Ivy, Nvidia PC build.

Hey guys,

The 600 series should be a significant gain over the 500 series from Nvidia so no matter what platform you choose the 600 series should rock.

The 590 is a horrible card, and you'll hear that from several people here. It's advertised 3GB is a lie, it's just two 1.5GB 580's connected via an internal SLI bridge with their speeds severally reduced to keep the card from melting. Dual chip cards should just be be avoided, x3 580's (3 real GPUs total) will smoke x2 590's (4 weak GPUs total).

I have reservations about the Ivy bridge and that rests solely on the MOBO platform. The Ivy brdige is supposed to be the same socket type as the Sandy brdige so we are likely only going to see current Sandy bridge MOBOs tweaked slightly and released as "Ivy bridge" MOBOs.

The issue with that is Sandy brdige platform MOBOs all lack the necessary PCI lanes run anything more then a x2 GPU set up and they all have issues that cause the RAM to run at less then it's full speed. If those issues are not address the Ivy brdige platform will be wasted.

The Sandy-e platform however does not have the issue with the lack of PCI lanes. So if you want to wait for the Ivy bridge you may need to wait for the Ivy-e platform as it will share the socket with the Sandy-e.


Edited by jmaster299 - 30 Jan 2012 at 10:10am

The issue with the 2600k "hanging with" the 3960 can depend on what you are using for your grounds as a comparison. In gaming you will not see the difference because games do not properly use multi-core CPUs or hyper-threading right now so the difference between the two will be negligible. The games simply do not benefit from the extra cores. The games that due use multiple cores do not always do so correctly and are generally targeted at only using 2 or 4 cores.

Synthetic benchmarks will show some difference but that's mainly because those are more of a stress test then a real test of graphics processing (which should not be CPU dependent anyways). For things like rendering or running other truly CPU dependent programs the Sandy-e series does offer a legit performance gain. Things like 3DMark base their results far too much on CPU performance when a proper designed and coded game should relay more on your GPUs. (That's what they are freaking there for).

I understand wanting to be able to use only 2 GPUs for the heat/power issues but there is no guarantee that two 600 series cards will be sufficient for a 6000x1080 resolution that you will be playing at. As no two 500 series cards (x2 590's does not count as that is actually 4 total GPUs) can even max 2560x1600 (which is over 25% smaller) I seriously doubt the 600 series will be that much of an increase.

For what you are going for I still think waiting for the 600 series will be a good idea but I'm fairly sure you are going to still need at least 3 GPUs for your resolution.


Edited by jmaster299 - 30 Jan 2012 at 3:12pm

7990's will be horrid since they will "probably" im not sure of this but probably will be dual gpu cards, and that being, almost no one on this forum likes dual gpu cards. just wait for the "680's" to come out and get two, or three of them, two dual gpu cards will produce more heat than two single gpu cards

Take any two mid to high end GPU (570/6970/580/7970/etc.) and they will all smoke the dual GU card of that same generation, possibly even the dual GPU card of the new generation too.

The 590, the 6990, and all dual GPUs cards before them are junk compared to any legit x2 SLI or Crossfire set up. The 590 is two 580 chips with their clocks turned way the hell down and connected via an internal SLI bridge. Same goes for the 6990, it's two 6970's way under tuned to keep the card from melting.

Let me put it to you like this. Would you ever take two 580 cards, install them in your system in SLI then go into the options and REDUCE all the clocks for both cards? I didn't think so, but that is exactly what you are doing when you use any dual GPU card. You are installing two GPUs in SLI and turning the clocks down to make the run slower.

AMD 8120 in surround 6000x1080 I had better FPS then the 2600k in surround. Who knows if it was better optimized or if I got a bunk chip, but the AMD made BF3 have better FPS, although..... it looks crisper and sharper on my 2600k, but i have to play in medium not in high like I could on the AMD.