Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah those are OK if you can get your head around the VRAM layout. Expensive though.

I wish I could say AMD will be releasing cards like that but the stock cooler for the new 390x has hose holes so it's looking like another hot potato

On paper the VRAM fuckery with the 970 could hurt it, and I know in synthetic tests it's been demonstrated to do so.

However, out in the real world, thusfar at least, no one's been able to come up with any examples of the 3.5+0.5 VRAM architecture actually impacting performance. Eurogamer specifically referenced this in the GTAV article as that's the sort of condition (massive VRAM usage) where you might expect the 970 to hurt, but there was no evidence of this being the case. (They also found the same results with other games when they first looked into it.)

(Not that I'm letting Nvidia off the hook for the way they marketed the card which was certainly a bit shady.)

I wish AMD would get their act together in terms of both CPUs and GPUs, because as it stands at the moment Intel and Nvidia respectively can largely charge what they want for fairly uninspiring products, safe in the knowledge that all AMD can do is cut the prices of their existing lines because they've got nothing to counter with. Intel's CPUs in particular have been dreadfully incremental for ages now. (Which is why my ancient (albeit overclocked) i7-920 can still trade blows with their latest CPUs, as fundamentally Intel's current architecture is very similar to the first i7s which were released in 2008.)

But yes, for me, if I do get a new graphics card it'll be a 970, and probably one of those mini-ITX variants. Having kicked GTAV around a fair bit now and tweaking it up, it's definitely my GPU that's maxed out as opposed to the CPU, so a new graphics card should give me a decent boost. (The GPU sits at a near-constant 100% utilisation whilst in game, whereas my four CPU cores are generally at 70-80%, hyper-threading is turned off because it does nothing for games and indeed generally hurts performance a little bit.)

Well you're actually in luck dude. Depending on your motherboard you can now pick up a hex cored Xeon X5650 or better from Ebay for around £50-£70. Overclocked to 4ghz they put out around the same numbers as a 4790k. It's basically a 980x.

Many on OCUK have been fitting them and have found that they're seriously quick. Definitely a worthwhile upgrade and no reason to buy anything newer.

AMD have Zen coming next year and they brought back the guy who designed the original FX CPU you had. They're going to be 4-16 core and will sport some sort of threading too.

Have a look at the Zotac 970 dude it's pretty small also. However if I were you I'd go 290x and replace your case, you'd be surprised what can be had for £50 these days. Not sure you still sub to Custom PC but they did a group test recently and the 290x was quicker at 1440p and 4k thanks to its far wider memory bus.

This is the same size as your 670.

http://www.ebuyer.com/666813-palit-gtx- ... 14g2-2041f

This is also nice and diddy.

http://www.ebuyer.com/663452-zotac-gtx- ... -90101-10p

The problem I have with the Zotac is it both draws its air in and dumps it back out inside the case, and it's already a bit cramped in mine (I have been looking at 970s over the last few months and that's one I've been eyeing up.)

Ideally I'd go for a card with a radial fan that draws air in at the back of the card (which is fed with fresh air by the 120mm fan at the front of my case), and then dumps its hot air out of the back of the case. (Which is what my reference 670 does, in fact, that Palit 970 looks like it uses exactly the same cooler as a reference 670!)

The ASUS mini-ITX 970 does technically dump a chunk of air back into the case but apparently it's got some clever mini vapour chamber trickery going on and runs very cool overall without moving a lot of air around.

I really don't want a 290x TBH, I fell out with AMD a few years ago and the experiences of my mates who've dabbled with their cards since then hasn't impressed me much. (The 290X a friend bought, easily hitting its thermal limits and throttling with the stock cooler whilst sounding like a leaf-blower wasn't exactly a great inspirer of confidence....)

I initially bought a R9 290 stock for £135 about six months ago for my Hackintosh. Before I put it in there I tried it in Windows 8 and tbh dude I must say I was blown away. It was almost as fast as one of my Titans and they were £699 each. It was hot and loud though but then the stock cooler is awful. However, I ain't gonna knock ya for not wanting to dance with their drivers. They are utterly shit tbh and why I hold firm on buying Nvidias. Just recently they haven't been updating and their crew have been basically saying "We'll release it when it's ready !" which isn't really good enough IMO.

