Dual 4970 or Triple 480

[carbon1121]

Which is would be more future proof and give more fps to you. Don't worry about cooling or anything im building a computer from Origin PC and just curious to know which is the way to go here?

 

[Derbixrace]

well i would beleive that gtx 480s are more futureproof because of their tesselation performance

 

[AMW1011]

Well, you will need one hell of a power supply and one hell of a case, but 3 GTX 480s would do better. Note that I gauarntee that you won't be able to overclock 3 GTX 480s in SLI with air cooling, they simply produce too much heat.

However, if you get 3 MSI 5870 Lightnings or Sapphire 5870 Toxic ediiton cards, you can overclock them to well past GTX 480 performance and they will produce much less heat, noise, and require much less power all for the same or greater performance.

 

[carbon1121]

The cards will be '1536MB GDDR5 Nvidia GTX 480 Liquid Cooled - Extended Lead Time' thats what the site says and the psu is going to be a '1.5 Kilowatt Silverstone Strider' adn the mb is 'EVGA X58 SLI Classified' the cpu is 'OverClocked Intel Core i7 980X 4.0-4.4GHz LGA 1366 Hex-Core Processor (12MB L3 Cache)' with 'ORIGIN High - Performance CPU Liquid Cooling Powered by KOOLANCE' basically my system is going to cost around 10k - 13k and running on a 30inch hd monitor

 

[rescawen]

imo 2 toxic 5850 will serve u well, and their power consumption and noise are so low and that will benefit a lot, anyways anything above is overkill and waste of power.

 

[carbon1121]

Ok what about 3 5970's if that is possible? I'm trying to build this system so that i do not need to upgrade my pc for a good 5-10 years

 

[notty22]

All MY opinion.
If you can afford it, go with 3 gtx 480's water cooled.
ATI or Nvidia 2 gpu scaling is excellent.
3 and 4 gpu scaling is not.
Nvidia has better 3 way scaling and thats in some games.
So putting 2 -5970's is not a good idea. That puts you right to 4 way crossfire. In some cases they don't add to performance and the extra hardware you computer has to deal with sometimes costs you a couple percent in fps. As strange as that sounds.

No combination of parts available today will guarantee , 5 years future proof. That rig will definitely be usable then, but its impossible to gauge future technology.

 

[mosox]

I'm trying to build this system so that i do not need to upgrade my pc for a good 5-10 years

You're doing it wrong. Think if you bought a high end PC a few years ago. It would be useless now, different video card slot, CPU socket, memory slots, slow CPU and video card, etc etc.

Things are moving fast in the PC hardware, get only what you need for now and keep upgrading.

Anyway, there's no difference if you run a game with 200 fps or 60 fps, the game runs the same. And you don't see better a movie at 200 fps, the quality is the same.

Get one 5970. And a small car.

 

[carbon1121]

True i know that because i did do that i have a build right now thats a p.o.s its a pci only and a single core celeron and cant go any higher on the mb. at least around 5 years is all im looking for

 

[Derbixrace]

3 gtx 480 would be great, why go with something that barely can do tesselation?

 

[itisravi]

Fermi scales much better than GTX 200 series which in turn scales better than ATI 4000/5000 cards.

Here is a link comparing 3x480 and 2x5970. Note that 5970 setup won't even run many games at high settings on 30" monitor due to the 1GB memory.

http://www.maingearforums.com/entry.php?24-So-You-Want-To-Buy-A-GeForce-Part-2

And IMO, Nvidia 3D surround with 3 1080p monitors will provide better gaming experience than a 30" single monitor and it can fully utilize all that horsepower. I am getting such a setup myself.

You will get a 30" monitor from OriginPC @ $1300. At just $100 more, you can get 3 1080p 3D-capable monitors from Acer ($400 each) and 3D vision glass ($200).

 

[builderbobftw]

2 5970s would be cheaper/ cooler, less power usage, and damn near as fast or faster.

 

[rofl_my_waffle]

To be honest 5-10 years is a lot of time. According to moore's law, transistor count for processors double every 2 years. Which has been pretty bang on accurate since 1971.

You are far better off putting that money in a bank and collect interest and 5-10 years down the road buy something with like 4x the speed.

Also SLI/Crossfire doesn't give good performance for money. You pay full price, get full power consumption/heat/noise for only 30%-60% performance for the second card. The third would add like 10%-15% for another full price card.

If you are filthy rich then who cares but if you are seriously going to hold back for 5-10 years. Don't even think about it.

 

[builderbobftw]

Well, He caould wait 40-50 years, and I bet stuff would be even faster!

He can't wait forever....

 

[rofl_my_waffle]

But he is preparing for 40-50 years down the road today.

Why not get something that can do everything today and leave the future stuff in the future. A single 5970 can drive pretty much anything.

 

[anonymousdude]

Build a PC now for around 1.5-2k and save the rest for 2 or 3 years down the road or when you feel the need for an upgrade. I guarantee you that that within two years the build that you are planning now will be outperformed for a fraction of the price.

 

[Guest]

I'm trying to build this system so that i do not need to upgrade my pc for a good 5-10 years

You're doing it wrong. Think if you bought a high end PC a few years ago. It would be useless now, different video card slot, CPU socket, memory slots, slow CPU and video card, etc etc.

Things are moving fast in the PC hardware, get only what you need for now and keep upgrading.

Anyway, there's no difference if you run a game with 200 fps or 60 fps, the game runs the same. And you don't see better a movie at 200 fps, the quality is the same.

Get one 5970. And a small car.

i have had my current pc for 5 years and it runs left for dead 2... my specs are: 1.09 ghz amd single core proccesor, 128mb ati card, i think its the x1050 not sure i am probably wrong, 1 gb of ram, and thats about my sytem