Which is the best video card set up

[attackdog]

Hello,
I am wondering which is the best set up out of the options I have, I have never used two video cards in one pc before. I can either have 2 x 550 Ti 1gb or 2x amd radeon 6750 1gb or 2x 6850

My system will be Asetek liquid cooling, gigabyte ga-990fxa motherboard 8gb ddr3 corsair AMD fx-8150 8core @ 3.60 GHZ

thanks

 

[esrever]

2x 6850 will be a lot faster than the other 2 choices.

 

[de5_Roy]

single radeon hd 6870 (msi twoin frozr or his iceq).
add another 6870 down the line.
among your options, 2x 6850s would be the fastest, faster than a single 6870.

 

[megamanx00]

I say go with the two 6850s I'm guessing you're ordering this from iBuyPower or something. Just make sure you choose an appropriate power supply (though that build should really only need a decent 550W or so PSU). If you're building it yourself though, then you're better off getting one 6950 now, and adding a second one latter, assuming a capable PSU of course ^_^

 

[attackdog]

I say go with the two 6850s I'm guessing you're ordering this from iBuyPower or something. Just make sure you choose an appropriate power supply (though that build should really only need a decent 550W or so PSU). If you're building it yourself though, then you're better off getting one 6950 now, and adding a second one latter, assuming a capable PSU of course ^_^

I am getting it from Cyberpowerpc though have been torn between ibuypower as well but for the money I have, cyberpower gives me that little bit extra eye candy. It comes with a 800 watt xtremegear psu

 

[esrever]

is there a way to get a nicer branded psu in there?

 

[attackdog]

for an extra $6 I can get a 850 watt xtremegear crossfire/sli ready psu anything more than that and I am totally over my budget $75 shipping is what kills me more than anythying

 

[purple stain]

Honestly you'd be saving a lot more money by building it yourself and you really should.The experience and knowledge you gain from doing it yourself is priceless.

To answer your question a 6850 crossfire is a lot faster than any of the other setups you mentioned but should go for a more powerful single card.

 

[amuffin]

for an extra $6 I can get a 850 watt xtremegear crossfire/sli ready psu anything more than that and I am totally over my budget $75 shipping is what kills me more than anythying

horrible power supply.

 

[vrumor]

What is your budget? Can most likely get much more power for the same cash.

 

[attackdog]

I have $1000 give or take 50 bux. Usually I just buy a basic pre built hp or dell and swap out the psu and add a card. I tried doing that with the one i'm currently using now. But the tower is such a crap design I would need to cut the metal around the psu just to make room for a standard one. So I figured I'll just hand this one down, and get a decent one for a change.

To the guys that say the psu is crap I did look at another site IbuyPower instead of cyberpowerpc and I can get pretty much the same build but with a thermaltake psu instead.

On another note I am going for 8 cores, could I easily go down to 6 core and put the money saved from that into better cards and still have a good enough gaming system?

 

[purple stain]

Sounds like you just need a new case.

Both companies provide really poor PSU's.I know because I got a CyberpowerPC before and they use Apevia PSU's which are like the very bottom of the barrel PSU wise,although you could probably do worse.Those PSU's cannot output what it's rated for at all.

They're plenty of people here at Tom's or How-to videos on youtube that can aid you in putting a PC together.You save a bunch of money building it yourself.And you also know that every piece of hardware in your PC is quality.The learning process is also very fun.

 

[esrever]

all the psus that come with these pc are pretty crappy. I'd also suggest against the 8 cores unless you want to do serious encoding.

I'd suggest looking at the intel I5s for the best gaming performance and spend as much as you can on a graphics card set up.

An i5 2400 + 7950(or 6970) would be pretty good for that price point once the 7950 launches.

 

[purple stain]

I agree.

AMD is great for budget but the FX processor's are a bust for gaming and the Phenom ii's are really starting to show their age.I recently had to RMA my 6870 crossfire because my Phneom ii x4 965 @ 3.8ghz was bottlenecking them in CPU demanding games.

For $1000 you could easily get a 2500k and a GTX570 and a bunch of other quality componets.But as I said before with the release of all these new cards so close I would wait it out.

 

[attackdog]

Sounds like you just need a new case.

Both companies provide really poor PSU's.I know because I got a CyberpowerPC before and they use Apevia PSU's which are like the very bottom of the barrel PSU wise,although you could probably do worse.Those PSU's cannot output what it's rated for at all.

They're plenty of people here at Tom's or How-to videos on youtube that can aid you in putting a PC together.You save a bunch of money building it yourself.And you also know that every piece of hardware in your PC is quality.The learning process is also very fun.

The motherboard in this pc doesn't have enough room for 2 cards as well as only coming with a stock 250 watt psu.

As for building my own pc I did match parts from newegg and tigerdirect and there didn't seem to be much in the way of price difference. So if I can get someone to build one for the same price I would spend myself I think I would rather have someone else do it.

I am fairly sure I could build one I have ripped apart enough pc's to know where and how everything goes.

@esrever I do, do a lot of ripping and converting.

 

[esrever]

well if your software can use the 8 cores, it does do well in ripping and converting but I still think an i5 would be good due to it giving exceptional gaming performance while giving decent video conversion performance. As opposed to ok gaming performance of the FX 8 core and good video conversion performance.

