I recently performed a complete overhaul of my rig due to a catastrophic failure of my 780i XfX motherboard. I went from an e8500 @ 3.8ghz w/8gb of ddr2 and 2 gtx 280's in sli to a I7 920 @ 3.4 ghz (for now) on an EVGA X58 LE and 6gb 1800mhz DDR3 with a HIS Radeon 5970. The install went really well.....and I must say...Overclocking the 920 was easy as my X. *** EASY ***. Anyway, 3.4ghz is a really minor OC for this chip...Please understand that I wanted to give it some breathing room during it's burn in. So far temps are around 26-29c idle and around 43-51 under load (crysis / dirt 2). 58c under Prime 95 blend test.
Now for the fun part. The 5970. After unpacking the video card I had to sit and just bask in its glory for a moment. The screen shots don't give this thing justice...It is indeed a huge video card. My nephew thought it was a remote control car. It installed with no problems. I was running a fresh install of windows 7 so no driver cleaning was needed.
The first thing I noticed is that the colors being rendered seemed to be more vibrant through the Radeon card than they were through the GTX 280s. At first I thought this was my imagination, I mean, why would the picture be any different from one card to the next? Well, for a sanity check I decided to call my wife into the room. She uses my rig for some of her graphic design work via adobe so she is really accustomed to how colors look on my monitors. I had her fire up adobe photo shop and play around a bit..Then she asked me "did you get another monitor or something? The picture looks better..." Yay!! I'm not crazy!
On to the meat and potatoes. I reinstalled my game library and set up eyefinity on my 2 x dell U2410/ 1 x 2408wfp monitors. It took a little time to figure out where to go so I will post the path here for those of you who might be in the same predicament: Graphics > Display > Option Arrow > Display Group > Create Group > 3 Displays. Catalyst Control Center was a little weird at first as it's not as straight forward as Nvidia's, but ultimately I got used to it pretty quickly. A button in the main menu, or under graphics to enable /disable eyefinity would be nice. Overall I think that CCC is a much more robust program than Nvidia's, but the layout could definitely use some work. I'm probably just used to seeing every option on one page.
Games:
Crysis Warhead was buttery smooth at enthusiast settings 4x AA at 1920 x 1200. It looked great, never saw frames dip below 30 and I saw them get as high as 61fps. At 5760x1200 in those settings it was unplayable. Gamer settings made it a little better. Ultimately I had to drop it down to a mix of gamer and mainstream (shadows, post processing etc.) to get playable frame rates. Things improved drastically at 3840x1200 on all options set to gamer as the game played smooth as silk with minimum frames back around 30 and max topping out around 46. I was really impressed by that actually. This card is beast.
Dirt 2: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping...just a beautiful game. Playing it in eyefinity is a trip!
DAO: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping. Cut scenes are jacked up, but thats to be expected as they probably don't render them at such a crazy aspect ratio (48:10?? LOL).
Hawx: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. Can get slightly choppy at times...Nothing that would make the game unplayable. This went away once I OC'd the card. Beautiful in eyefinity.
Supcom: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping. FoV is kind of funky at times and the menu's are skewed some. Know your hotkeys!! This is the only way to play RTS games for me from now on lol.
CoH: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping. Same as Supcom only the FoV problems much more pronounced. You get used to it...I would hope they fix this in a driver update.
In all these games I never saw temps go past 70 c. I can't really attest to noise since I am using a Cosmos 1000 case that is loaded with Scythe Ultra Kaze 3000 rpm 120mm fans. In other words...They are louder than the card could ever be haha. All in all, I am incredibly happy with my purchase. The performance of the 5970 is without a doubt impressive. Will Fermi be competition for this card? I am sure. But to be honest... I don't care. To be quite frank I was getting sick and tired of Nvidia and their pricing..not to mention their policies regarding competitive brands. Seeing them release cartoons, memos, press releases from their CEO bashing all of their competition just seemed childish / hypocritical to me. Especially when they disabled physics on their OWN F$&*ing HARDWARE because you have a competitors video card installed. IMO that's just a lawsuit waiting to happen. I am happily selling off my gtx 280's and never looking back!
