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The Power PC Thread [f*ck off consoles]



  A shiny black one.
Nothing beats new computer bits, feels great unpacking and spending ages looking at the bits before putting them together.

I've got a red and black themed motherboard myself.
95843938231c1c51fa4bdaeb372dbe05.jpg


My build is post 1932.
 
Just Cause 3 is raping my PC, I had to put stuff to medium (1920x1080) :(
I think it's time to finally upgrade
It's been plodding along since July 2012, so not too bad going for a GTX670. Probably don't need to replace the lot, doesn't seem like CPU is much of a factor regarding bottlenecks (have an i5-3570K)
What's best bang for buck card of the moment?
 
I'm doing the same @Snake182, going from AMD to Intel and will be looking to put my order in next week. I was looking at getting the 5820k, but the 6700k isn't much more expensive. It seems to save a LOT of power! The 5820 has the extra cores though

I'm not sure what is better for gaming, more cores or higher clock speed
 
  Renault Clio182 bean
NVidia gtx970 are pretty good for the price compared to 980ti and so on. However the AMD R9 range offer very good value for money.
 
Just Cause 3 is raping my PC, I had to put stuff to medium (1920x1080) 😧
I downloaded it in anticipation of my new pc, and thought I'd try it on my old 1gb card just for a laugh. At the intro scene in the chopper, the guy would speak the line, then it would take another minute for his mouth to complete all the movements lol
 
  Renault Clio182 bean
I'm doing the same @Snake182, going from AMD to Intel and will be looking to put my order in next week. I was looking at getting the 5820k, but the 6700k isn't much more expensive. It seems to save a LOT of power! The 5820 has the extra cores though

I'm not sure what is better for gaming, more cores or higher clock speed
That's why I went for it, overclockers.co.uk have it for £330, I just paid £350 for it 5 days ago fml lmao. For gaming single core performance is quiet important as not all cores can be utilised in various scenarios, Intels single core performance beats AMD hands down, and Intels architecture is far ahead of AMD
 
  Renault Clio182 bean
What's the AMD equivalent? 390? 390X?
The AMD equivalent to GTX 980/980ti would be the cards you have mentioned yes. AMD's GPU's seem to have more GDDR5 memory than equivalent NVidia cards which is annoying as I prefer NVidia lol
 
  Renault Clio182 bean
For the sake of £30 I might go for it then, it means finding a new MB though
That's where it started getting expensive for me, most of the decent Intel gaming oriented boards are £150+, the one I just purchased has a dial on the mobo just for overclocking which is handy.
 

welshname

ClioSport Club Member
Spent weeks f**king about trying to get hold of a MoBo to run SLi on 1155.

Had 3 off eBay with issues so returned them. Finally got it all working.

Comparison of OC'd i5 3570K and OC'd 970 FTW vs stock 3570K and stock SLi'd 970's.

Decent jump

uploadfromtaptalk1450007417244.jpeg
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
Spent weeks f**king about trying to get hold of a MoBo to run SLi on 1155.

Had 3 off eBay with issues so returned them. Finally got it all working.

Comparison of OC'd i5 3570K and OC'd 970 FTW vs stock 3570K and stock SLi'd 970's.

Decent jump

View attachment 142598

Quite surprised at those results - I would have thought they would be a fair bit higher? Especially when you consider my CPU is 2008 vintage...

3DMark%20demo_zpsjcy736k2.jpg


That said, I tend not to take much to heart with these benchmarking tools. There are so many tiny variations that create (or alter) a score - I just take it with a pinch of salt!
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
Nothing beats new computer bits, feels great unpacking and spending ages looking at the bits before putting them together.

I've got a red and black themed motherboard myself.
95843938231c1c51fa4bdaeb372dbe05.jpg


My build is post 1932.

Still one of the de-facto performance motherboards to get. I won't be replacing my Rampage III Extreme with an up-to-date equivalent though, as 90% of abilities are just wasted on me.