The Palit card is the same as what you have now yes. Small PCB with a plastic extension on the back. Honestly going into miser mode I would say that throwing in a hex cored Xeon and a 970 will cover you for a couple of years at least. You're spot on about Intel. Their gains recently have been complete crap and I've seen some slides on Skylake and it's about 5% faster than Devil's Canyon.

When I bought my 3970x (which I got on Ebay for £340) the 5820k was about to launch. All told with the Dominator Platinum (which is horrifically expensive) I spent about the same as a 5820k set up with crap DDR4 with no heat spreaders. However, my worries were ill founded it seems because I can get 4.9ghz out of it and the 5820k only clocks to around 4.2 which means I can easily beat it in any benchmark or game. That's the issue with these new Intels, whilst the die shrink brings a small bump in performance it also means that the core itself gets incredibly hot as soon as you start to crank on it which means earlier gen CPUs can easily make up for the bump with much higher clocks and lower temps.

It's going to take a bit of a miracle with AMD and this Zen, but hey, this is the chap who brought us the original FX series and they were absolutely incredible. So I do hold at least a glimmer of hope.

I may not personally like some of the style choices, but I do think they are executed well and look to be well assembled.

Yeah it's a bit loud. The tiny rig is quite refined once the side panel goes back on

It's mainly just to make it easier to clean. All I have to do is get out a paint brush and clean out the fans, then once all the dust is out use a damp cloth (very lightly damp I add) and just wipe all the panels down. The big black and orange rig is a real nightmare to keep clean. It's just a dust magnet

Yay, so I'm breaking my duck for this year and this is the first review (with data) that I've done in an absolute age.

Today's review concentrates on the Intel Pentium G3258, also known as the 20th Anniversary CPU. I have built a completely mismatched PC using parts I had lying around for months. The spec of the test system are as follows (the parts that matter).

Intel Pentium G3258 overclocked to 4.2ghz turbo @ 1.197v (max the board allows)
4gb Geil Extreme ram running @ 1333mhz
Gigabyte B85N "Phoenix" ITX motherboard (max 1.2v)
MSI Nvidia GTX Titan Black stock clocks

So what is the aim of this review?

Well, I will be honest I love testing things. Reviews of the Pentium were pretty plentiful at launch but sadly it was benched and tested as a entry level CPU and thus was not tested with high end graphical hardware. This is a shame, because there may be a point where the CPU can be bottlenecked by the graphics hardware. For example, running something like a Radeon 270 with this CPU could cause a situation where you are GPU limited and thus the CPU is made to look bad.

So the aim here was to eliminate any graphical bottle necking at 1080p resolution and find out exactly what the processor itself is capable of.

The CPU

Intel decided a while back to finally release a budget CPU that could be overclocked. They did this to coincide with the 20th anniversary of their first Pentium CPU. Here it is here, retail package.



And Intel's data sheet.



This CPU can easily be overclocked. What makes this CPU an even more tempting proposition is that certain board partners have released cheap low end motherboards with the overclocking options left active. This means it's not very difficult to grab a board that will overclock and the CPU for a very low price.

The games and testing methodology

Please note I have chosen games from multiple genres in order to help those out who may be considering buying one of these CPUs. As thus I have chosen a certain type of game and consider those the bigger, leading type of their class (so for example racing games, first person shooters and so on).

Each game has been set to run at the absolute maximum settings the games will allow. I decided to use 2XMSAA when possible due to the amount of system ram, as upping the MSAA can cause the GPU to lean on the system memory.

The benchmarks

OK let's get to the good part.

First up Dirt 3 - Note - Max FPS is not recorded.



At first I had to rub my eyes and look again. Got to admit, was very shocked by the result. Obviously Dirt 3 is not CPU bound and doesn't really care how many cores you have. Moving on..

Grid 2



And again I was pretty surprised at how well the Pentium performed. Time for some first person fun.

Sleeping Dogs.



Not my sort of game and to be honest I only played it for about an hour before I stopped playing. But again we see that the Pentium is not really stopping the system from achieving perfectly playable FPS.