 

[purple stain]

From this it doesn't seem like it's a for sure thing if you think of how much gaming performance you would loose.It's only on average about 5-10 seconds faster.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8150-zambezi-bulldozer-990fx,3043-17.html

Can you list the parts?Or provide a link to the Cyberpower/iBuypower PC your looking at.

 

[purple stain]

2500k=$230
Gigabyte Z68-UD3=$160
Corsair 8GB DDR3-1600mhz=$50
CM Storm Trooper=$150
Corsair 750watt=$105
MSI Twin Frozr III=$300

Have about $5 left after all of that and that's not including rebates and most of that ships for free.You could also go even cheaper if you wanted to get a lesser case,PSU or mobo.Which could give you an additional $200.

 

[attackdog]

2500k=$230
Gigabyte Z68-UD3=$160
Corsair 8GB DDR3-1600mhz=$50
CM Storm Trooper=$150
Corsair 750watt=$105
MSI Twin Frozr III=$300

Have about $5 left after all of that and that's not including rebates and most of that ships for free.You could also go even cheaper if you wanted to get a lesser case,PSU or mobo.Which could give you an additional $200.

This is the cyberpower pc listing not including the tower

2 x 550 Ti 1gb or 2x amd radeon 6750 1gb or 2x 6850

My system will be Asetek liquid cooling, gigabyte ga-990fxa motherboard 8gb ddr3 corsair AMD fx-8150 8core @ 3.60 GHZ (first system I have customized) but since starting this thread and from people have been saying I have kinda changed my mind a couple of times.

I don't really bother with rebates I have a wife who hates anything to do with rebates, and has also put me in this budget because well if she didn't I would end up buying stuff I really don't need, because if I really had my way it would make coffee as well as play games lol.

I notice a couple of times people have said get 1 decent card. A couple of things with this, most of the time I have always had a low-mid range card usually budget prices ranging anywhere from 80-120 bux on newegg. I could get a nice high priced card but if it died chances are it would be a while before I could replace it. With dual mid range cards if one dies I always have one I can fall back on, and can probably replace a cheaper card much sooner than I could an expensive one.

I have looked at cyberpower to their intel based pc's but the cards that come with it don't show to good stats for games like battlefield 3 for the ones within my budget usually come with a 520 or 550 Ti which show up as would need to be played in low settings.

I have tried playing it on a GT 240 in low settings and well you may as well just laugh.

 

[esrever]

get the 6850x2 if you are getting that pc, its worth it. but you'd save yourself a lot of money for more performance as well as higher quality parts if you buying a pc yourself.

 

[purple stain]

Intel is more expensive so they probably cheap out on the GPU.

I've owned a CyberpowerPC and they included a Asetek LC setup and it wasn't very good.I believe it was the lowest model(510 I think) but it really doesn't do well with heat at all.And if your thinking of going for a FX processor those things can get really hot if you O.C. and I doubt it would be able to keep up with the heat.

The reason people suggest a more powerful single card is because not all games support multi-GPU setups.Not to mention the hastle of driver support.Some games work flawlessly others will only get half usage and some games doesn't even support it leaving one of the cards just idling doing nothing.

If you are planning on playing BF3 I really suggest going with a 2500k.That is a very CPU demanding game.

 

[megamanx00]

Meh, the 850W unit should be more than enough for that system with two 6850s. If it wasn't, they wouldn't offer it because then they would have a lot of returns. The problem is, the cheaper default boards only offer 16x/4x crossfire and as far as I'm aware only ASRock has a 970 board that offers 8x/8x crossfire and sli. Sure some games will not loose anything for going 16x/4x but others do. I say that for now you go with a board with 8x/8x or 16x/16x SLI or crossfire and a corsair PSU. Really though you may be better off starting with the Z68 configuration

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/CyberPower_Z68_Configurator/

 

[attackdog]

Now I have some things to think about. I thought more core = more power a noob assumption I'm guessing.

So from what I'm understanding for gaming an i5 4 core @ 3.30ghz will be better than amd's fx-8120 8 core @3.1ghz?

So would nvidia in sli work better with intel and radeon in crossfire work better with amd?

I could possibly squeeze a couple of extra bucks from the old crone if I can persuade her that, it's not something I will have to upgrade for a while. On that same note is one of the reasons I was looking more at 8 core to 4. But if that's not going to be the case I wont.

 

[purple stain]

After seeing that the list I had is way better than what they have for less even.And they are using the 510LC which is the lowest end water cooling and doesn't cool well at all.I know I keep saying this over and over but it really is the best bang for your buck in that you should build it yourself.They would charge you $1500 for the $1000 of parts I selected.

Yes for gaming the 2500k is better than the 8120.

No it won't matter which CPU/GPU combo you go with they both work the same.

You've got to understand that the FX based CPU's are actually server based processors.Which is why they do so terrible in single threaded application such as games.

 

[megamanx00]

Sadly yes, the i5 4 core @ 3.30ghz is better than the fx-8120 in a lot of cases. Sure the 8120 is better at a few tasks that can take advantage of multiple cores, but not by much. Just read this article and be surprised

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120.html

Now keep in mind that AMDs "8 core" CPU is more like a quad core CPU with extra resources for multi-threading. Sure the modules get about 80-90% of the performance they would if they were two separate cores (which can be seen in the minor improvements in windows 8 where two threads are done on two separate modules rather than the same one) but AMDs per core performance just sucks this time around. There are a lot of reasons for that, but no single reason. It's death by 1000 cuts in that case.