What's better, 1 or 2?

1
i5 760 @4.2
2 x gtx 580

2
i7 2600k
1 x gtx 580

number 1 is better, as is by far. The difference between one GTX 580 and to SLI GTX 580 is staggering to say the least. I run 5870 crossfireX and I get about 90-100% scaling, running two cards over one is a gigantic increase, its incredible.

number 1 is better, as is by far. The difference between one GTX 580 and to SLI GTX 580 is staggering to say the least
Thanks batman, yeah it's the most tempting route for me right now, means i can upgrade CPU & PSU at a later date, i only got a 23" 60MHz monitor right now anyways so the i7's uber gaming performance won't be missed that much.

with the overclock on the i5, it would do just as good as the i7 in gaming. SLI GTX580 will need a Powerful PSU though.

with the overclock on the i5, it would do just as good as the i7 in gaming. SLI GTX580 will need a Powerful PSU though.
I got a good quality PSU, an XFX 850, i know 850 is a little low for 2x 580s but it's a gaming PSU and i'm very confident in it.
Gonna order an ASUS Direct CU II 580 to go with my ASUS 1st edition 580, hoping the 1.5GB VRAM ain't too little.

with the overclock on the i5, it would do just as good as the i7 in gaming. SLI GTX580 will need a Powerful PSU though.
I got a good quality PSU, an XFX 850, i know 850 is a little low for 2x 580s but it's a gaming PSU and i'm very confident in it.
Gonna order an ASUS Direct CU II 580 to go with my ASUS 1st edition 580, hoping the 1.5GB VRAM ain't too little.

yeah that XFX 850 should do. I use a Corsair 850TX and it powers my Gigabyte 5870 Super overclock CrossfireX easily, and Overclocked i7@ 3.6. 1.5 GB of video ram is plenty. I only got 1 GB and at 1680x1050 my frames is always 60 with the high textures pack. But with DX11 my frames will dip into the 40's at times. Multiplayer same thing. still runs great. GTX 580SLI should be awesome.

3 is better

AMD Zambezi fx-8150 "Bulldozer"
AMD Radeon 6950 2gib in CFX (unlock them into 2 6970, only the 2Gb model)

Hey, sli-mk.2, I've seriously checked out the CPU usage with the DX11 version of Crysis 2 today and I can safely say it's still a 3 core game. I can post up some science if anyone wants?

Hey, sli-mk.2, I've seriously checked out the CPU usage with the DX11 version of Crysis 2 today and I can safely say it's still a 3 core game. I can post up some science if anyone wants?
That's good news then, i was looking at some sandy bridge gaming benchmarks and the performance of them is quite awesome, so i was thinking my i5 was holding me back, no worries i got that other 580 ordered anyways so i look forwards to maxing this mofo, with butter smoothness too!

Number 2 is better the i5 760 runs on the now EOL (End OF Life) P55 Chipset, it has since been replaced with the P67 and Z68 chipsets. With the i7 2600K overclocking is extremely simple because its just a matter of increasing the CPU Multiplier rather than having to tweak base clock speed and balancing QPI bandwidth. Also the i7 2600K is from the Sandy Bridge Micro-architecture which is 32nm so in basic terms it can be overclock higher because it uses less power and produces less heat. I overclocked a friends PC with a Core i5 2500K to 4.5Ghz with ease and their CPU idles around 30*C and maxes out around 50*C, thats with using a Corsair H60 CPU Cooler. Also to note Z68 chipset has the ability for you to add a SSD to your existing HDD configuration and setup the SSD as a super High-Speed HDD cache that will put the most actively used files on the drive to increase file transfer performance by about 4x. Z68 Chipset also has Native USB 3.0 (4.8Gbps) and SATA 3 (6Gbps) integration so you would have the latest and greatest technologies making your system more future proof and better value for money.

