My computer currently has an ATI 4850 video card installed.
Any opinions on whether I should get another 4850 and CrossFire them or buy a newer card? What are the limits/problems associated with CrossFire?
If I bought another 4850 it would run me between $100-150. A newer card that would perform better than CrossFire 4850s would be (at minimum) the 5850 which would be ~$300.
Also, I am currently running a 500 GB SATA II drive as my main and a 350 GB IDE for extra storage.
Would upgrading to a Kingston 128 GB SSD and a 1.0 TB SATA II for storage significantly improve my performance?
Any thoughts would be helpful!
Thanks!
For reference, my baby:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition
4 GB RAM
Sapphire ATI 4850 512 MB Video Card
HD 1: SATA II 500 GB
HD 2: IDE 350GB
Antec Skeleton Case
750W Antec Power Supply
Windows 7 Home Premium
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Does your motherboard support crossfire? I have an 8800GT still and I can SLI them with a 2nd, but my motherboard only supports crossfire and not nvidia's SLI
That's a tough call.. crossfire and SLI have gotten a lot better recently with their performance but it still usually requires specific support in the driver (though I've read you can make your own profiles), so one thing would be to check if the games you play the most work well with crossfire.. it would suck if you got it and found out your #1 game got zero benefit.
You'd definitely see some benefit for the SSD as well, everyone that has one will tell you it's night and day, Anandtech says it's the one upgrade you can do that has the most impact on how fast you perceive your computer running. Just be careful with the Kingston ones make sure you do the full research on the drive, I think there's ones that are reasonably fast for the price, and ones that are cheaper but really slow.
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Also consider that adding a 2nd graphic card is going to draw a lot of power and add heat to the case interior. If you go this route make sure your power supply and cooling is up to the task.
Also consider that adding a 2nd graphic card is going to draw a lot of power and add heat to the case interior. If you go this route make sure your power supply and cooling is up to the task.
With my 750W PS I don't think it should be a problem.
Plus, I have an Antec Skeleton case, so cooling has never been an issue for me.
Thanks for the insight!
Antec Skeleton:
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Just out of curiosity, how much is the SSD you are looking at? I'm also thinking of upgrading my hard drive to SSD soon and it would be nice to know how much I should be expecting to shell out for one. Thanks.
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Does your motherboard support crossfire? I have an 8800GT still and I can SLI them with a 2nd, but my motherboard only supports crossfire and not nvidia's SLI
That's a tough call.. crossfire and SLI have gotten a lot better recently with their performance but it still usually requires specific support in the driver (though I've read you can make your own profiles), so one thing would be to check if the games you play the most work well with crossfire.. it would suck if you got it and found out your #1 game got zero benefit.
You'd definitely see some benefit for the SSD as well, everyone that has one will tell you it's night and day, Anandtech says it's the one upgrade you can do that has the most impact on how fast you perceive your computer running. Just be careful with the Kingston ones make sure you do the full research on the drive, I think there's ones that are reasonably fast for the price, and ones that are cheaper but really slow.
Have you heard anything bad about the Kingston SSDs? The user reviews at Newegg are good.
I read website reviews on it as well, they all say pretty much the same thing. It is on the slower end for SSDs but still blows away any HDD on the market by a wide margin and is by far the best price for an SSD (128 GB is $240).
Quote:
The Kingston V SNV425-S2 may not be the fastest SSD on the market, but it's no slouch, and with an excellent price, you get a very capable SSD, and the value offered here is the most impressive feature. The Kingston SNV425-S2 is probably one of the first "affordable" SSDs on the market that isn't a basement-dweller in terms of performance. Frankly, with these respectable numbers and amazing price, this drive is sure to make many consumers jump onto the SSD bandwagon.
Legit Bottom Line: Kingston has really put the pressure on the other SSD manufacturers with their 128GB SSDNow V Series drive. With solid performance for an entry-level drive and $2/GB pricing that even SSD upgrade holdouts will find hard to resist, I have a feeling retailers will have a hard time keeping these drives on the shelves.
