The Official OC (OverClocking) Thread!

oooh That's gonna be a bit over budget. Shaf, you sure you can't do some magic and make that 300?

 

hell im hoping itll be under £300 in the UK.

 

Hopefully they won't try exchange rate trick.

BTW who is that in your Sig?

 

what bios are you using? theres a fixed one for the hd3850's too I believe.

http://www.mvktech.net/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,26/func,selectfolder/cat,1/ look there under your card manufacturer's name

if you want a copy of winflash (ati's version) pm me

 

Thanks for the thought, but keeping it at 55% is fine with me. I don't want to void my warranty either.

 

its the middlesbrough football club logo,(who i support) but with didier Drogba on it, who's the best player ever.

 

If the card's $450 in the US, it'll be between £240 and £270 in the UK.

 

thats what i thought. even if its near the high end of that, its about the same price of Xfire 3870s, and has better results than them.

if ati dont realese anything more highend, (or even nvidia) by end aug, early sept, its going in my uni rig. )

 

haha "uni rig" - that's exactly how my PC was born.

 

It seems that ATI has finally taken the crown on the most powerful card again. That is until the 9800GTX comes out...

 

9800gx2 is less then 4 weeks away so its a short lived reign as king.

edit

good news for ati fanbois

 

heh, the 9800GX2 versus the HD3870X2, well that's basically an SLI vs Crossfire match isn't it? Somehow I'm thinking the SLI version is going to win... THG posted a recent article on how Crossfire fares up in PCIe 2.0 versus SLI. The results are just as appalling for CF as I remember.

 

xfire is not crap. most games support it very well. you really have to stop putting it down.

Sli is in the same catagory, just that xfire scales MUCH better than Sli, as it is newer technology, and can be updated easily per card, seeing as it relies on drivers, unlike SLi which is hardware focused.

 

I would love Crossfire to be good, I really would. it's an ideal way of solving the slump in new advances in graphics. Trouble is though, it really isn't. In the games it works in, it now scales excellently, but those games are too small in number to make the additional expense worthwhile.
Have a look at this
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/01/23/crossfire_meets_pci_express/
Let's see, in Blacksite Area 51 crossfire doesn't work at all.
In Call of Duty 4, the results are hardly mindblowing for either platform, around 20-25% at best, down to 10% at high resolutions.
In Crysis, it doesn't work at all according to the article. I'm dubious of that, but either way, if tom's couldn't get it to work, it can't be that easy to do!
In Doom 3, SLi scales pretty well, up to 60% at high resolutions, and even then it's presumably only limited by the CPU, since the frame rate is well over 100 even at the highest resolution tested. Crosfie on the other hand does, in the words of Adam Savage, "bupkiss".
What about Half-Life 2 episode 2? An important game in the minds of most true PC gamers. Well, the CPU ceiling is a pretty low 75fps, so it's hard to test, but the results are promising, around 40% improvement for the 3850, potentially could be higher due to the ceiling, so we have one game that crossfire benefits from. Or do we? I played HL2:E2 at 2560x1600 on max detail on my single X1900XT, it ran alright. If the game's smooth without crossfire, there's no need for it here.
How about Flight sim X? A bit of a disappointing turnout for ATi here. The ATi drivers induce a CPu ceiling of only 25fps. In addition to that, the gains from crossfire are nil, when it works at all. In PCie2.0 mode, it doesn't.
Lastly, World in Conflict, a demanding but superb game, I'd love crossfire to work here. Notice that when Anti-Aliasing is introduced, crossfire fails completely. That's not good, I like my AA. Additionally, the few tests that did pass show zero improvement, and since all the ATi cards are already slower than all the nvidia cards, the game is pretty much an nvidia only zone.

I fail to see how anybody can be impressed with crossfire after reading that article. It's a real shame, as I like CF as a platform, but the benchmarks don't lie, it's completely useless.

 

Well that's disappointing to say the least. My mobo supports CF but I don't know if I'll ever take advantage of it. Is this lack of improvement due to the abilities of the video card or the lack of support from games and game creators? I know almost nothing on this subject so a quick learning curve may be in order.

...gm

 

3870 Crossfire resluts:



http://www.legitreviews.com/article/605/9/




http://www.legitreviews.com/article/605/8/



http://www.legitreviews.com/article/605/7/


remeber ppl would only use dual setups for higher res anyways.

want more sam?

 

A bit more impressive. Makes you wonder what drivers THG used to mess up so badly...

 

yeah. and this review was in DEC 5th. so wonder the better results it would have now

 

Of course the burning question is, will the 3870X2 give similar results? I won't be buying a new motherboard any time soon, so I'm limited to a single graphics card.

 

im sure it will be betetr, as there will be no bandwidth linit betwenn the pcie lanes and the xfire connector. because that is all internal now