Number 2 is better the i5 760 runs on the now EOL (End OF Life) P55 Chipset..
Hi James, yeah i got a nice 1156 mobo with usb3 and i've not had it that long either so i'll keep it for a while and maybe down the road i'll pick up an i7 870 for it, i'll probably miss the sandies out completely but who knows, i do understand their gaming potential for sure.
Anyways, having two GPUs is fun, i had two 460s before.
The i7 Sandy would have helped my MP performance, but this new 580 SLI rig is gonna blow SP into the ashes, even more so with an i7 870.

What's better, 1 or 2?

1
i5 760 @4.2
2 x gtx 580

2
i7 2600k
1 x gtx 580

Both sides have strengths. 1 has super gpu processing potential but may have a hard time being choked a little bit by the cpu. Choice 2 has a really good vid card and current technology on the cpu. This chip can consistently oc to 4.5-5.1 at 1.35-1.48 vc which will take full use, 99%, of the 580. I'd stick w/2 for the above reasons as well as being a little lighter on the wallet. 1 gtx580 on the right mb/ram/cpu setup will run great even in dx11. I think specs only demand like 550w for a 580 but I may be wrong but anything over 800 should be okay with room to accommodate all ur other junk. Plus OC'ng the SB platform is stupid easy and results are nuts. Most will run rock solid at 4.5-4.9and most will post in the mid 5's with suicide runs in the 5.4-6.0 range on insane vc (1.6+)

3 is better

AMD Zambezi fx-8150 "Bulldozer"
AMD Radeon 6950 2gib in CFX (unlock them into 2 6970, only the 2Gb model)
not really. AMD is never known for gaming performance and Crysis 2 doesn't take advantage of 8 cores.
Also, we all know that Crysis 2 favors Nvidia over AMD
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crysis-2-directx-11-performance,2983-8.html

the i5 760 overclocked will be absolutely fine for Crysis 2. it will not bottleneck the SLI GTX 580s in most GPU demanding games. it'll only start to bottleneck once u go 3 way SLI.
overal i would say that option #1 is the best.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crysis-2-directx-11-performance,2983-6.html
70 fps avg with a min of 43 fps is very smooth
if you want to know single GTX 580 performance, use the GTX 570 number add about 20% to that. so about 45 fps average while SLI GTX 580 gives 70.

logged in just to post this haha. frikin crytek forum log in issue make me too lazy to post stuffs.

Thanks! Hey here's a vid i done with my i5 760 /580 setup, i'll do another vid with hopefully everything on ultra(apart from Post Processing) when i get things setup


To the uk users, i can recommend this place for all your rig needs >>
http://www.scan.co.uk/

Depends on what you want that for.

Thats the first question.

If Crysis - then concentrate on Vcards - the game isnt that CPU dependant.

Depends on what you want that for.

Thats the first question.

If Crysis - then concentrate on Vcards - the game isnt that CPU dependant.

I want it for C2, it's my 'Crysis 2 rig', once i gets me an i7 it'll be done.
OCing the GPUs and an uber PSU may be down the road, ...WAY down the road.

Yeah I have to agree with the 1 vs 2 GTX 580's - right now Nvidia isnt up to speed on optimized drivers for SLI much less anything more than 1 GTX 580. Crytek's 1.9 release also hosed up the FPS flow and dropped me considerably - again probably due to Nvidia not being up to speed on their drivers which is not suprising.

I run a 990X @ 4.6GHz and three GTX 580's - actually four, but I had to disable one because the drivers cannot really handle 3 GTX 580s + PhysX and neither can my Silverstone ST1500 (1500W) PSU. So if you can get a good balance between PSU/GPU/CPU - I would go with the second option, it appears to be a bit more balanced in power and cheaper in the long run.

Why is just about everyone recommending an i7? Intel's prices are very high compared to AMD price vs performance. ￡250 for an i7 Vs ￡134 for a Phenom II 1090T Black Edition six core.

Why is just about everyone recommending an i7? Intel's prices are very high compared to AMD price vs performance. ￡250 for an i7 Vs ￡134 for a Phenom II 1090T Black Edition six core.

The only choice for a new CPU now is the i5 2500k, it's ￡150-￡160 and it can do everything that the i7 2600k can do when it comes to gaming. You can get the 2600k for a little less than ￡250 now though.