Hitman Absolution



Again not one of my favourite games but it is quite hard to get running at maximum settings but once again was absolutely no problem at all for the Pentium.

Metro 2033



Note - this benchmark will always come back with a very low FPS score no matter how good your rig is. What's important here is the average FPS and 64 is again more than playable. In fact it's actually better than just more than playable it's quite amazing. It may be an older title but that doesn't matter, it's still a pig to run.

Crysis 3



And I will admit the first jaw dropping moment of the day. I just couldn't believe that the Pentium was able to keep the minimum FPS playable. This is a test that I tried, and failed, using both an I5 2400 at stock speed and a AMD FX 8320 at stock speed. The AMD needed serious overclocking to get into the 40s. However once again the average FPS is truly remarkable and again, more than playable. Stunning !

GTAV



Please note ! I had to enable VSYNC because the game was stuttering quite badly with it disabled. One would think that with it enabled a average FPS count would be hard to maintain, but once again the Pentium truly left me flabbergasted. I really could not believe how well the game ran on such an entry level CPU.

Conclusion

A couple, nay, few years ago I decided to have some fun with a Celeron G530 and a GTX 480. At that time the GTX 480 was still a high end card and I wanted to see what it could do with the cheapest processor available from Intel. Those results left me quite shocked, with the rig only really failing in Mafia 2 which seems to be heavily CPU bound.

I repeated that test this time around and to be honest the game was pretty much unplayable with the Pentium, even with it overclocked. I would imagine it had something to do with Physx which I did set to maximum. However, every other result from the Pentium has absolutely amazed me.

I did read in reviews that in certain games the Pentium could be an issue. However, using many of the latest games I saw no issues at all. It wouldn't surprise me if the minimum FPS counts could actually be improved by running 8gb of ram, but I really wanted to keep the rest of the rig as cheap and low rent as possible.

GTX970 arrived today so first thing I did when I got home was whack it in my PC.

PCs being what they are today I didn't even bother to turn my PC on to uninstall the 670 through Device Manager or anything like that, just took the 670 out, put the 970 in, turned the PC on, it asked for a reboot after the first load into Windows, and thereafter, job done, 970 is good and ready to go.

The only thing I'm really interested in (and indeed the only thing that'll push it) is GTAV, and the main news is that it will indeed shunt it around at 2560x1440@60FPS, with slightly better detail settings than the 670 could manage at 1920x1080, and that was with a more variable framerate (the 670 managed 40-60FPS).

So it's VERY HIGH across the board, although I'm still steering clear of ULTRA and the Advanced Settings.

Took a car out North where all the heavy grass effects kick in and saw a low of 50FPS, so a definite improvement there.

CPU load has remained steady, I was slightly worried I'd hit some sort of horrible CPU bottleneck if I removed a constrained graphics card from the equation, but each of the CPU's four cores are still topping out at around 85% utilisation and it's staying well within its thermal limits.

GPU wise the default fan profile massively prefers to throttle the GPU rather than ramp up the fan, to the extent that the fan tops out at around 45-50% with the GPU under 100% load, with the GPU temperature bobbing around 80C which is the point it throttles at - as such the card was dropping down to 1140MHz to maintain 80C.

With a manual fan profile it boosted a lot more aggressively, settling down to a steady 1240MHz under the same solid 100% load conditions, albeit with the fan at a far noisier 80% speed, but that's no biggy as I tend to play GTAV with some decent volume anyway.

VRAM usage has been between 2.5GB and 3.2GB, which shows how limiting the 2GB was on the GTX670. The 970 has completely eliminated the occasional 'lurch' that I got on the 670, which I can only assume was the result of the game desperately shuffling data in from the slower system RAM into the far faster VRAM where it's required.

The cooler on this card is definitely down at the cheaper end of the market (I think it's exactly the same as the 670 reference cooler), so I'm not going to start buggering about with any overclocking shenanigans. Then again, it's a full-fat GTX970 GPU for £240, so an exotic cooler would be a bit much to ask at that price point.

Outside of GTAV and using the default fan profile, it's very civilised and quiet, not much to be heard over the case fans at their lowest speeds. (I ran a couple of instances in WoW with Hearthly Jnr on that profile, and the PC remained very quiet.)

