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Please Critique this SLI Rig

J

jam3

Member
Well havent spent this much on a comp in awhile so I wanted some input. Money is not a big factor but going over 3K seems a bit much. I have a dell 21" monitor ill be hooking upp (the 2100 FP) so everything will be normal screen 1600x1200. Felt it was finally time to upgrade from the old p4 2.8 9800 128mb (which has been a darn good system for a long time now), and SLI seemed like the way to go especially with an AMD 64X2.


I might overclock the cpu a tiny bit (maybe up to 2.6 2.7) everything else I'll set for stock speeds. Also I don't burn alot so the NEC was a reasonable deal at $45.
appx cost for everything here is 3K

2 x OCZ EL Platinum Revision 2 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model OCZ4001024ELDCPER2-K - Retail

1 x AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail

1 x ZALMAN CNPS7000B-Cu LED 2 Ball Blue LED Light Cooling Fan - Retail

1 x Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - OEM

1 x MSI K8N Neo4/SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

2 x BFG Tech BFGR78256GTXOC Geforce 7800GTX 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16

1 x Lian Li PC-65B Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

1 x SeaSonic S12-600 ATX12V 600W Power Supply - Retail

2 x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA II Hard
(will run in RAID 0)

1 x SAMSUNG Black IDE DVD-ROM Drive Model TS-H352A/BEBP - OEM

1 x NEC Black IDE DVD Burner Model ND-3540A - OEM





 
I'm gonna go out on a limb & suggest just one 7800GTX...somehow i think others will join me on that limb...
 
Well, if you like to play your game @ 2048 w/ high AA/AF, I guess 2x 7800 GTX is not a bad idea..even tho it's bit overkill for now. Also, I would get the 4400 over the 4200 for the extra cache per core.
 
> 1 x AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail

If you're fanatical enough about performance to be thinking SLI 7800, you need a faster CPU, at least a 4400+.

That wimpy 4200+ won't even beat a 3700+ in games.
 
Ok I think im going to get the 4400 and get the 1gb sticks. But why is everyone so against SLI is it a pure money issue? Is it a hold over from the 6800 not performing very well in SLI? Those benchamrks for the 7800 GTX in SLI look awesome, so can anyone explain what the animous is all about?
 
Originally posted by: jam3
Ok I think im going to get the 4400 and get the 1gb sticks. But why is everyone so against SLI is it a pure money issue? Is it a hold over from the 6800 not performing very well in SLI? Those benchamrks for the 7800 GTX in SLI look awesome, so can anyone explain what the animous is all about?
Click to expand...

It's because of the heat, power consumtion, compatibilty with games (zero gain in some games).
It's because you won't see any improvement unless you game @ 2048x1536, 4xAA, 16xAF
It's also because when next gen cards come out, you can spend $600 for the same performacne.
 
screw that, get the sli'd 7800gtx if you got the bank and the monitor to make it worthwhile.

thats some upgrade. 🙂

 
you can get 90% of the performance and pay 50% less than your rig. dual cores won't help you in games as most games are not smp/smt aware

1x7800GTX

2x1GB Ram

3700 Diego

Non- SLI M/B

get a thermalright XP90 and o/c the 3700

you only need 1 optical drive, you don't rip dvds on the fly

raid 0 = bad idea and basically no benefit to a desktop user, you would be better off with a 74GB raptor or a 36GB U320 15k rpm scsi hdd (for seek times) for the system drive and a 250-400GB secondary drive.
 
^
|
|

What Bob said, except get the SLI board. Throw the second 7800GTX into your rig when the 1x7800 starts to become slow in the new games. By the time that happens, you should be able to either:

1. Sell it to me
2. Pick up another one for around $200-$250 and then you can SLI
 
get one 7800 GTX for now, you do not need more than that for now(at least till the new quake engine),...then use that saved money for 2GB of RAM...and get 1gbx2 so you can run at T1

otherwise nice choices...

But also, dump the second raptor...RAID 0 offers no performance gains at all in the desktop world...get one Raptor for your page file and OS, and then a nice big seagate for storage

EDIT: also if you are gaming you might want to upgrade to the 4400 at least...or go single core..do you do a lot of multitasking, or do you mainly game?
 
