Core i7: 4-Way CrossFire, 3-way SLI, Paradise?

[Ferocious]

It wont disappear if you dont move your mouse pointer out of the box after clicking the arrow.

It will be nice to see if AMD has anything that can compete with the i7 up their sleeves...

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]bunnyblaster[/nom]I've been an avid Toms Hardware reader for over 8 years now. This is my first post. It is an issue that has been nagging me the last few updates for Tomshardware. The "page scrolling function" on each page is terribly designed. I find it slow, disappears before I select the page and sometimes does not register at all. I have multiple computers and I draw the same conclusion on all of them. It gets rather annoying when I just want to read some implications or conclusions of some reviews and I can't get there easily without going through 27 pages. Why not just revert to the system everyone else uses with a simpler scroll-down bar? [/citation]

I'll forward this to the operations team. Thanks for the heads-up.

 

[ilovebarny]

GREAT Article Toms!! really enjoyed it. but i think you should have used water cooled GPU's. the systems cost so much and you didnt put temps up so i would have just made your job easyer. another thing that would have been nice is if you had benchmarked the GTX260 core 216 since it costs about half as much to buy three GTX260's instead of three GTX280's.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]ilovebarny[/nom]GREAT Article Toms!! really enjoyed it. but i think you should have used water cooled GPU's. the systems cost so much and you didnt put temps up so i would have just made your job easyer. another thing that would have been nice is if you had benchmarked the GTX260 core 216 since it costs about half as much to buy three GTX260's instead of three GTX280's.[/citation]

Would have loved to add the Core 216s and water cooling--perhaps in the future. As it stood, this was a massive project =)

 

[coupe]

If you buy 2 4870 x2's you are a nub. If you buy 3 280 SLI you are also a nub. The value isn't there.

 

[mapesdhs]

Cangelini,

Do you know if there are any plans for 'professional' series
X58-based mbds with PCIX included? I'm currently using an ASUS
M2N32 WS Pro, exploiting both PCIX and PCI Express for U320
SCSI RAID. Although I do use the system for games (8800GT atm,
for Oblivion/Stalker/CoD4), my main task is video encoding, so
the Core i7 looks like a winner, but will I be able to keep
using my PCIX RAID cards? No doubt all the enthusiast/gamer
boards will only have PCI and PCIe. Have you heard from mbd
makers about Pro solutions? I don't necessarily means boards
like those that use XEON/Opteron with ECC/buffered RAM, eg. my
mbd has a normal 6000+ and unbuffered DDR2/800, and there's an
equivalent board with normal LGA775.

If there won't be any X58 boards with PCIX, no matter, I do
have a Dell PERC 4e/DC PCIe U320 RAID card I can use instead.

Ian.

PS. My system: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/mysystemsummary2.txt

 

[silversound]

Thanks for the review, 4850X2 is out, hope tom you can review it.
You missed lots of product reviews for ATi and AMD products, AMD shanghai chip? 4870X2? 4670? Otherwise you will be a truly pro intel/nvidia partner.

 

[kamkal]

yea the scroll bar is FLOP
the biggest issue is that it goes away if you move your mouse out of it, reverting back to the old bar would be nice

i think i will be waiting until prices droppppp for this new stuff

 

[megamanx00]

Hmm.. seems like nVidia has better algorithms for divvying up the work among GPUs than AMD does. I expect that future drivers will change the situation for the Radeons. I wouldn't expect big improvements for the older quad cores on nVidias part though. After all, dividing the work between GPUs takes alot of CPU overhead, so it's likely nVidia will focus it's efforts on optimizing their drivers for the i7 to bring small improvements while the Older Core2 quads are ass good as they will get under SLi.

 

[megamanx00]

Man, those benchmarks make that poor little Phenom cry next to the i7. hope the 45nm Phenoms post better numbers, but I guess we'll see.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]silversound[/nom]Thanks for the review, 4850X2 is out, hope tom you can review it.You missed lots of product reviews for ATi and AMD products, AMD shanghai chip? 4870X2? 4670? Otherwise you will be a truly pro intel/nvidia partner.[/citation]

We haven't seen a single 4850 X2 card yet. Shanghai is not yet available. 4870 X2 is *IN THIS STORY,* if you read it, and 4670 didn't arrive until well after AMD launched it.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]Cangelini,Do you know if there are any plans for 'professional' seriesX58-based mbds with PCIX included? I'm currently using an ASUSM2N32 WS Pro, exploiting both PCIX and PCI Express for U320SCSI RAID. Although I do use the system for games (8800GT atm,for Oblivion/Stalker/CoD4), my main task is video encoding, sothe Core i7 looks like a winner, but will I be able to keepusing my PCIX RAID cards? No doubt all the enthusiast/gamerboards will only have PCI and PCIe. Have you heard from mbdmakers about Pro solutions? I don't necessarily means boardslike those that use XEON/Opteron with ECC/buffered RAM, eg. my mbd has a normal 6000+ and unbuffered DDR2/800, and there's anequivalent board with normal LGA775.If there won't be any X58 boards with PCIX, no matter, I dohave a Dell PERC 4e/DC PCIe U320 RAID card I can use instead.Ian.PS. My system: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/mysystemsummary2.txt[/citation]

Map,

I believe Supermicro will soon launch its own line of X58 boards--I wouldn't be surprised if those included PCI-X connectivity, given the company's target market.

