Radeon HD 8970 & Intel Core i7-3770K @ 4.2 GHz

[blazorthon]

Crossfire only gets you so far.. You get 50% higher performance the most in some games if the drivers are made by god himself and there are games in which it doesn't matter. It's a good idea if your card is cheap and old, and you don't have money to buy a good new one, but I wouldn't bother otherwise. And besides, it's just beating the dead horse.. Unless you are some maniac who has his wall covered in monitors and wants to have insanely high frame rates, those people buy a bunch of brand new cards.

LOL, Crossfire is almost always between 75% and 100% faster with the current cards and drivers so long as there aren't other bottle-necks such as a CPU that can't keep up or a memory capacity or bandwidth bottle-neck. Crossfire works best on the newer, higher end cards and it is a proven fact that cheap, old cards are in fact usually the worst for it. What you say is completely contradictory to what the experts say and my own considerable experience from building hundreds of systems for clients.

 

[blazorthon]

My motherboard supports up to 4 GPUs: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8Z77M_PRO/ !

Any motherboard with at least two PCIe x16 slots (even if one or both of them are electrically only PCIe x4 slots) can support up to four GPUs, depending on the cards in use. Regardless, quad-GPU arrays are known for their generally poor scaling, so I don't think that it's particularly important.

 

[jnjnilson6]

I do know some people considered "experts" who know nothing about hardware. For example "an expert" built a PC for my friend in 2010 with HD 5850, 4 GB RAM, AMD 1090T for 3000 euro.. Seriously? The specifications are good, but they are complete junk for 3000 euro, he could have given my friend a HD 5970, 16 GB RAM and an i7 980X, and there would've still been spare money!

 

[blazorthon]

I do know some people considered "experts" who know nothing about hardware. For example "an expert" built a PC for my friend in 2010 with HD 5850, 4 GB RAM, AMD 1090T for 3000 euro.. Seriously? The specifications are good, but they are complete junk for 3000 euro, he could have given my friend a HD 5970, 16 GB RAM and an i7 980X, and there would've still been spare money!

I consider the experts running Tom's hardware articles, Anand, Tech Report, and several other such sites to be quite credible for this and worthy of being called experts.

 

[redeemer]

I consider the experts running Tom's hardware articles, Anand, Tech Report, and several other such sites to be quite credible for this and worthy of being called experts.

Agreed mostly though I would not place Tomshardware up there with Anandtech, Tech Report or Guru3d

 

[blazorthon]

Agreed mostly though I would not place Tomshardware up there with Anandtech, Tech Report or Guru3d

Tom's might not be as good as Techreport and Anand, but Techreport has other issues (such as very small test selection sizes for gaming) and I definitely wouldn't put Guru3D anywhere near even Tom's due to their recurring Nvidia bias with drivers (Guru3D seems to like testing current Nvidia drivers against old AMD drivers in "fair" comparisons for current cards instead of testing new drivers for both companies' cards). Tom's is still pretty decent most of the time anyway. They were among the few sites to give non-biased comparisons of Nvidia's GT/GTX 600 series to AMD's Radeon 7000 series as each card came out, granted some of their article titles were misleading and several of their reviews were a few days late.

 

[redeemer]

Tom's might not be as good as Techreport and Anand, but Techreport has other issues (such as very small test selection sizes for gaming) and I definitely wouldn't put Guru3D anywhere near even Tom's due to their recurring Nvidia bias with drivers (Guru3D seems to like testing current Nvidia drivers against old AMD drivers in "fair" comparisons for current cards instead of testing new drivers for both companies' cards). Tom's is still pretty decent most of the time anyway. They were among the few sites to give non-biased comparisons of Nvidia's GT/GTX 600 series to AMD's Radeon 7000 series as each card came out, granted some of their article titles were misleading and several of their reviews were a few days late.

Really well from the impression I perceive the opposite actually Toms is very much Intel/Nvidia biased, this is the general consensus.

 

[blazorthon]

Really well from the impression I perceive the opposite actually Toms is very much Intel/Nvidia biased, this is the general consensus.

