PC Build Advice/Review II: 5090 or Bust.

[Adajer]

Whats with all you guys and your dark backgrounds

hail whitey

[Kalmado]

I saw some benches showing the 970 still doing work against 480s in crossfire. It might have been Jays2Cents recently.

Sent from my SM-G925T using Tapatalk

That was 970s in SLI, and still losing to crossfire 480s. Good sale for Arkanna. Bad buy for buyer!

I'm buying a Gigabyte R9 290 for $93 give or a take a few bucks tomorrow from Micro Center. Pretty excited.

[Arkanna]

HardOCP's RX 480 Crossfire review is out.

They compared it against both a 1070 FE and a 1080 FE. Long story made short, 480 Crossfire consistently outperformed the 1070, and traded blows with the 1080. Value-wise it is certainly better than the 1080, costing ~$460 as opposed to the 1080 price range of $619-$699. Value compared to the 1070, though, is much closer. 1070's can be had (if you can find one in stock) for $399-$449. If you buy a 1070 at the low end, the value is similar.

One thing to keep in mind here is that we're comparing two video cards to a single video card ... Crossfire (and SLI, for that matter) will always complicate the situation. Crossfire/SLI are dependent upon drivers from the card manufacturer (DX11) which has always been hit or miss, and Crossfire/SLI on DX12 is almost a complete unknown at this point since multi-GPU duty will be moving completely to the developer.

Another thing about the 480. A single card is generally going to be a 1080p solution, as they struggle at 1440p and above. In Crossfire, they become a perfectly-capable 1440p solution, but even with two cards, 4k performance is not good. Some speculate that the 480 just does not have enough ROPs to perform well at such high res.

Last thing: the 480 (single-card and Crossfire) requires a lot more power to do its thing than either the 1070 or 1080. HardOCP quoted power consumption of 480 Crossfire as being 60% higher than a 1080 (while only trading blows in terms of performance) and 87% higher than a 1070 (while only being 10%-20% faster).

For me, I am fine with my choice of a single 1070, since my case is mini-ITX and thus will only fit one card, and my power supply is SFX limiting me to 600w. I'm not trying to sound like I prefer one company's solutions over the other, but for right now, I'm good with my 1070.

[Zetanio]

What's the total power cost difference for a year?

With that much of a power skew, it's almost never going to be worth it to go dual card. Couple that with Crossfire being a total crapshoot on DX12 and I don't see the 480x2 being a smart move unless you REALLY hate nVidia.

[Arkanna]

I really have no idea on the total power cost difference. It'll vary person to person anyway, based upon where you live, and by how much you game, based strictly on a non-dollar-value total power consumed comparison. But there's no question, for the 1440p gamer, RX 480 Crossfire represents better value than a 1080.

I've personally never wanted a dual-card setup anyway. Crossfire and SLI have always been a crapshoot, regardless of game, timeframe, or renderer (DX version OpenGL etc.) If someone wants a single-card solution for 1440p or 4k, or ANY solution for 4k, they will need to get a 1080 or potentially wait for Vega this fall.

[Zetanio]

The review you linked disagrees with RX480x2 being an optimal 1440p solution.

They note that the Crossfire struggles with current games and that doesn't bode well for future game releases.

A 1070 is a viable solution for 1440p gaming that's much more reliable and draws half the power. You won't be playing fully maxed out on every game but it's overall a very solid performer.

[Arkanna]

To be fair, my words were "perfectly-capable", not "optimal". I agree with you completely.

I think I made a subconscious decision to try to sound neutral while I wrote the above, also. But for this upgrade cycle (and for the last few, in fact), I am not neutral. nVidia has been making a bitch out of AMD for a long while, and I suspect the 1060 will continue that even without SLI support.

[Zetanio]

To be fair, my words were "perfectly-capable", not "optimal". I agree with you completely.

I think I made a subconscious decision to try to sound neutral while I wrote the above, also. But for this upgrade cycle (and for the last few, in fact), I am not neutral. nVidia has been making a bitch out of AMD for a long while, and I suspect the 1060 will continue that even without SLI support.