Overall I'm very happy with the upgrade, it's done exactly what I wanted it to (GTAV at 2560x1440@VERYHIGH@60FPS), I've already got a buyer at work for the 670 for £60, so I've effectively upgraded for £180, to a GPU that is just one notch short of the current king of the GPU castle, the GTX980.

And my really rather elderly i7-920 CPU + mobo and RAM (which I bought second hand on the cheap!) continue to amaze, being as they are now fully six and a half years old and will be celebrating their seventh birthday in November!

Intel made a mistake with the I7 920 by thinking that the Phenom 2 would be far better than it was. They made that same mistake with Sandybridge too, again giving AMD a little too much respect, and thinking Bulldozer would be better than it was.

Since then they've realised the error of their ways. An I5 now costs over £200.

The motherboard in my monster rig has decided to die and so I need to gut my Hackintosh whilst I RMA the screwed board.

Bit of a bummer but I've not used the mac in over two months.

Yay so I've repaired my main PC. Got a Rampage IV Extreme for £120. Fitted it and performed what has to be the easiest overclock ever, straight in at 4.7ghz.

Very happy. Just got to RMA the MSI board now but will be selling the replacement as I've vowed never to stray from Asus again.

I should have bought the Rampage at the start.

Not a gaming PC question. However, I am after PC wisdom.

I'm potentially going to be moving out of London and therefore looking to work from home a few days a week. My current Macbook Pro is creaking and aged, which makes working over the VPN slow and frustrating.

So I want a desktop PC that's got enough "grunt" (whatever that is) to make work as zippy as possible, and two monitors so I can ping between screens like I do at work. I don't code or design, I write.

So, in the words of Destiny's Child, question(s)!

1) Are brands like HP, Lenovo and Acer fine?
2) Is PC World to be avoided at all costs? Anywhere better? John Lewis?
3) I'm willing to throw up to £1000 at this to cover the machine and two screens. I'm not bothered about gaming on it but will no doubt use it for the indies and and strategy games I can't get on PS4. Any great deals out there for that sort of cash?
4) Given I'm not especially bothered about gaming on it, is it worth getting an SSD?

Finally, I don't want to build a PC. I'm shit at fingers.

Any thoughts welcomed and gratefully received.

I would avoid all of said brands tbh. They're always under powered and in some cases can use non standard parts.

It all really depends on your budget, but, for example have a look at this.

http://www.cclonline.com/product/142043 ... L-EL-NGT2/

A solid, standard PC for not much money. Easily upgraded too, if that tickles your fancy

Scan also do a decent range of cheaper computers.. It would help if you knew what sort of spec you wanted (IE gaming, office only, etc) and then I can find you a few to choose from.

Awesome, thank you JC. To be honest the spec is primarily office, but being able to play the odd indie or strategy game would be nice. I'll leave my real gaming to the PS4.

Dear PC gamers.

I played ARMA III and my PC defaulted to Very High settings.

Is that cool or what? Can I play, I dunno, GTAV with better than PS4 graphics or what bearing that mind?

Yours faithfully

Ian

It takes some serious muscles to throw around ARMA III on those settings. What is the spec of your machine?

"Bearing in mind my PC can run a two year old game at an arbitrary level, will it run a brand new game at a level higher than a completely different hardware set?"

Pfffffttt. JC gets it and he's a PC obsessive.

No idea. I should find out...back in a sec.

BOOM! It was this one.

It's hard to say really. I would stick to the PS4 if it were me though. It's 7 DVDs to install and takes around four hours so a piss load of hassle.

Dear JC,

Is my PC better than yours and are you well jel?

Thanks

Ian

Yeah, he really let me down there...

My short answer works out about the same as the long one, which is basically at 1080p the 260x you have is about the same as the GPU in the PS4 and then of course comes the PC premium, so overall it would look about the same but possibly not run as well due to the PC overheads.

I haven't looked at benchmarks or performance on GPUs like yours but I would say the above is about right. I don't run 1080p any more I have a 4k screen and thus only really bother with 4k benchmarks.

