Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Jetmech Jr. on February 12, 2005, 09:33:14 pm
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AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Processor
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI Motherboard w/ Nforce4 SLI Chipset Socket 939
2GB Corsair DDR 3200 Memory
2 each NVidia GForce 6600GT PCI Express Video Cards linked in SLI mode
Hitachi 160GB SATA Hard Drive
16x Double Layer DVD RW
52x32x52 CD RW
Inside a MGE Viper ATX Midtower w/ 500WT Power Supply
ViewSonic 19" LCD Moniter w/ 12ms Response time.
Looking for opinions...
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How much money do you have?
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Enough.
All in all, it costs a little under $2,000.
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:eek:
Ooooooooooh! Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Et cetera.
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About £1K - quite good. :)
Then again I'd have cut corners by replacing the CD-RW with a standard drive since your DVD-R should be able to do that anyway. ;)
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Get the AMD 3900+ that has 90 nm technology. That thing is a beast and I think it cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 270$.
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Where do you buy this? anywhere i see that would cost like, $5000 minimum.
Well actualy, just not to sound ignorant i did a quick search and is seems prices have recently dropped quite a bit.
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Well, we're buying the stuff from newegg.com.
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*becomes green with envy*
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What, no sound card? :p
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get another SATA drive and put them in a raid-0 config :)
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SoundBlaster Audigy 7.1 Channel Integrated on the Motherboard.
We ain't exactly into a decked out sound system.
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Originally posted by PhReAk
get another SATA drive and put them in a raid-0 config :)
We already have a spare SATA Drive that's going to be used as well ;)
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http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-501&depa=1
90 nm 64 bit. A beast. I heard it outperforms most FX chips...
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:jaw:
Lucky you!!
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I cant wait ta see what I can do with SCP with this machine.
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If you're gonna Overclock at all - and to be blunt, NOT overclocking a winchest core is practically a sin - don't buy a 3500+. The 3200+ and the 3000+ pretty much all reach the same overclock of around 2.5-2.6 Ghz on air. I've got mine up to 2.5Ghz (250x10) by loosening up the ram timings to 2.5-3-3-8. Many on the net think they're all essentially 3500+ (same fab, sab silicon, same design) and AMD could sell them all as 3500+ if they've got the demand.
Mobo is fine. MSI makes pretty fine A64 board. The Neo2 plat I'm running is a nice piece of machinery.
2 GB of Ram will quite possibly hurt performance. The on-board Memory controllers of the AMD64s generally don't like using more then 2 dimms, and it will automatically apply a divider if you've got that much ram. Some of the later winnie's can handle 4 dimms at DDR400, but it's far from guaranteed. Unless you're planning on doing something -really- memory intensive, I wouldn't expect 2GBs to really improve things over 1GB.
A single 6800Gt will outperform a 2-6600gt SLI setup even in SLI enabled games, and will run circles around them in anything not SLI enabled. Given how questionable SLI is in principle and how few games it actually works on, not to mention the large budget here, I'd spend the extra $80 or so and go with a single 6800GT.
The power supply in the MGE viper has a weak 19-Amp 12 volt rail. Running SLI on that would be a real, real bad idea. Even a single 6800gt is probably gonna be power starved.
Make DAMNED SURE you have a floppy if you intend to install windows XP on a SATA hard drive. You absolutely must install the SATA drivers to install windows on a SATA and drive, and microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, chose to only let you install them from a floppy disk. It don't care if you've got a cd with em on it, or even an IDE HD with em, you've got to have a floppy drive.
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Originally posted by MatthewPapa
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-501&depa=1
90 nm 64 bit. A beast. I heard it outperforms most FX chips...
this is the processor we ordered,.... your link was to an Athlon 64 3000+
Model: Athlon 64 3500+
Core: Winchester
Operating Frequency: 2.2GHz
FSB: Integrated into Chip
Cache: L1/64K+64K; L2/ 512KB
Voltage: 1.4V
Process: 90nm
Socket: Socket 939
Multimedia Instruction: MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNOW!, 3DNOW!+
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I thought the SATA problem was with SP1?