 

[craig hallworth]

This is an amazign article and one of the reasons I read this website every day, keep up the good work guys thanks for this great evaluation during this exciting time of new hardware release.

 

[cruiseoveride]

If only ATi would hire someone to write Drivers.

 

[scooterlibby]

It would nice to see the Core i7 compared to the e8600. Does quad beat dual yet?

 

[antiacid]

so spending 1250$ for 3way SLI 280gtx, 1000$ on a cpu, 400$ on an enthusiast mobo and 500$ on ram (for a total of around 3100$) will yield good results at high resolution. Well, well...well. What a surprise.

Can't wait for someone to look at fps/$ comparison to actually discuss what is a good "enthusiast" system. As it stands, this kind of system is for "wealthy enthusiasts" which isn't exactly the core market of Nvidia, intel or tom's

 

[anartik]

There may still be drivers to be fixed/enhanced and I would bet Nvidia had the advantage here in dealing with Intel and product development due to the inclusion of SLI. Since AMD got ATI they have been much better than Nvidia in getting out driver releases but they have some serious catching up to do... if they can. I would also wonder about a question someone else asked... if something about the platform favors SLI?

On the other hand we may just finally be seeing the full potential of the Nvidia cards & SLI being realized and theres probably a bunch of ATI fans running around ripping hair out and eating crow lol. The article shed a whole new light on the GPU arena and stopped me in my tracks from going ahead and springing for several ATI cards. I would have to think this review snatched much of the recently found glory away from ATI and has Nvidia laughing all the way to the bank. I have also seen enough light shed on X58 and Nehalem in the past 24 hours to put them back on the next possible upgrade list.

 

[sandmanwn]

Bleh, obviously still far too many driver issues with multi-gpu.

You do great in one benchmark at one resolution. Add a card on the same benchmark at same resolution and your performance plummets.

Outside of research projects and heavy rendering, buying multiple cards when a single card is already over 60fps is just a gimmick to suck some more money out of your bank account.

 

[the last resort]

AMD has another series of processors coming too....
And they will most certainly be better than the current Phenoms.
I don't AMD should be bashed so quickly.

 

[Guest]

Ok...so core i7 is a little better at games than the extreme version C2D. But let me get this right... you want someone to pay 3100$ for a gaming system? you must be kidding. I saw that even those crappy Phenoms performed good in some tests and they cost like 10 times less than Nehalem. I hope AMD will fix the damn drivers (like someone said..they should hire someone to write them) and i also the next AMD CPU will be better (or at least comparable) than the xtreme version from Intel because i'm NEVER gonna buy a 1000+ bucks on damn chip.Seriously Intel are making good chips but they are waaaay too expensive. I've heard that even slower Nehalem chips will not be cheap. And if you add the cost of ddr3 and the mobo you get a real headache.
PS: Nice equipment you got for this almost nice review.(You shouldn even put the 3dmark score on the site. It's fake and i hope nobody trusts synthetic benchmarks (although i know that's not true)).

 

[cangelini]

Check out the paragraph-long caveat right about the chart about comparing AMD scores to Nvidia scores directly. =)

The

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]bogdan-not-amd-fan-[/nom]I've heard that even slower Nehalem chips will not be cheap. And if you add the cost of ddr3 and the mobo you get a real headache.PS: Nice equipment you got for this almost nice review.(You shouldn even put the 3dmark score on the site. It's fake and i hope nobody trusts synthetic benchmarks (although i know that's not true)). [/citation]
Price depends on where you live. With the AUD so weak prices here are garbage. US prices should be ok though, but I'd still rather pick up a Q6600

Also 3DMark, however "fake", is just one of those standard benchmarks that you run because that's just what you do. Every review has it in there, and none would be "complete" without it.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Check out the paragraph-long caveat right about the chart about comparing AMD scores to Nvidia scores directly. =)The [/citation]

Well that got all hosed, didn't it? Should be "...caveat *above* the chart about comparing AMD and Nvidia scores directly."

 

[Tiger King]

very nice article.
but upon reading article from another site, i'm wondering if the editor actually used the latest engineering ATI driver.
check out Guru3D's article:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/core-i7-multigpu-sli-crossfire-game-performance-review/
in that article, ATI and Nvidia cards seem to perform much closer to each other in terms of performance. and the editor on Guru3D said that there was hardly any kinks during the testing.
if anything i've concluded is wrong, please correct me, as i'm a very casual computer person

 

[Tiger King]

http://www.guru3d.com/article/core-i7-multigpu-sli-crossfire-game-performance-review/
for some reason the link didn't show up, so i'm posting it as text