Considering purchase of 4870X2, input from owners requested!

[Bwdsmart]

So my Dad is looking to buy a PC for my little brother so he stops using his laptop all the time. I have a low end PC with a dual core celeron(Core2 based) 2 gigs of ram, and a P5K motherboard. I'm going to ask for 300$ for everything including a sony 19in trinitron moniter, keyboard and mouse.

Here's where the trick comes in. My brother plays PC games too and hes running my old system, a 939 mobo w/ a 3800X2(2ghz) a 7800GS and 2 gigs of ram. I'm thinking if I can convice him to buy my 8800GTX for 150 or so + the other one when it comes back from RMA I can take the old PC give it to my little brother, and the PC my dads buying goes to my brother.

This will bring me in about 450$, maybe 500 if I charge my brother another 50$ for the other GTX.

Now, I get to the actual question. How does everyone like their 4870X2's? Are you satisfied with it, and the final question has anyone actually played through Crysis @ 1920x1200 w/ AA (not just the bench) and gotten similar results to Ethers review over at ClubOC? Basiclly that means Very high, Any AA level min frame levels ~ 20 or so?

Thanks for any input in advance, I appreciate it!!

[Scubar]

Extremely happy with mine. Have played every game so far @ 1080p with 8xAA. Even Crysis.

You wont be dissappointed in playing all your games with 8xAA or 16xAA.

[Bwdsmart]

Originally Posted by Scubar

Extremely happy with mine. Have played every game so far @ 1080p with 8xAA. Even Crysis.

You wont be dissappointed in playing all your games with 8xAA or 16xAA.

Well that sounds good so far, anyone else feel free to chime in. Just a matter if I can convince my bro to buy my GPU.

Additional Comment:

Oh yes, and I'm curious about what kind of OC's you all have reached on these beasts!

[Orac]

happy with mine, again it plays everything maxed in its sleep seemingly. and see rig 1 in sig for my OC. the card will go further but need to get some othere stuff sorted.

[DiMeLo]

Total beast of a card. I just recently purchased a 30" lcd and can play all my games @ 2560x1600 with max settings (exept Crysis). My card does 850 on the core and 950 on the ram. I am looking into purchasing a waterblock for it but have not made up my mind on wich brand. Great card no regrets here.

[Bwdsmart]

Originally Posted by Orac

happy with mine, again it plays everything maxed in its sleep seemingly. and see rig 1 in sig for my OC. the card will go further but need to get some othere stuff sorted.

You aren't getting a bottleneck from your CPU? just curious

And now I have to make the tough decision, My plan was to wait until summer 09 for Denab/Nehalm and the nvidia/ATI refresh. Then again judging by its performance in Crysis I can use the card in my next build and probably not worry about bottleneck as I think it's going to take a year or two to catch up on Crysis graphic wise.

Hate decisions like this!!!!!

[Orac]

as i am getting some bottleneck at the CPU in some games, but i am goning to be waiting for deneb and till i get a new mobo ect, if i remember correctly 4.6 on a core 2 dual (i think so dont quote me) is enough to remove the bottleneck from 2 of these cards so you should be good with a quad at 3ghz

[Scubar]

As for Ocs, i have have mine at 800 Core and 977 on ram when running for benchs as the ram does start to artifact when it gets too hot. fan on 50% sorts that problem out though. Most of the time i just run it at 770/962

[AruisDante]

Originally Posted by Bwdsmart

You aren't getting a bottleneck from your CPU? just curious

And now I have to make the tough decision, My plan was to wait until summer 09 for Denab/Nehalm and the nvidia/ATI refresh. Then again judging by its performance in Crysis I can use the card in my next build and probably not worry about bottleneck as I think it's going to take a year or two to catch up on Crysis graphic wise.

Hate decisions like this!!!!!

Originally Posted by Orac

as i am getting some bottleneck at the CPU in some games, but i am goning to be waiting for deneb and till i get a new mobo ect, if i remember correctly 4.6 on a core 2 dual (i think so dont quote me) is enough to remove the bottleneck from 2 of these cards so you should be good with a quad at 3ghz

GAHHHH.... more ridiculous talk of CPU's bottlenecking high end GPUs.... see my rant here

now that that's out of the way....

The 4870x2 is a very, very nice card. If I hadn't needed to replace my 8800GTX right when I did, I would have had one instead of a GTX280. You'd be very happy with it.

[Bwdsmart]

Originally Posted by Scubar

As for Ocs, i have have mine at 800 Core and 977 on ram when running for benchs as the ram does start to artifact when it gets too hot. fan on 50% sorts that problem out though. Most of the time i just run it at 770/962

Well I crank my fan to 100% when gaming/overclocking (unless it's really easy to play at stock speeds.....everything for this card) I have the 5.1 drown out the noise!