Hope you enjoyed this write up thingy...As always, let me know if you have any questions. Pics coming soon!
Now for the fun part. The 5970. After unpacking the video card I had to sit and just bask in its glory for a moment. The screen shots don't give this thing justice...It is indeed a huge video card. My nephew thought it was a remote control car. It installed with no problems. I was running a fresh install of windows 7 so no driver cleaning was needed.
The first thing I noticed is that the colors being rendered seemed to be more vibrant through the Radeon card than they were through the GTX 280s. At first I thought this was my imagination, I mean, why would the picture be any different from one card to the next? Well, for a sanity check I decided to call my wife into the room. She uses my rig for some of her graphic design work via adobe so she is really accustomed to how colors look on my monitors. I had her fire up adobe photo shop and play around a bit..Then she asked me "did you get another monitor or something? The picture looks better..." Yay!! I'm not crazy!
On to the meat and potatoes. I reinstalled my game library and set up eyefinity on my 2 x dell U2410/ 1 x 2408wfp monitors. It took a little time to figure out where to go so I will post the path here for those of you who might be in the same predicament: Graphics > Display > Option Arrow > Display Group > Create Group > 3 Displays. Catalyst Control Center was a little weird at first as it's not as straight forward as Nvidia's, but ultimately I got used to it pretty quickly. A button in the main menu, or under graphics to enable /disable eyefinity would be nice. Overall I think that CCC is a much more robust program than Nvidia's, but the layout could definitely use some work. I'm probably just used to seeing every option on one page.
Games:
Crysis Warhead was buttery smooth at enthusiast settings 4x AA at 1920 x 1200. It looked great, never saw frames dip below 30 and I saw them get as high as 61fps. At 5760x1200 in those settings it was unplayable. Gamer settings made it a little better. Ultimately I had to drop it down to a mix of gamer and mainstream (shadows, post processing etc.) to get playable frame rates. Things improved drastically at 3840x1200 on all options set to gamer as the game played smooth as silk with minimum frames back around 30 and max topping out around 46. I was really impressed by that actually. This card is beast.
Dirt 2: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping...just a beautiful game. Playing it in eyefinity is a trip!
DAO: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping. Cut scenes are jacked up, but thats to be expected as they probably don't render them at such a crazy aspect ratio (48:10?? LOL).
Hawx: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. Can get slightly choppy at times...Nothing that would make the game unplayable. This went away once I OC'd the card. Beautiful in eyefinity.
Supcom: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping. FoV is kind of funky at times and the menu's are skewed some. Know your hotkeys!! This is the only way to play RTS games for me from now on lol.
CoH: Every setting maxed, 5860x1200 : Fluid fps. No stuttering, chopping. Same as Supcom only the FoV problems much more pronounced. You get used to it...I would hope they fix this in a driver update.
In all these games I never saw temps go past 70 c. I can't really attest to noise since I am using a Cosmos 1000 case that is loaded with Scythe Ultra Kaze 3000 rpm 120mm fans. In other words...They are louder than the card could ever be haha. All in all, I am incredibly happy with my purchase. The performance of the 5970 is without a doubt impressive. Will Fermi be competition for this card? I am sure. But to be honest... I don't care. To be quite frank I was getting sick and tired of Nvidia and their pricing..not to mention their policies regarding competitive brands. Seeing them release cartoons, memos, press releases from their CEO bashing all of their competition just seemed childish / hypocritical to me. Especially when they disabled physics on their OWN F$&*ing HARDWARE because you have a competitors video card installed. IMO that's just a lawsuit waiting to happen. I am happily selling off my gtx 280's and never looking back!
Hope you enjoyed this write up thingy...As always, let me know if you have any questions. Pics coming soon!
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