'll be able to hit 5ghz with more testing) His motherboard is worth every penny and will do wonders avoiding the dreaded TDR errors. I recently switched to Asus motherboards and I will never look back. The two 2600k based pc's I built for myself this year have been hands down the best build experience I have ever had.

OP you made the right choice. SLI those cards for the time being and grab a 560 Ti down the road. Better yet, get two of them if you can swing it... I recently SLI'd two of them in my secondary 2600k system and performance is great.

 

actually an 8800 gts is still good enough for most games at below 1080p. Thats why nvidia rebadged the 8800 series for the 9800 series. Of course most passionate pc gamers would upgrade from a 8800gt by now, 460s were going for 100 during some sales for goodness sake. Its just like iphones for example, the 3gs is still good enough for what most people do, but millions bought the iphone 4 and the iphone 4s when they came out.