Almost every recommended card by Tom's is an AMD card and almost every graphics card in their SBMs is an AMD card. They do prefer Intel CPUs over AMD, but that is not without reason. Intel's i5s are undisputed as ideal gaming CPUs for budgets that allow for them and although Intel is usually chosen for their cheaper CPUs in the lower budgets too, AMD is still given recognition with several CPU recommendations and occasional use in SBMs.

Tom's recently changed several CPU recommendations to AMD in light of modern games getting progressively better at scaling across four to eight threads and AMD irrefutably holding the highly threaded performance for the money crown at almost every price point. Tom's even listed the Radeon 7970 GHz Edition as the fastest single GPU graphics card until Titan and it's still the fastest single GPU graphics ard with a value recommendation.

Tom's, unlike many other sites, also doesn't give either graphics company a driver advantage, has a fairly diverse testing suite, and although often late, tests almost everything that they can.

I don't see why people accuse Tom's of being biased against AMD. The only valid point that I can think of in such an argument against Tom's would be their insistence on reference cooler performance and noise being very important for enthusiasts, a crowd that generally uses non-reference cards.

 

[redeemer]

Almost every recommended card by Tom's is an AMD card and almost every graphics card in their SBMs is an AMD card. They do prefer Intel CPUs over AMD, but that is not without reason. Intel's i5s are undisputed as ideal gaming CPUs for budgets that allow for them and although Intel is usually chosen for their cheaper CPUs in the lower budgets too, AMD is still given recognition with several CPU recommendations and occasional use in SBMs.

Tom's recently changed several CPU recommendations to AMD in light of modern games getting progressively better at scaling across four to eight threads and AMD irrefutably holding the highly threaded performance for the money crown at almost every price point. Tom's even listed the Radeon 7970 GHz Edition as the fastest single GPU graphics card until Titan and it's still the fastest single GPU graphics ard with a value recommendation.

Tom's, unlike many other sites, also doesn't give either graphics company a driver advantage, has a fairly diverse testing suite, and although often late, tests almost everything that they can.

I don't see why people accuse Tom's of being biased against AMD. The only valid point that I can think of in such an argument against Tom's would be their insistence on reference cooler performance and noise being very important for enthusiasts, a crowd that generally uses non-reference cards.

Agreed but lets be honest most sites have some sorts of bias. I do not know how long you have been cruising Toms Hardware for but this interpretation was not built over night instead realized over the years.

The thing about Toms is the inconsistency of it news publishing when compared to other websites in regards to Nvidia and AMD.

 

[blazorthon]

Agreed but lets be honest most sites have some sorts of bias. I do not know how long you have been cruising Toms Hardware for but this interpretation was not built over night instead realized over the years.

The thing about Toms is the inconsistency of it news publishing when compared to other websites in regards to Nvidia and AMD.

For all it matters, I've been a member at Tom's for around two and a half years and an active member for more than half as long.

What inconsistency? It lines up quite well with what Anand posts and Anand is among the most relied on so long as you avoid their crappy comparison tools and instead read their newer articles.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, this sort of thing might be better discussed in a different thread instead of me hijacking this one :lol:

 

[Sakkura]

My motherboard supports up to 4 GPUs: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8Z77M_PRO/ !

Two HD 7990s on a mATX motherboard?

 

[ghettotank]

Just wanted to put this out there: http://www.amd.com/us/Documents/AMD_Radeon_HD_8970_Feature_Summary.pdf
Dpesn't look much different to the 7970, just faster clock speeds. Nothing an overclock can't do

 

[Sakkura]

Just wanted to put this out there: http://www.amd.com/us/Documents/AMD_Radeon_HD_8970_Feature_Summary.pdf
Dpesn't look much different to the 7970, just faster clock speeds. Nothing an overclock can't do

Those are the exact same clocks speeds as the 7970 GHz edition. That's the change they made from the original 7970 to the GHz edition. This is just a straight rebrand; the only difference between a 7970 GHz and an OEM 8970 is the sticker.

The 8000 series is currently just an OEM rebrand. It's not the successor to the 7000 series. Eventually there'll be a retail 8000 series, or who knows, maybe they'll call it the 9000 series.