3x 30" Portrait 6970 CF Eyefinity vs 580 SLI Surround Showdown

Makes me wonder what an extreme edition IB would be able to do. 6.0GHz? 6.5?
 
Man, just got done playing the Shogun 2 demo @ 5088x2560 on Quad-SLI. 2100MB VRAM usage in some spots, 4x GPUs maxed out producing average 70FPS. Friggin' beautiful.

I need to work on this cooling as card #4 that can breath without restriction was only at 65 C yet card #1 was at 95 C! I think I will add another 120mm Scythe fan blowing down on the cards instead of just one to see if that helps. Can't wait for EK water blocks. The amount of heat being put out by 4x over clocked 580s is pretty impressive! It is similar to my paint stripper heat gun. :D

Since my build has departed quite a bit from this threads original 2x 580s vs 2x 6970s, I am thinking about starting a new thread detailing the 4x 3GB 580 setup and custom sub-zero liquid cooling. Including benchmarks, screenshots, video etc.



Shogun2_2011_02_24_16_16_15_114.jpg



BTW this is Shogun 2 Demo with all settings at maximum but with no AA. (AA not enabled in Demo). Thats a lot of VRAM usage with no AA at all! 3GB Quad-SLI is amazing. ;)
 
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Vega said:
I am thinking about starting a new thread detailing the 4x 3GB 580 setup and custom sub-zero liquid cooling. Including benchmarks, screenshots, video etc.
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Excellent, hop to it. Remember- 2 cards, crysis, 5760x1200, maybe underclock the CPU a bit to simulate a 2600k. To work!

/cheeky
 
Dan_D said:
You can safely take them over 1.5v. However you shouldn't need to unless you are trying to take it over 5.0GHz. In which case your chip may or may not do that regardless of the voltage. These things have multiplier limits and they'll hit a wall at some point. For those it's usually around 49x-50x
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I'm running a beta bios that provides PLL overvolt that is supposed to break through the barrier. I can run at 4.9ghz at 1.42v but it fails out of folding after a while, I've been nervous about giving it more voltage even though the temps max out at about 63C. This processor is at full load 24/7 for folding so I can't use a voltage that is only appropriate for bench runs, have people been running well over 1.4v 24/7?
 
Yeah I was anticipating temps being an issue with non-ref coolers that jammed together. Interesting you can run Shogun 2 maxed out, I was hearing that the beta was an absolute hog. Still, 57fps on four GTX580s is pretty alarming!
 
R-Type said:
I'm running a beta bios that provides PLL overvolt that is supposed to break through the barrier. I can run at 4.9ghz at 1.42v but it fails out of folding after a while, I've been nervous about giving it more voltage even though the temps max out at about 63C. This processor is at full load 24/7 for folding so I can't use a voltage that is only appropriate for bench runs, have people been running well over 1.4v 24/7?
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When I had a 2600K I did a a lot of research and found you can run 1.5v 24/7 fine as long as you keep the temps in check.

samuelmorris said:
Yeah I was anticipating temps being an issue with non-ref coolers that jammed together. Interesting you can run Shogun 2 maxed out, I was hearing that the beta was an absolute hog. Still, 57fps on four GTX580s is pretty alarming!
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Alarming in a good or bad way? ;)
 
I'm surprised you can get away with 1.5V on a 32nm chip to be honest, given the voltage tolerances of their predecessors. What's defined as the temperatures 'being in check?'


Heh, alarming in a bad way. That's a LOT of graphics power to not quite break 60fps.
Is there an agreeable scaling percentage you've come across for Quad-SLI with the 580s, or would you consider it too variable?
 
R-Type said:
I'm running a beta bios that provides PLL overvolt that is supposed to break through the barrier. I can run at 4.9ghz at 1.42v but it fails out of folding after a while, I've been nervous about giving it more voltage even though the temps max out at about 63C. This processor is at full load 24/7 for folding so I can't use a voltage that is only appropriate for bench runs, have people been running well over 1.4v 24/7?
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PLL overvolting can allow you to get over the hump on some setups, but so far that hasn't been my experience. Though I've not had a whole lot of time with the 2500K / 2600K parts on my test bench compared to other processors.
 
samuelmorris said:
I'm surprised you can get away with 1.5V on a 32nm chip to be honest, given the voltage tolerances of their predecessors. What's defined as the temperatures 'being in check?'


Heh, alarming in a bad way. That's a LOT of graphics power to not quite break 60fps.
Is there an agreeable scaling percentage you've come across for Quad-SLI with the 580s, or would you consider it too variable?
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Temps below 75 C are fine. Scaling is pretty damn impressive so far. One word of caution though, even if you have a SSD do not disable the page file! I was having all sorts of issues without a page file. Even though I was only using 3-5GB out of 6GB while playing games, tons of games want a page file. I am not sure if its DirectX or Windows 7, but at this high of a resolution there needs to be a page file for some reason.