Yeah. You're right, I should have read more carefully.

I'm getting a 1070 as soon as I see one for 380 or less.

[Arkanna]

Gonna be a while on that, I'm thinking.

[Kalmado]

So for 4k solution is sounds like the best value to performance would be sli 1070, but obviously single is 1080. One thing I didn't like in the review was using AA for any card at 4k let alone 1440. Maybe it's me, but I don't see the difference and it's nothing but a fps killer.

[Arkanna]

Agree, but if you look at the benchmarks I posted from my Division @ 1440p, there was hardly any performance gained from cutting aniso from 16x down to 1x. That really surprised me, but then again, I have heard lately that aniso is not the perf killer it used to be.

[Kalmado]

Agree, but if you look at the benchmarks I posted from my Division @ 1440p, there was hardly any performance gained from cutting aniso from 16x down to 1x. That really surprised me, but then again, I have heard lately that aniso is not the perf killer it used to be.

Absolutely it isn't. But if you were to use any form of Anti-Aliasing it absolutely will. Like in Far Cry 4. If the system doesn't have the gpu horsepower and AA is turned on the user will absolutely see downgraded performance without a noticeable bump in graphics quality.

[ikariiiii]

Anyone have recommendations for a good mobo/cpu combo? looking to upgrade, budget is pretty wide but I don't need high end gear, just something that is durable and stable, if possible. Currently have:
-Intel i7 920 Processor
-EVGA 132-BL-E758-A1 X58 3-Way SLI Core i7 Motherboard
-GeForce GTX 960 (recent purchase)

I should mention here I mostly use it for FFXI, and occasionally steam games like Dark Souls 3, Rocket League, MGSV

[Arkanna]

I usually recommend a Skylake-based Core i5, a Z170 motherboard, and 8 to 16GB of DDR4 memory.

1) Skylake i5's are no longer more expensive than earlier i5's
2) Which specific motherboard doesn't matter much, just pick a Z170 from a decent company that has the features you want
3) DDR4 memory is also no longer more expensive than DDR3, and is in fact, pretty cheap. No matter which quantity you decide on, make sure you get modules in pairs to take advantage of dual-channel speed

[Zetanio]

Yeah. Z170 is a great buy. Just put one in my new build.

[Shenrien]

8 to 16GB of ram is good, if you know what you're doing grab 32GB and build a RAM disk. People say that SSD and m.2 loading speeds are amazing, on a RAM disk its just one step above that.

[ikariiiii]

Thank you all for the advice. I really do appreciate it!

[Malithar]

Not really a build question but more of a problem. I didn't see a tech help thread and this is one of the few getting traffic. I bought an Asus G11CD today that seemed priced really well but I'm having nothing but problems out of it it seems. Specifics of system are:

Skylake Mobo (not sure of model, PC stuck in update limbo atm)
I5-6400
16 gig DDR4
GTX 960
Win x64

No matter what I've done, I can't seem to get virtualization to work with emulators. They always claim it's not turned on, but in both the bios and task manager CPU tab, it says it is. Seems like a common issue from searches, but the fixes I've tried have yet to work. Anyone have any experience?

I've had 3 crashes while setting up basic programs (spybot s&d, avast, VLC, updating nvidia drivers). Is windows 10 just that tempermental while setting up, or am I looking at something being wrong with it?

Also, windows 10 update. I did a search after getting everything sorted for windows updates and it said it was ready to update and to schedule a restart. No mention of how many files or their size, so I just restarted then. That was a mistake it seems. Its now been just over 3 hours and it's at a blistering 9%. Is the first update just epically massive or is something boned? I'd format better and give more details on the system, but it's stuck in that update.

Even though both Avast and Spybot were supported for Windows 10, they both seemed to be the culprits for all of the issues. Had well over 300 warning/errors/critical issues in event viewer, haven't had any in the past 3 hours without them. Shitty, loved those two for my AV needs over the past decade-ish.

[Zetanio]

I use MSE or w/e the equivalent for Win10 is. Is there a better solution?

[Zetanio]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...65/unknown.png

da fuck is making everything work so hard. This is with nothing open.