It will still be an Asus mobo though - whichever one I decide to get.
 

welshname

ClioSport Club Member
Quite surprised at those results - I would have thought they would be a fair bit higher? Especially when you consider my CPU is 2008 vintage...

3DMark%20demo_zpsjcy736k2.jpg


That said, I tend not to take much to heart with these benchmarking tools. There are so many tiny variations that create (or alter) a score - I just take it with a pinch of salt!
You do have hyperthreading though whereas the i5 doesn't. My primary card isn't boosting much higher than the base clock due to temps either. I need a new case really as airflow in mine isn't great at all
 
Looking at the specs its a very good board, x99 chipset processors can get very costly indeed lol, that's why I went with 1151 chipset on the new skylake range in the end
I gonna go for the Asus Z170-A. I was looking at the deluxe version but I don't think I really need it. So that has worked out as a nice little saving actually :)
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
I've got my 780ti running something like 1215mhz IIRC, but I'm contemplating swaping to a z97m and SLI'ing with my 780.

Worth it?

Coming from someone who previously had SLi'd GTX460s and now SLi'd GTX690s - I'd personally say its not worth it......... currently. The main issue is with the previous versions of DirectX - up to and including DX11. They aren't really written with true parallel graphics tasking in mind. They attempt it - and depending upon the gfx engine in question - sometimes make an admirable attempt to get a performance increase. But all things being equal - I could have bought a single 980Ti card (with the all important 6GB onboard) for the combined price that I paid for the two 690s. And sat here today, I know which one I'd rather have.

SLi generates a lot more heat and noise and also puts extra load on your PSU. In car terms for the most part, it's like having a 200bhp 4-pot - compared to 250bhp V8. It's a 'nice-to-have' but not with much benefit. With my combo having four separate GPUs and 8GB between them - there's the potential that games written with DX12 in mind, could have a significant performance increase. But how long off is that? The 680 GPU is still relatively potent, but with each new GPU release, its getting left further and further behind.

If you can pickup another 780 for peanuts - then I'd say definitely do it. But don't pump loads of hard-earned into a purchase because you'll probably be disappointed with the results. Some games (although thankfully very few in number) - actually run quicker with SLi disabled.

@SharkyUK :)
 
  LY 220 Trophy+IB PH1
Got to consider vram too, 2GB a card does not equate to 4gb total (As each card is often working from the same texture sets, it's almost mirrored on both sets of RAM) Same with tri and quad configurations. DX12 should remove this, but unsure if it's just going to be exclusive to DX12 pure breeds. Some people also suffer from microstutter.

After having experience with a single, trifire and SLI/quad SLI setups, a single fast card would be my way forward.
 

McGherkin

Macca fan boiiiii
ClioSport Club Member
Ta folks. I already have the 780, but if it's not worth it then I won't go ripping it all apart! Looking back it'd need to go watercooled as well because my air cooler wouldn't fit with an extra card.

Wait a while for 980tis to go down then :)
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
Got to consider vram too, 2GB a card does not equate to 4gb total (As each card is often working from the same texture sets, it's almost mirrored on both sets of RAM) Same with tri and quad configurations. DX12 should remove this, but unsure if it's just going to be exclusive to DX12 pure breeds. Some people also suffer from microstutter.

After having experience with a single, trifire and SLI/quad SLI setups, a single fast card would be my way forward.

Yep - the field of gfx memory requirements has definitely shot forward in the last year or two. Makes me laugh when some articles describe the 980Ti's 6GB as being overkill because 4GB is deemed to be enough. Really?

GTAV is a prime example where the lack of true VRAM accessibility on my PC is clearly shown. It runs bad - the recent patches have made a significant improvement - but not enough where I'd want to play the game. In a utopian world, it would be accessing all four GPUs and accessing all 8GB available. I'll guarantee that despite the SLi profiles - it will be using a single 680 GPU and just 2GB of RAM.