If I'm being completely honest if I were running 1080p now days I would buy a PS4.

Still have my Alienware with I7 2600K and 16GB of Ram with a GTX Titan

Been a good PC for the last 3 years, only issue I have is once in a blue moon the BIOS gets upset on reboot and the disk boot order is all messed up.

Can't see me changing it for a while and when I do not sure what I'll get

Don't suppose you build PC's for a price Mr Coffey?

Even though I work in IT I hate building my own systems and gave it up.

I could do yeah. TBH though if I were buying a new PC now I'd actually plump for the new Area 51 I think it's stunning.

Thing is for gaming at least there's absolutely no point in upgrading because you still have a very quick CPU. I would upgrade your Titan to the imminent 980ti as it's a slightly cut back Titan X and fit a PCIE SSD for booting from.

Odd that you mention Alienware. On Thursday I had to swap out my Area 51 with my step son because the PSU has died.

So Thursday just gone I went over to see my step daughter and her fiancée. Wonderful people. My step son to be is a lovely kid so for his 21st birthday about ten months back I gave him my Alienware Area 51 ALX. Sadly it started developing issues and eventually the PSU died. This is the model here.



So I gave him my Dark Carnival rig (the red and black one) sans any hard drives or GPUs (the Alienware was running 670 SLI so I just moved those over to the new one) and brought it home. It's in a bit of a sorry state because I had to cut the left side panel and fit some grills due to the 670s overheating. Not only that but the PSU is proprietary and the rig won't function properly without it due to the complex IO the machine needs (motorised vents, front panel, a plethora of LEDs and so on). I almost took it to the dump up the road, then I thought I would at least investigate before calling it a day because it's a lovely unit and the RRP was £2600 and up for this model (it's the ALX).

This is the IO board here.



Note it has a 10 pin proprietary connector for the power? this was the issue. A regular PSU does not come with that connector so I was thinking it really was game over. Then I found these online.





Both match, aside from the one guy not realising one of the 5v is +5vSB but I know exactly what that is as it's the only pink wire in the 24 pin. So what I'm going to do is order a 24 pin ATX extension (done, at a whopping cost of £3) and basically bridge the 10 needed power wires from that. That should allow full function of the IO board which means the case will be back to its original state. The only thing remaining was the left side panel which I cut (and looks pretty nasty) but I managed to find one in the USA for $26 inc so £20. I would imagine it will cost me around £100 to have shipped over but I feel it's worth it. The rest of the case is pristine I mean, not even one mark and pristine examples of this chassis are very rare due to how heavy it is and how hard it is to move. We're talking around 30 kilos empy...

Luckily I have some seriously lovely parts kicking around. An 8 core Ivybridge Xeon complete with motherboard and a choice of either a Radeon 7990 or Titan Black. It's going to be really nice when all restored

So I cut the proprietary connector from the Alienware loom.



I then soldered it into a 24 pin extension.



And connected up a Corsair RM 750.



Annndd..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv3qMT0S69I

Bit squeaky but then it's been sat for nearly a year.

I've ordered a new side panel from the USA as I cut into the original and don't like it. Now all I have to do is fit all of the drooly hardware (8 core Xeon, Titan Black etc)

Do you get any real gaming benefits from SLI?

Last year we built some PC's from parts and filled them full of graphics cards for our CADD group to do some GPU based calculations.

This proved to be successful so we then spent a fortune on a HP GPU system with 48 Tesla cards which I deployed last week

As such the PC's are not needed now, one of them has 4 Titans in it!

I was thinking of taking it home for a month or so to see how it played with games

Are you asking whether having multiple cards is better than a single one? Isn't that answer to that pretty obvious?

Interestingly, it's currently a hindrance when using a Rift. Or at least, was when I sold mine, they might have sorted that in recent firmware updates.

Even Custom PC (home of 'rigs', 'mods', 'customisation' and LEDs) recommend going down the single big bastard GPU route rather than SLI/Crossfire these days, and have done for a while.

When you've got single cards like the 980Ti that can handle 4K gaming, SLI/Crossfire makes no sense in any scenario.