Well so I can give everyone a more detailed view of what I run on my main gaming/programming/work machine.

Office, mostly word
FrontPage 2003
Visio 2003
Visual Studio 2003
Emacs
Adobe PhotoShop
MSSQL Client Tools
PL-SQL Developer
PuTTY
VNC Client

Also look close at those drives that 2x 250gb SATA II WD, not raptors, thats half a terrabyte, RAID-0 just because it might be a little better than putting them on seperate I/O channels. I back all my important stuff off to my other machines where I have tapes and a couple of RAID-1 drives, In this case I am actually going for volume a little bit over performance, but I figure im moving up to SATA II at the same time which should provide decent performance for such high capacity dirves.

I also run Ventrillo, MSN Messenger, iTunes, sometimes a newsreader, and will run all those while playing something like WoW. It's also possible for me to have an editor or some utility I downloaded to check out for some reason or another.

I run a Linux Fedora Core 4 machine (with Oracle) and a windows 2003 server(with IIS and MSSQL Server).

So yes I multitask while playing games🙂, and definetly while I am working.

Also I am basing all my info mainly from this article.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2451

That shows a appx 33% increase in performance for SLI above a single 7800 gtx, that about what I would expect, also I figure that the next Nvidia wont get release for another year anyways so this puppy should last me as top of the line for a year and the a darn good machine for another one and a 2 year lifespan is what I typically do when rotating my main rig.

You guys are almost talking me into getting the top of the line X2 4 gbs of RAM and SLI, u bastages.
 
Originally posted by: bob4432
you can get 90% of the performance and pay 50% less than your rig. dual cores won't help you in games as most games are not smp/smt aware

1x7800GTX

2x1GB Ram

3700 Diego

Non- SLI M/B

get a thermalright XP90 and o/c the 3700

you only need 1 optical drive, you don't rip dvds on the fly

raid 0 = bad idea and basically no benefit to a desktop user, you would be better off with a 74GB raptor or a 36GB U320 15k rpm scsi hdd (for seek times) for the system drive and a 250-400GB secondary drive.
Click to expand...


i agree with everything said in this post
 
Coldfusion gives me a headache and Frontpage works really well in conjunction with VS 2003 since they can both work of the Frontpage Server extensions for loading sites. And ADO.NET frickin rules for any type of data work.
 
Originally posted by: jam3
Well havent spent this much on a comp in awhile so I wanted some input. Money is not a big factor but going over 3K seems a bit much. I have a dell 21" monitor ill be hooking upp (the 2100 FP) so everything will be normal screen 1600x1200. Felt it was finally time to upgrade from the old p4 2.8 9800 128mb (which has been a darn good system for a long time now), and SLI seemed like the way to go especially with an AMD 64X2.


I might overclock the cpu a tiny bit (maybe up to 2.6 2.7) everything else I'll set for stock speeds. Also I don't burn alot so the NEC was a reasonable deal at $45.
appx cost for everything here is 3K

2 x OCZ EL Platinum Revision 2 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model OCZ4001024ELDCPER2-K - Retail

1 x AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail

1 x ZALMAN CNPS7000B-Cu LED 2 Ball Blue LED Light Cooling Fan - Retail

1 x Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - OEM

1 x MSI K8N Neo4/SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

2 x BFG Tech BFGR78256GTXOC Geforce 7800GTX 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16

1 x Lian Li PC-65B Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

1 x SeaSonic S12-600 ATX12V 600W Power Supply - Retail

2 x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA II Hard
(will run in RAID 0)

1 x SAMSUNG Black IDE DVD-ROM Drive Model TS-H352A/BEBP - OEM

1 x NEC Black IDE DVD Burner Model ND-3540A - OEM
Click to expand...
pfft! you're kidding, right?? what a piece of crap!



/green with envy

 
Originally posted by: rise4310
screw that, get the sli'd 7800gtx if you got the bank and the monitor to make it worthwhile.

thats some upgrade. 🙂
Click to expand...

heck yeah, add more gigs to the rig, and you've got yourself one hot comp...
(get ultra kill DDR2 with lowest CAS and OC...)
 
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