Also, the 1090T does have 6 cores, but like I said earlier, this game use 3 cores only (most games use 2 or 3 cores). And anyway, phenom II doesn't have much grunt at all compared with most intel CPUs. With most games relying purely on clockspeed, 6 cores is no use to anyone at the moment.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crysis-2-directx-11-performance,2983-8.html
because of the outrageous difference in core for core performance between intel and amd.
and last time i checked no game use more than 4 cores (may be wrong, correct me) so x6 is useless in games.

and no this game use 4 cores. check my link

Thanks for the link, th3-0nly-1337.

I dunno, I still think there may be other reason they got a different minimum framerate on a triple core than they did on a quad core. But look at this:

For this test, I downclocked my i5 2500k to 1.7GHz, so that I could get a CPU bottleneck with absolutely no GPU bottleneck. In the first picture 1 core is disabled, in the second picture all cores are enabled. If this game uses 4 cores, then why does usage on the other 3 cores drop whenever you enable the 4th core? All that happens is that windows simulates use on the other cores, and you may see other cores apparently being used but never more than 75% usage on all cores, which means it's infact only using 3 threads:

http://i51.tinypic.com/2jed8qe.jpg

http://i51.tinypic.com/2ytyb2a.jpg

Intell is preferable.

AMD screwed me with streaming... (you cant stream properly on an amd processor)

forum log in issue is extremely annoying.

Windows always tries to spread workload among the cores so you may see lower individual core usage when you are having more cores, but that doesn't mean ur extra resources isn't used. the CPU doesn't have to be at 100% for it to be a bottleneck. if the game only use 1 core, then 25% CPU usage on a quadcore > CPU bottleneck.

also notice how in the picture where u set afinity to only 3 cores, the graphs of 3 cores peak 100% alot? at those moments, the CPU is bottlenecking.

in fact comparing graphs isn't really a good way to gauge performance and bottleneck. the best way to do so is to compare framerate (especially min framerate as CPU speed affect this the most) using a predefined benchmark which this game lacks :/

another good but non-objective way to find out CPU bottleneck is by comparing video cards temperature and usage. if the CPU is not bottlenecking, temps will be high and GPU usage will be maxed. if the CPU is bottlenecking, ur cards will run cooler and GPU usage will not be maxed all the time. in those screenshot notice ur GPU temp are slightly lower when only using 3 cores, indicating slight bottleneck. the graph of the cores also indicate bottleneck because the line is hovering near the top.

Why is just about everyone recommending an i7? Intel's prices are very high compared to AMD price vs performance. ￡250 for an i7 Vs ￡134 for a Phenom II 1090T Black Edition six core.

The only choice for a new CPU now is the i5 2500k, it's ￡150-￡160 and it can do everything that the i7 2600k can do when it comes to gaming. You can get the 2600k for a little less than ￡250 now though.

Also, the 1090T does have 6 cores, but like I said earlier, this game use 3 cores only (most games use 2 or 3 cores). And anyway, phenom II doesn't have much grunt at all compared with most intel CPUs. With most games relying purely on clockspeed, 6 cores is no use to anyone at the moment.


Stupid forums bugs!

Yeah but the i5 2500K is 60% more in price than a Phenom II 965 black, but not in performance.

Windows always tries to spread workload among the cores so you may see lower individual core usage when you are having more cores, but that doesn't mean ur extra resources isn't used. the CPU doesn't have to be at 100% for it to be a bottleneck. if the game only use 1 core, then 25% CPU usage on a quadcore > CPU bottleneck.

also notice how in the picture where u set afinity to only 3 cores, the graphs of 3 cores peak 100% alot? at those moments, the CPU is bottlenecking.

Yes, this is what I was trying to say. But given the fact that there is absolutely no GPU bottleneck, I expected all 4 cores to to max out, just like it did when the 3 cores were bottlenecked, but instead it just spreads the same load across all 4 cores (also the framerate in the game stayed exactly the same, I had picked a part of the game where I was looking at a lot of cell soldiers walking about)

Well anyway, you are probably right about the measuring of framerates being better than graphs though.