I swear, the 1950XT is the loudest card I have ever heard. I honestly think its louder then my vaccume cleaner!! My buddy runs that card now, Maybe I could convince him to buy my other card and go tri-fire. That would suck for a few reasons

A.) Just created a Raid-0 on my 680i, it would have to die.
B.) P35 has 16x and 4x on the slots
C.) 700w is pushing it for an 8800GTX setup much less that!

[Orac]

Originally Posted by AruisDante

GAHHHH.... more ridiculous talk of CPU's bottlenecking high end GPUs.... see my rant here

now that that's out of the way....

The 4870x2 is a very, very nice card. If I hadn't needed to replace my 8800GTX right when I did, I would have had one instead of a GTX280. You'd be very happy with it.

you can rant all you like but when a 100MHz increase in CPU gives more than 10 FPS you will struggle to tell anyone that the CPU isnt bottlenecking, along with never having 100% (never seeing both above 80% at the same time) usage on either GPUs while seeing over 80% usage on 4 cores... so no CPU bottlneck??? like i say 4GHz on a dual should do it, and 3GHz on my quad wouls be ebough to get everythng runing just so.

so go ahead and rant until you go blue the face and it still isnt gonna remove the fact there is still some bottleneck there.

[Bwdsmart]

Well I run 1920x1200, and will be running AA if/when I get the card, so my quad should be plenty!

[Scubar]

8800GTX SLI wont be bottlenecked by the Q6600 @ 3.4

However the 4870X2 will be bottlenecked by it. I noticed a fps increase in going from 3.6 to 3.8 on my Q9450. Ideally i need to push it to 4.2-4.4 in order to have no bottleneck although thats still only an estimation, It might need more i dont know.

[Bwdsmart]

Even with high AA levels @ 1920x1200?

Additional Comment:

Only saying that, because 3.4 is the highest stable oc I've gotten.

[SSPrncVegeta]

Originally Posted by Orac

you can rant all you like but when a 100MHz increase in CPU gives more than 10 FPS you will struggle to tell anyone that the CPU isnt bottlenecking

Ha ha ha, good one. 100mhz! Classic.

The truth is it doesn't really matter what speed your cpu is. If you have a Core2 or a Phenom, at 19x12 you won't notice see a difference. In some cases even an X2 will suffice at 12x10.

[Scubar]

Originally Posted by Bwdsmart

Even with high AA levels @ 1920x1200?

Additional Comment:

Only saying that, because 3.4 is the highest stable oc I've gotten.

Yes even at that. My fps were still going up from 3.6-3.8 in Crysis Bench at V High 1920x1080 8xAA

[Orac]

Originally Posted by SSPrncVegeta

Ha ha ha, good one. 100mhz! Classic.

The truth is it doesn't really matter what speed your cpu is. If you have a Core2 or a Phenom, at 19x12 you won't notice see a difference. In some cases even an X2 will suffice at 12x10.

well there seem to be a few other people who disagree with this... need i say any more

[AruisDante]

10 fps? Where? Max fps? Joy, you can render the sky 10fps faster. Here's a little tip... If it's not increasing your min fps, it's not actually helping you. Who cares if you can render an open scene at 200 fps or 210 fps. It's not helping at all. And that's the problem with a lot of benches, they have scenes of very low detail that artificially inflate the max and average fps numbers. This is when people think that they're aliviating a 'bottleneck' when really they aren't.

[SSPrncVegeta]

100mhz does nothing, even on a program that's multithreaded to scale to four cores. If you're running at 12x10 you might see a handful of extra frames over the cores of a long period that would bump the average framerate up 1fps. Going from a dualcore 2.5ghz to quadcore 3.2ghz in Crysis yields a 4ghz upgrade at 16x10. 700mhz is greater than 100mhz, and 4fps is less than 10fps. Your equation is bogus and it gets worse as you raise the resolution.

[Orac]

funny isnt it, i never said it was max FPS or min, oh and yeh thats min and if i remember rightly from reading aruis bit that he said that CPUs does bottleneck, this is gonna vary from system to system, you know it seems odd that even tho it is in herently there you deny it is.

oh and i never said that it was in quad optimised game, seeing as there so very few of them there isnt even much point taking into acount. this is all while keeping my RAM at 800MHz - so just out of interest where is the extra performance coming from if the GPUs and RAM staty the same, thin air???

now i dont get me wrong i do think that the CPU bottleneck can be a little over rated and a term that is over used and both of your link do say that there is often a small bottleneck there but usally unoticeble. to add to this there is the enevatble smothness that can come from increased CPU performance even if you dont see any FPS gain.

so yeh you may not gain much in max FPS but because you dont get such large or any fluxuations in the FPS the game will be better to play - this essentialy amount to a CPU bottleneck as the increased performance of the CPU has improved the GPU output. also i think there is far too much attention on MAX FPS instead of overal play of the game itself - hense why benches are useless in real world apps.

now if you dont like the idea that the CPU can be a bottle neck with out holding back FPS then tuff cookies go moan somewhere else because i for one cant be bothered to right this out again