Future proofing

[Heaton89]

Hey I'm looking to put my system together for in honesty bf3 and wow. Current specs are phenom 2 955 be oc'd at highest I could get it too stabley. 8 gb ram 460gtx soc edition. W7 home prem. Mobo is a m4a87td evo. Pci-e 2.0 x16 and a x4 With air cooling. My question is what would u say the best card I could put in to my system would be? Without bottlenecking? Oh and my psu is a antec 750w gold edition. Thanks guys

 

[bystander]

You could put in two 6990's or two 590's without bottlenecking your system, depending on your monitor setup.

 

[mactronix]

Hey I'm looking to put my system together for in honesty bf3 and wow. Current specs are phenom 2 955 be oc'd at highest I could get it too stabley. 8 gb ram 460gtx soc edition. W7 home prem. Mobo is a m4a87td evo. Pci-e 2.0 x16 and a x4 With air cooling. My question is what would u say the best card I could put in to my system would be? Without bottlenecking? Oh and my psu is a antec 750w gold edition. Thanks guys

Couple of questions, What is the actual OC on the CPU ? What resolution do you play at. Take a look at this http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/balanced-gaming-pc-overclock,2699.html
You will be mainly interested in the Overclocked 955 performance(obviously). The 5970 card which is featured in the tests has about 3 cards that are more powerful see here http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_580_Matrix/27.html

So assuming a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and an overclock of near to the one in the review i would say the answer is pretty much which ever one you fancy/can afford.

Mactronix

 

[mosox]

Wait for the new 7000 series in the fall. The CPU is fine.

 

[Heaton89]

It's the same speed as in the test ye. 7000 series? Ati is that? Retail at say 400 pound or so? Aslong as a 500 series or a 7000 series wouldn't bottle neck me then id be very interested

 

[Heaton89]

Since my mobo is a pci e 2.0 but with 1 x16 slot and 1 x 4 is crossfire viable or will it be pointless? Ive never read in to crossfire and such

 

[mactronix]

There is a loss for PCIE scaling with a X4 but i cant remember exactly what it is, its not huge though i know that. 5-10% at a guess. Toms have done a scaling article im sure of it. Techpowerup here you go http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/1.html
Not really sure you would need to run dual cards though. but if you want it would seem not to be an option.

Mactronix

 

[bystander]

You still haven't given us your resolution or monitor setup.

As far as x4 vs x8 vs x16, I've seen different results, and varying vastly depending on the motherboard. Using a P55 platform, THG saw a lost of 20-30% performance, but only about 10% with the x58 platform.

 

[purple stain]

I actually just looked up the Tom's review on the PCI-express slots performance with x4/x8/x16 loss.It seems that you only loose about 5-10 fps with runnning a card in a x4 slot.So it really isn't as huge of a loss as everyone makes it out to be.

I would suggest going with a another GTX460 for SLI.GTX460's a cheap now and are still a very powerful card.But if you wanted to get a "new" card I would suggest going with a 6950.The 6950's tesselation will defnitly come in handy for BF3.

 

[bystander]

I actually just looked up the Tom's review on the PCI-express slots performance with x4/x8/x16 loss.It seems that you only loose about 5-10 fps with runnning a card in a x4 slot.So it really isn't as huge of a loss as everyone makes it out to be.

I would suggest going with a another GTX460 for SLI.GTX460's a cheap now and are still a very powerful card.But if you wanted to get a "new" card I would suggest going with a 6950.The 6950's tesselation will defnitly come in handy for BF3.

What platform were they using?

 

[bystander]

The reason I ask, is here is an example of 2 systems being compared with x16, x8 and x4 setups and one was hammered far more than the other: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p55-pci-express-scaling,2517-3.html

 

[Heaton89]

Monitor res is 1920 by 10 80 ideally. Just one monitor in VGA possibly 2 at a later date. Its a 21 " widescreen. No Idea how to tell platform? Is that chipset? If so my mobo is above. Sorry my techie knowledge is somthing to be desired lol. Thanks in advance guys

 

[Heaton89]

Unsure if my mobo is sli compatible to be honest. It says crossfire ready but I don't know if that means I can do sli aswell?

 

[Heaton89]

My platform is windows 7 64 bit home prem

 

[bystander]

You have an AM3 motherboard. Which I unfortunately have never seen a comparison of x4 PCIe slots. As you can see by the link I posted, x4 isn't bad on x58, which mactronix' review showed as well as mine, but on a p55 system, x4 is horrible.

I don't know which the AM3 system is going to be more comparable, but I was actually asking purple stank about the test setup he saw.

 

[purple stain]

I think it might have been the one you just had.Still even on a bad board on a x4 slot the max loss is 10fps.That isn't to bad given how much of a gain you get from adding a second card.