If ever there was a game to prove/disprove what DX12 was genuinely capable of, over DX11 on the same hardware - it would be this.
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
What's best bang for buck card of the moment?
I'd probably be looking at the nVidia 970. Relatively good pricing, decent performance and plenty of variations / manufacturers to choose from.

I'm not sure what is better for gaming, more cores or higher clock speed
Given the level of CPU you are considering, the CPU clock speed won't be an issue as you will have plenty of headroom modern games. A high-end / enthusiast level 4-6 core CPU will see you good for gaming for many years to come in my opinion. I would only go for more cores than that if you are a serious power user that needs it; i.e. you are performing computationally intensive processes such as rendering 3D graphics, big data analysis, complex simulations, etc.

For gaming single core performance is quiet important as not all cores can be utilised in various scenarios...
Single core performance is important, but the move to parallelism and distributed processing over multiple cores is slowly gaining momentum. I'm disappointed that the move isn't happening quicker but robust programming across multiple threads and cores is not a trivial thing. It's easy to do it badly with catastrophic results! Thankfully the new iteration and evolution of API's and engines are better written with fundamental support for threading and working across multiple processing units (rather than half-assed attempts to shoe-horn in such functionality in legacy systems).

Coming from someone who previously had SLi'd GTX460s and now SLi'd GTX690s - I'd personally say its not worth it......... currently. The main issue is with the previous versions of DirectX - up to and including DX11. They aren't really written with true parallel graphics tasking in mind. They attempt it - and depending upon the gfx engine in question - sometimes make an admirable attempt to get a performance increase. But all things being equal - I could have bought a single 980Ti card (with the all important 6GB onboard) for the combined price that I paid for the two 690s. And sat here today, I know which one I'd rather have.
Thanks for the tag, D. I've never been a fan of multiple GPU's despite having worked on such systems from day one. I've always preferred to go with the most expensive single card solution I could afford at the time. From a development point-of-view the sheer awkwardness and hoops you have to jump through to get your system rendering nicely in SLI / Crossfire (in the past at least) has been nothing but a ballache. On top of trying to deal with the issues from there simply being so many different cards out in the market to support, the inevitable driver issues, and everything else, I am not surprised that many games don't have SLI support (or they are often very bugged). Sure, I appreciate there are a few games out there that work well in SLI / Crossfire but they are the exception rather than the rule in my opinion!

DirectX11 went some way in altering it's architecture to try and better cater for multithreading (designed from the ground up and by implementing synchronisation in D3D11). The aim was to maximise the operation of CPU and GPU without one having to wait for the other causing a stall (a GPU stall invariably leading to negative impacts on the framerate). D3D11 had the concept of Device Contexts (which were not thread safe and single thread only) and Devices (which were thread safe). As Device Contexts were single threaded only a single thread could call a context safely at a time, hence the need for synchronisation to control the access to them. The API was effectively split into two parts when it came to the multithreading; support for object creation and support for rendering. I won't go into detail but even with the improved support for multithreading there was still an art to implementing it and it was also incredibly sensitive to driver support.

DirectX12 is seemingly shaping up nicely and looks to offer some very nice features and much improved multithreading support. My only concern is that it might be some time until we see the benefits. My hope is that developers can adopt and adapt quickly as I genuinely think there are some real positive gains to be made with the new API.

Ta folks. I already have the 780, but if it's not worth it then I won't go ripping it all apart! Looking back it'd need to go watercooled as well because my air cooler wouldn't fit with an extra card.

Wait a while for 980tis to go down then :smile:
I'd wait rather than rip your whole system apart mate. I love the 780 Ti and it's still an incredibly capable card. I only truly sold it so that I could work on some DX12 and development code that needed features on the newer cards. I found the 780 Ti more than capable of running my games at 1080p and 1200p as near as dammit on maxed settings :) The arrival of Pascal should see some nice reductions in prices on the 980 Ti's but it might be a while yet.
 