Quad-3GB SLI has been incredible so far. In release version DCS-A10C, with every in game setting maxed at 5088x2560 I am getting 60-100FPS with all GPUs maxed out.

I need a watt meter as I hope my solo HCP-1200 is holding up ok. I figure with the OC'd CPU and 4 OC'd GPUs I am pushing near 1500w and pulling around 1700-1800w from the wall. I had to plug the HCP-1200 directly into the wall as the UPS I was running shut down from overload. :D
 
I need a watt meter as I hope my solo HCP-1200 is holding up ok. I figure with the OC'd CPU and 4 GPUs I am pushing 1500w and pulling around 1700-1800w from the wall. I had to plug the HCP-1200 directly into the wall as the UPS I was running shut down from overload.
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Holy shit man, you don't need a watt meter; you need a nuclear generator..............

Your stuff is way impressive....and the time and energy you've put ito the comparisons is awesome.

Keep up the good work.:p
 
magoo said:
Holy shit man, you don't need a watt meter; you need a nuclear generator..............

Your stuff is way impressive....and the time and energy you've put ito the comparisons is awesome.

Keep up the good work.:p
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I just did a run of Heaven 2.1 with the same settings as the original post and pulled a 40 FPS on stock GPU clocks (to keep heat down). Just to put that into perspective, thats exactly twice the speed as 2x overclocked 6970s in Crossfire. Now thats some scaling :eek:

I put my ear to the HCP-1200 during the benchmark and it was making all sorts of electrical capacitor type high pitched squealing. I hope the PSU will shut down before it hurts itself. ;)
 
You're a sick, sick man Mr. Vega. Love it! I hope to see you run Quadfire with two 6990's and let us know how it performs for you.
 
NukeDukem said:
You're a sick, sick man Mr. Vega. Love it! I hope to see you run Quadfire with two 6990's and let us know how it performs for you.
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Having followed this thread, I doubt he's going back to the amd cards any time soon after finding the 3gb 580's
 
R-Type said:
Having followed this thread, I doubt he's going back to the amd cards any time soon after finding the 3gb 580's
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Ya, I've realized 2GB VRAM isn't nearly enough either. I routinely run around 2.5GB VRAM. Crysis with only 2x AA is using 2700MB VRAM. :eek:
 
NukeDukem said:
I'm sure someone will come out with a 4GB version of the 6990 :D
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I have my doubts. The regular GTX580 was clearly lacking in VRAM but the 69xx series having 2GB covers 99.9% of users. Although I hope they keep adding more and more VRAM to the next series of cards as the requirement is only going to go up.
 
Yeah new thread time. The original purpose of this thread is served. Time to move on to the future!
 
Heh, Vega already has twice as much Vram physically on that build as he does system memory, 16 gb of physical vram for 4gb effective would be insane.
 
I personally would welcome (if they could get it to scale) 6-way graphics with three dual cards. If they can get that working well enough, dual GPU cards would make a bit of a renaissance.
 
Vega said:
One word of caution though, even if you have a SSD do not disable the page file! I was having all sorts of issues without a page file. Even though I was only using 3-5GB out of 6GB while playing games, tons of games want a page file. I am not sure if its DirectX or Windows 7, but at this high of a resolution there needs to be a page file for some reason.
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Some further information about why disabling the page file is a bad idea even with gobs of memory. http://www.dansdata.com/io113.htm
 
Yup, even if Win 7 shows plenty of free physical RAM, some things just don't work right without a page file being there. I wonder if the page file has anything to do with pre-loading data for the video RAM, as if I turned off the page file a lot of games wouldn't work properly and I would get DirextX errors, etc.
 
Vega said:
Yup, even if Win 7 shows plenty of free physical RAM, some things just don't work right without a page file being there. I wonder if the page file has anything to do with pre-loading data for the video RAM, as if I turned off the page file a lot of games wouldn't work properly and I would get DirextX errors, etc.
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Vega: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778.html

Some reading for you concerning RAM, video cards, and swap files. Obviously you can ignore the parts about bypassing the limits of 32bit Windows.

I was surprised as hell when you went with only 6GB on this latest setup. If any gamer could benefit from 12GB or more, you would be it. At 12GB you could even make a small RAM drive of 1GB or so and use it as your swap file so Windows and some programs don't flip out.
 
Hm, interesting. Although, I still haven't seen any games use more than 4-5GB physical RAM according to Win7 task manager. I do have 12GB of RAM, just been running 6GB as that can support higher overclocks.

I'll test out some slower 12GB RAM versus 6GB faster RAM and see what I get.
 
Its been said Win7 memory management will reduce the amount of system RAM used (going into the swap file) so I'd say you should test this. Try the 12GB and see if the amount used increases.
 
Finally got my tracking info, ready to do some comparisons Vega =P...well kind of haha
 
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