AMD Build Nov 2010. 6870 in 2 Way Crossfire

[QuantumPhx]

Alright im back again with a refined build now that the AMD 6000 series cards are out so here it is:


AMD Phenom II X6 1090t
Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD7 (Will be adding 4 cards eventually so thats why I got this board)
Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 6870 (Getting 2 and putting them in a crossfire setup)
Corsair DDR3 4GB PC-10600/1333 (2x XMS3 2GB) TW3X4G1333C9DHX (Getting 2 kits so a total of 8GB of ram)
Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000watt (for the 4 video cards eventually)
Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA (i would like a different hard drive because there have been bad reviews but there isent anything else 1tb in the same price range, if you know of one please let me know)
LG GH22NS50 SATA DVD Re-Writer (blu-ray fails in my opinion so i just got a cheepy dvd drive, thats all i really need, there is a reason they invented ISO mounters lol)
Cooler Master HAF-X (love the case, has lots of features and also fits all my components nicely)
Noctua NH-U12P SE2 (may be over clocking but probably not since in not very experienced in over clocking, i just like to have it in case i ever do)
Antec TriCool Clear 120 x 25mm Fan ( to cool the first 2 video cards/ram i put in)
Antec BigBoy 200 x 30mm Fan (i have no idea why cooler master dident include 2 top fans with the case so this is to make up for there stupidity)

Windows 7 Ultimate X64

I will most likley wait for the 6970's to come out and then ill do some research on them to see if they are worth it, otherwise i will stick with the 2 6870's.

So any suggestions would be appreciated. Oh and also I im trying to keep it in the 2000 dollar range.

Thanks, Quantum

 

[mosox]

You can't crossfire more than two 68xx cards. Get a cheaper mobo and a 750W PSU or better wait for the 69xx..

 

[QuantumPhx]

You can't crossfire more than two 68xx cards. Get a cheaper mobo and a 750W PSU or better wait for the 69xx..

sorry if i wasent clear. i was going to do a 4-way crossfire with different cards eventually not the 6870, most likley AMD 69XX

 

[mosox]

Well, let's wait a few weeks for the 69xx and see how they scale in CF. But a single 6970 should do for any game out there. Not to mention the HD 6990.

 

[Somebody_007]

AMD cards scale badly once you start going 2 cards or higher nvidia takes a huge lead in bang for buck.

 

[sp12]

The above is ridiculously false. Nvidia cards are the ones that scale terribly past 2 cards, AMD cards just scale mediocrely.

That said, you will definitely be CPU bottlenecked by any AMD CPU with more than 2 GPUs (assuming 1920 resolutions), so an i7 platform may make more sense here.

 

[Somebody_007]

The above is ridiculously false. Nvidia cards are the ones that scale terribly past 2 cards, AMD cards just scale mediocrely.

That said, you will definitely be CPU bottlenecked by any AMD CPU with more than 2 GPUs (assuming 1920 resolutions), so an i7 platform may make more sense here.

I'm assuming you agree that 2-way sli is better than 2-way CF here is just a review to back it up if you disagree. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/crossfire-sli-scaling,review-32023-10.html

About the 3-way scaling there really isn't that much revelant info on the topic because none of the current good cards(cool, cheap and fast as in 6xxx and 460s) support it and there are hardly any benchmarks with 3-way crossfire, because it's simply not sensible. Please show me benchmarks where 3-way crossfire scales better than 3-way sli( and not those stupid benchmarks that were done a few days/weeks after release because obviously beta drivers aren't made to optimise 3-way).

You are right about the cpu though however the resolution has nothing/little to with it.

 

[vindictive]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185 Amazing Harddrive

 

[Noodletoe]

I'm assuming you agree that 2-way sli is better than 2-way CF here is just a review to back it up if you disagree. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/crossfire-sli-scaling,review-32023-10.html

According to your link, at 1920x1080 they scale the same for CF and SLI, but at the resolution 2560x1680 SLI is better than CF, but that is pretty useless for 99% of us... So stating "2-way sli is better than 2-way CF" is wrong and intentionally misleading.

 

[Somebody_007]

I'm assuming you agree that 2-way sli is better than 2-way CF here is just a review to back it up if you disagree. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/crossfire-sli-scaling,review-32023-10.html

According to your link, at 1920x1080 they scale the same for CF and SLI, but at the resolution 2560x1680 SLI is better than CF, but that is pretty useless for 99% of us... So stating "2-way sli is better than 2-way CF" is wrong and intentionally misleading.

Sorry for linking the wrong page there that page is pretty misleading as you pointed out. Here is a better page to prove my point http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/crossfire-sli-scaling,review-32023-7.html here we see clearly 1 5870>1 470 and 2 5870s<2 470s

The last page which I linked first is pretty messed up because many games don't go higher than a certain fps which messes up all the charts like we see here http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/crossfire-sli-scaling,review-32023-5.html which means that on 1920 the difference between all the setups is small because most setups reach the fps limit whereas at 2560 most don't so the performance difference is more obvious. It's not as much that sli is better for higher resolutions as it is sli is simply scales better than crossfire and this comes to show more when the proggram being run actually needs all the horsepower(wether this is by high resolutions or higher graphics settings the point remains the same: sli scales better than crossfire for the time being at least).