McGherkin

Macca fan boiiiii
ClioSport Club Member
I'd wait rather than rip your whole system apart mate. I love the 780 Ti and it's still an incredibly capable card. I only truly sold it so that I could work on some DX12 and development code that needed features on the newer cards. I found the 780 Ti more than capable of running my games at 1080p and 1200p as near as dammit on maxed settings :smile: The arrival of Pascal should see some nice reductions in prices on the 980 Ti's but it might be a while yet.

Yeah, 1080p performance is great. Problem is I've developed a taste for 4k now!
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
Yeah, 1080p performance is great. Problem is I've developed a taste for 4k now!
:tonguewink: I don't think 4K is truly 'there' yet. Personally, until I can get a solid 4K experience from a single card (i.e. max settings with consistent 60fps+) then I'll only use 4K for non-gaming applications. I love my new 980Ti but it's certainly not capable of 4K on its own. I think it will be a generation or two yet until we see single card solutions capable of delivering at the levels of fidelity we have become accustomed to. In the meantime 4K remains the domain of the ballers and multi-gpu setups (with all the headaches that can come with such setups) :tonguewink:
 
nom :grin:

IMG_0172_zps3vclbwx2.jpg


IMG_0173_zpsnicihede.jpg


I'm gonna wait till tomorrow for the boot up, bit tired now. I cloned the SSD from my old rig on to a HDD so that I can still use it while I set up the new rig. And WOW it is so slow now! I forgot what a massive difference SSD's make. Takes so long to boot up and do anything

Does anyone know what the deal is with the reset switches on these MB's? Instead of just ground and reset switch, I've got ground, rstcon# and +3v. The pins from the case switch don't split, and some googling tells me that putting it on ground and rstcon# doesn't work. I'm not too fussed because I never use the reset button, but it would be nice if it was right.
 
  BMW M4; S1000 RR
The AMD equivalent to GTX 980/980ti would be the cards you have mentioned yes. AMD's GPU's seem to have more GDDR5 memory than equivalent NVidia cards which is annoying as I prefer NVidia lol

Umm. 390 is not even close to a 980ti. I used to have a 290 which is very similar of course to a 390 and it was a cracking card. Would recommend it any day (just not the MSI twinFrozr model. But the 980ti is another league of performance.

I've got my 780ti running something like 1215mhz IIRC, but I'm contemplating swaping to a z97m and SLI'ing with my 780.

Worth it?

Nope! Never is from what I read at the moment. Maybe one day. But there's always a single card solution for whatever you want -unless it's 4K but the next top end card should do it when released since the TitanX/989Ti are nearly there.
 
  2014 Focus Titanium
nom :grin:

IMG_0172_zps3vclbwx2.jpg


I'm gonna wait till tomorrow for the boot up, bit tired now. I cloned the SSD from my old rig on to a HDD so that I can still use it while I set up the new rig. And WOW it is so slow now! I forgot what a massive difference SSD's make. Takes so long to boot up and do anything

Does anyone know what the deal is with the reset switches on these MB's? Instead of just ground and reset switch, I've got ground, rstcon# and +3v. The pins from the case switch don't split, and some googling tells me that putting it on ground and rstcon# doesn't work. I'm not too fussed because I never use the reset button, but it would be nice if it was right.
What case is that? Look lovely!
 
I'm getting a solid 60fps at near max settings on GTA5 :D

At first I maxed out everything, then started panicking when I got the stuttering frames at high speed. After a bit of googling I realised I was upscaling to 4K lol
 
  BMW M4; S1000 RR
I'm getting a solid 60fps at near max settings on GTA5 :smiley:

At first I maxed out everything, then started panicking when I got the stuttering frames at high speed. After a bit of googling I realised I was upscaling to 4K lol
Decent! Was that the 3.5GB memory issue or just running out of puff do you know?
 


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