Theydon Bois
Distinguished Member
The last few pics as a recap of part three:
Ok guys, a bit of an update on my gaming rig. AS A long term AMD fanboy it is with a heavy heart I have to announce the purchase of an Nvidia graphics card.
My HD6870 has done sterling work in my PC for the last 8 months, and my original plan was to buy another when prices fell to crossfire. However I have had driver issues with crossfire before, and would prefer a more powerful single card. The 7950 or 7970 would have been my first choice but they are still too dear for me.
Then I spotted a 6/12 old gtx580 for sale on here for £180. With me selling my 6870 for £80 this means it has only cost be £100 to upgrade. What swung it for me is that I am a huge fan of the batman arkham asylum / city games, and being able to play them in their physx'ed up glory was a major draw.
Feeling like a traitor I did the deal and bought the 580. Here are the pics.
This is the pc as it was with the 6870. I have stripped the watercooling stuff out temporarily which sorting out the graphics cards as it makes it easier to swap cards about.
The H50 is ok but nowhere near as good as my proper WC loop. I have had to back the cpu overclock off to 3.8Ghz while gaming as the H50 can't cope with the temperatures of the 4.0GHz I normally run with the full WC set up, and I was getting hard crashes after an hour of so of gaming .
GTX580 in all its glory. It looks massive compared to the 6870. This model is the MSI twin frozrII OC edition with a factory OC to 800mhz. I am sure I will be able to improve on that once I get it under water.
580 fitted. I was a bit worried about space in the case but it fits absolutely fine. Driver installation was completely painless, and soon I was up and running.
First impressions of the card are good. I always though these fermi cards were hot and noisy going by their online rep, but this card is neither. at idle is clocks back to a frankly unbelievable 51/135 Mhz at 0.96 V and still runs windows aero fine. Idle temps are mid 30s, full load mid 60s which similar to the 6870. The cooler is also very quiet indeed, I can't hear it at all behind the case fans, though I am having to run them faster than normal to keep the cpu cool.
I finished the last half of crysis 2 on the 580 and even when maxxed out the gameplay was perfect with no slow down at all. It played ok on the 6870 as well, but I had to drop from ultra to extreme settings.
I had a quick game of batman and again it played fine. I haven't got the the heavy physx sections yet but even early on you can see the difference. I still find the game stutters a but in sections, but it seems even people with sli 590s get a bit of this in this game on DX11. I think it is an issue with the game rather than he hardware.
Next mission will be to restore the WC set up and try overclocking the card with afterburner.