Just out of curiosity, how much is the SSD you are looking at? I'm also thinking of upgrading my hard drive to SSD soon and it would be nice to know how much I should be expecting to shell out for one. Thanks.
Prices are nice right now for the Kingston SSDs.
At Memory Express (as of today):
Bare Drive/Kit
$100/110 for 30 GB.
$110/130 for 64 GB.
$205/240 for 128 GB. (Bare Drive completely sold out)
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As you say it's still a lot stronger than a normal hard drive, but for me I'd rather go a little bit further, spend the extra $60 and get a drive that doesn't have the same slowness in that area:
4850's crossfired would be quite powerful, equivalent to a modern day $300+ 5850 despite only have 512MB of ram. Since it is an older card, perhaps you can find one used?
I'd say it's value for money versus buying a new $300 card to just spend $150 to CF them. The only area of concern is that the 512MB of ram will limit your ability to use higher resolutions and higher levels of AA in addition to the maximum texture sizes of some games like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Starcraft II or if you like to use custom texture packs for some games like Oblivion/Fallout 3, etc.
Use the saved $150 to buy yourself an SSD and you are off to the races. You could also use the money saved to buy a better cooling solution and overclock that Phenom X4 9850 to around 3.0 GHz.
I did SLI once with a pair of 7900 GS. I didn't like it. First of all it gets a bit loud. Secondly even though FRAPS showed framerate increases from a single card a lot of times the graphics did not seem smooth as indicated and some games gave me mouse lag. Google SLI and microstutter to find out more.
It uses a SF-1200 controller and it's 120GB so it'll be between the OCZ Agility 2 I linked above, and the OCZ Vertex 2 (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/o...f1200-reviewed).. There's different versions of firmware that Sandforce (the company making the SF-1200) are giving to manufacturers so while both the Agility 2 and the Vertex 2 (and the Gskill drive) use the SF-1200, they'll have different ratings for IOPS.
From what I'm reading this drive has the same high IOPS firmware that the Vertex 2 does, so it should be the same as the Vertex 2 in terms of performance, which means it'll be one of the best drives out there.
If we are derailing Nek's thread into SSD discussion, I understand that there were issues with raiding SSDs before due to loss of trim support. Has this changed lately? All my regular SATAs are full but I have two RAID ports unused and sometimes it's economically cheaper to buy two smaller capacity drives and Raid 0 them.
Yeah that's a pretty good deal, the F120 is listed as having a lower IOPS rating as the Vertex 2, but the difference doesn't seem to make much difference in real world performance, and only a tiny difference in the benchmarks:
It's kind of annoying though, with Sandforce basically playing with the parameters of the chips for different manufacturers. Makes it hard to compare apples to apples.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
If we are derailing Nek's thread into SSD discussion, I understand that there were issues with raiding SSDs before due to loss of trim support. Has this changed lately? All my regular SATAs are full but I have two RAID ports unused and sometimes it's economically cheaper to buy two smaller capacity drives and Raid 0 them.
It's still true; RAID controllers don't currently pass through TRIM commands to the drives. But I've read some articles trying that and said that it isn't as bad as it would seem, that the latest drives are more resilient to performance degradation. I'll try and find some of the articles later.
Once you price it out though it's almost the same thing, at least for the 64GB drives and the 120ish GB drives.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
It's still true; RAID controllers don't currently pass through TRIM commands to the drives. But I've read some articles trying that and said that it isn't as bad as it would seem, that the latest drives are more resilient to performance degradation. I'll try and find some of the articles later.
Once you price it out though it's almost the same thing, at least for the 64GB drives and the 120ish GB drives.
Use software RAID instead, and then the TRIM commands will be passed down. Keep in mind that unless you have a dedicated RAID controller, and I’m not talking about the junk on consumer motherboards, that software RAID is going to run just as fast, particularly RAID-0 and RAID-1, where there is no CPU overhead for parity calculations.
There are other benefits to software RAID too, namely that you can take those drives and plug them into any other system and the RAID’ed partitions will be usable without being tied to specific hardware implementations.
Help! Thoughts on potential computer upgrades?
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