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Gpu upgrade 7950

only issue with the sapphire card is he wants to do tri-fire, so the cards cant take up more than 2 slots per card. I would go with the twin frozr.
 
Shmee said:
only issue with the sapphire card is he wants to do tri-fire, so the cards cant take up more than 2 slots per card. I would go with the twin frozr.
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The sapphire card takes up only 2 slots? I owned a TF3 7950, while that is a great card, the cooler is quite under-performing, especially for Tri-fire conditions and OC.
 
hmm, it looked like the fan made it go into the third slot a bit. Wasn't sure.
 
The Sapphire 7950 does not extend into the 3rd slot. I have it mounted on a motherboard with another 7950 below it.

I'd either go with the Sapphire or the MSI Twin Frozr. Of course I do question the reasoning for going with triple crossfire. Crossfire/SLI scaling drops considerably with the 3rd card. I'd Crossfire two 7970's before going with three 7950's.
 
dfanatic86 said:
After a lot of research I think I've pinned this one down. I'm fairly confident in this gpu. Here's a link. thinking i wanna go the triple xf route.
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What resolution and how many monitors?

What kind of research led you to that idea? Tri-Fire and Tri-SLI are terribly broken in terms of efficiency for a 3rd GPU. It actually falls off to 25-45% most of the time meaning you are wasting $ for that 3rd GPU unless you are gaming on 3 monitors. Personally, unless you are gaming at very high resolutions with multiple monitors (say 3x 2560x1600), you should stick to 2 GPUs.

In fact, Xbitlabs just ran GTX660Ti 2-way and 3-way SLI and 3-way GTX660Ti are not any faster than GTX690.

I think you would be better off getting 2x $480 HD7970 Asus Matrix cards and overclocking them to 1275-1300mhz than spending $900 on HD7950 Tri-Fire. Alternatively, you can grab 2x HD7970 Ghz edition cards for $720. Or just get 2x GTX670 cards for $720 for SLI or even HD7950 CF + overclocking.

Also, the reference 7950 card you picked is terrible since the main point of going with HD7950 is its overclocking capabilities. If you are not going to overclock the HD7950, you should instead get the $360 HD7970 Ghz and not a $300 HD7950 imo, because HD7970 Ghz is more than 30% faster than a stock HD7950.
 
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i had a similar setup like yours, hd 6850s CF, and went to HD 7950s CF. I'm happy with the decision and everything is practically twice as fast :-D
 
After reading the OP, I was going to post what Russian did, more or less. 🙂 I would buy two cards and see how that performs before committing the money to tri-CF/tri-SLI. My suggestion would be to buy two non-reference 7950's that let you adjust voltage and have good coolers, and give them a nice big clock boost. I bet you'll find two 1100+MHz 7950's are plenty fast. 🙂
 
Thanks for the useful info. After researching thru anandtech bench and 3dmark, im more than likely getting a pair of 7970's.
 
I would agree with russian for the most part, and I see you have reconsidered and are looking more towards 7970 CF. Still, it would be good to know your system specs and games played, particularly resolution and potential system bottlenecks.

This way it is easier to make recommendations.
 
Upgrade system spec are:
MB: Maximus V Formula
CPU: i5 2500k
Ram: Corsair Vengeance 4X4 ddr1600
Resolution: 1920X1080
Games: BF3, Skyrim, Crysis etc.
 
dfanatic86 said:
Upgrade system spec are:
MB: Maximus V Formula
CPU: i5 2500k
Ram: Corsair Vengeance 4X4 ddr1600
Resolution: 1920X1080
Games: BF3, Skyrim, Crysis etc.
Click to expand...

for 1920 x 1080 resolution a HD 7950 is more than enough. don't waste money. get a Gigabyte HD 7950 OC with the windforce3x cooler or Sapphire HD 7950 Boost with the dual x cooler. these cards can hit 1.15 - 1.2 Ghz with voltage overclocking and will run the most demanding games like BF3 at 60 fps.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/08/23/galaxy_gtx_660_ti_gc_oc_vs_670_hd_7950/3
 
there's no reason to CF with 1 display at your resolution.

if you go dual displays at a later date that's when you should decide if you need to buy a second card.

until then its waste of money


Posted from Anandtech.com App for Android
 
CF, sure. Trifire? No way. Get 2x 7970s and take off running. Once you get into 3way/quads you begin to lose in terms of gains per card added. many developers don't optimize for anything more than dual card setups.
 
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