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Did they fix it? I don't have a slipstreamed XP-SP2 install CD to know, and this occurs during installation.
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Originally posted by phatosealpha
A single 6800Gt will outperform a 2-6600gt SLI setup even in SLI enabled games, and will run circles around them in anything not SLI enabled.
actually not true, you can see the benchmarks at www.tomshardware.com, the 6600GT SLI setup outperforms a 6800GT, and both cards, Plus the extra price of a motherboard that supports SLI are the same price as one 6800GT. So i opted for the dual 6600GTs and hey, I can always ask for 2 6800s next christmas :)
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SLI enabled games, yes. Nvidia has to write a profile for each and every game that tells it how to implement SLI in the game. Without it, you get no benefit from SLI at all - it runs in single card mode.
Or in short, unless nVidia activates SLI with a profile for each and every game, it does jack squat and you're running a single 6600gt. Never have to worry about that with a single 6800gt.
Reappraising the benchmarks, it's a bit more back and forth then I remember......of course, the real problem is the SLI setups choke big time when you enable Image quality features. Pretty much across the board, if you kick up AF and AA, sli loses. Are you really gonna buy a $500 video subsystem to play without antialiasing and Ansiotropic filtering?
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Well, I brought this up with my da', and according to him, your incorrect.
From the SLI Developer's FAQ:
Will my game or application just run on NVIDIA's SLI technology?
Yes.
Developers are not required to make changes to make their application work on NVIDIA's SLI solution. In fact, developers are not even required to make changes to enable the speed-boost available on a multi-GPU system.
...might wanna tell nVidia they don't know what their own stuff is or isn't capable of. ;)
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Re-Read that.
DEVELOPERS don't have to make any changes. And they don't.
NVIDIA has to make a profile.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzEx
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_sli_certifiedgames.html
In short, unless nVidia makes the profile, the game doesn't run in SLI. Which is exactly what I said.
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Originally posted by Jetmech Jr.
SoundBlaster Audigy 7.1 Channel Integrated on the Motherboard.
We ain't exactly into a decked out sound system.
Eep.
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Originally posted by phatosealpha
Re-Read that.
DEVELOPERS don't have to make any changes. And they don't.
NVIDIA has to make a profile.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzEx
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_sli_certifiedgames.html
In short, unless nVidia makes the profile, the game doesn't run in SLI. Which is exactly what I said.
Overreaction.
There are already several user-made programs available, designed for just that: To create Profiles for games.
http://grestorn.webinit.de/yape/Readme.rtf
In particular, this line:
And one of the most important advantages is that you have full control over all SLI settings, so you can make all the games work with your SLI setup, even though nVidia doesn't provide a profile for them yet.
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Well, good luck to you with that. I wouldn't go that way, for the wide variety of reasons listed, but hey, not my machine :)
At any rate, reconsider your power supply.
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Dumb question, but I thought all SLI did was split the video processing in 2, giving each gpu half the load(screen) at a slight cpu overhead?
So why should it need a special hardware setting? Since, according to my knowledge(which is far, far from complete), it would be splitting the load all the time.
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AFAIK, it's a matter of how exactly to implement the SLI. You can either have the two cards rendering alternating frames, or you can have it so one renders the top of the screen, the other renders the bottom.
The former mode is generally faster, but if the game uses framebuffer effects that blur between frames, it won't work properly. The second has more overhead because it has to constantly be rebalancing the load on the GPUs, but should be more compatible. Thus the profiles, to determine which mode it should run in.
Why exactly nVidia defaults to single GPU operation I'm not sure. I think it's a matter of them not wanting to have people using it and have unexpected image quality problems which would not make them happy, but I can't say for certain.
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Shocks... pegs...
Luckyyyy!