XFX 780i worth it?

R

RM_Bulldog

Gawd
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Jan 12, 2003
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my rig is in my sig below, i dont want to spend more than say $255 to upgrade it just to tide me over till sandybridge or cheaper i7 cpus, so would buying a refurbed XFX 780i for 60 bucks on ebay and a used 260 for SLI be a cost effective upgrade? i would plan to use the 260's in sli for whatever quad+ i get in the spring/summer 011
 
if you really want sli try to get a refurb or b-stock evga 780i.
 
No 780i board is worth the hassle. The chipset runs so hot that thermal shutdown kicks in. The only way I've managed to get a reference 780i board (XFX and Evga are identical reference boards) to run with any degree of reliability is by reapplying the thermal paste under the chipset cooling system, strapping a 60mm fan to the northbridge/NF200 sink, and cutting down to 2 sticks of memory. The thermal probe is built into the southbridge chip, but the heat comes from the northbridge and NF200 chip.

This has been the case with every 780i based computer that the guys I work with built before I started, they've all come back and I've had to "fix" them.

YMMV of course, but I see you've got 8GB of memory, so don't bother.
 
Your system isn't really dated - you should still be able to play just about any game with highish settings.

Unless your just itching for a project I'd save the money and wait until your ready to move to i7 or whatever comes down the road. If your looking for a project just mod your case or something ;) I held of my latest upgrade for a year at least by learning to program, I didn't really need more power but I was wanting to tinker with something.
 
+1 To what VitaminTee said. I just started using this old rig that's in my sig a few months ago and it runs everything I need just fine, as he said on "highish" settings. Work on your cable management when you get the upgrade itch, worked for me!
 
i bought a used evga 780i and i plan to sell 4gb of my memory because i got an ssd
i figure a 410-415 FSB will be plenty from this board and most people dont have a hard time getting that :) also have another 260 to go sli with
playing battlefield bc and the mafia demo showed me that yes it is time to upgrade from a dual core so i got a Q9550. hopefully this set up holds me over for another year
 
well i found out i had a 4gb set of 5-5-5-18 1.8v that can do 926 1:1 with same timmings at 2.2v so maybe the evga can do 463 fsb :) i also have a 92mm fan on an arm that i will be pointing at the ram and northbridge and it has 70 cfm ;) every board i have ever owned the nb gets hot so i have kept this arm and fan through many set ups and it does a good job keeping my chipset and memory cool :) a q9550 @ 3.9 with 260 sli will kick ass if the motherboard can handle that modest fsb
 
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