SLI/Crossfire are also dreadfully driver dependent, so if there isn't a profile for your current game of choice, only one GPU will be used. Then you have companies like Blizzard that don't support SLI/Crossfire in any capacity whatsoever so if you have a problem with one of their games the answer is always 'take one of the graphics cards out and try again'.

Then you've got micro-stutter, which has never really been properly fixed.

And then you've got the increased power requirements, and heat and noise generation that SLI/Crossfire bring to the table.

Custom PC did a £4000 'Dream PC' build feature this month, and for the graphics card they used a single Titan-X.

When I played with in the past, it wasn't that great you need specific drivers for games and even then another card would be out that was better in single configuration

That's not true; if I've got a single card that's getting on a bit and I can get a performance jump by sticking another one of them, for relatively cheap, in a spare slot then it's difficult to argue against that. Especially if your argument is "go out and but a new hilariously expensive card instead".



Fair enough, these issues I wasn't aware of so apologies to asfish for attempting to over-simplify his question.

To a point, but even then there are several points to consider.

1) Can you even still buy a matching card for your existing card? Also, just because a card is old doesn't mean it'll be cheap even if you can source one.

2) Does your motherboard support SLI/Crossfire?

3) Power supply requirements, if you need a new power supply then all of a sudden it ain't so cheap.

4) Driver support, once a GPU gets to a certain age Nvidia/AMD stop optimising their drivers for it, so adding a second 'abandonware' GPU to an existing 'abandonware' GPU might not get you very far.

5) Noise and heat, if this doesn't bother you then fair enough.

6) Is there an SLI profile for your game of choice? The list isn't as long as you might expect..... http://www.geforce.com/games-applicatio ... =&sort_by=

That said, yes if you can maybe grab a suitable card for £50 or less, and your motherboard/power supply supports it, and the game you're having trouble with has an SLI profile for it - there's not really much to lose by giving it a go.

In the interests of fairness though, I should note that it appears that as of the latest expansion, SLI is now supported in WoW for the first time....

I think it's safe to assume that in the context of a discussion about the benefits of SLI that we're starting from a point where it's even physically possible.



That's a fair point I hadn't considered.



I don't think this argument makes much sense. Even if there's a shortfall in potential performance because a given card isn't getting further optimisations you'll still get a decent performance boost by adding a second one (compared to having the single one), even if it's not as much as it could be in an ideal world. Unless you're arguing that adding a second card will somehow result in less power than having a single one, which I assume you're not as that would be bonkers? Also, I don't think I've updated the drivers for my ATI card in ages and it's still happily trucking along. While driver updates might make a big difference when targetted at certain high profile game (e.g. Witcher 3, GTAV, etc) I'm not convinced they make a wild difference in general.

Short answer from phone.

Nvidia cards have hardware onboard to help prevent runt/dropped frames which cause micro stutter. The only remaining issue is sudden frame drops on very intense scenes which is amplified if you have SLI or Crossfire X but this is what Freesync and Gsync are for.

I've been using SLI and Crossfire since 2008 and it's not all plain sailing but from my experience SLI is by far the more polished. It's very rare that a game does not work with it but there are a few examples (like UBI's shit and the modern Wolfenstein games).

Also this - Fuck Custom PC. Until recently they were recommending Crossfire for 4k. One 980ti is not enough for 4k, Custom PC are still using three year old games to bench with.

Three way SLI adds about 8% over two cards and four way usually detracts performance.

Since buying my Titan Blacks last August I've only seen Far Cry 4 hate SLI and I don't like Far Cry anyway and Wolfenstein the old blood is it?

Other than that every game I've played has shown a significant boost from using SLI.

Crossfire? Well AMD were caught with drivers that cheated (dropped and runt frames) and did eventually address the issue with Frame Pacing. Sadly of late their driver team seems to have gone on holiday so there are no Crossfire profiles for any of the latest games. So no GTAV etc.

It's like WW3 on the OCUK Graphics forum.

So if I get two sound cards, I'll have better sound?

Yes.

Two sound cards don't produce samples in tandem for better quality sound though, do they?

SLI does render alternate frames for massive performance boosts though.

As I mentioned before it's actually very rare now for a game not to work in SLI.

And then of course there's the future, where DX12 will natively support multiple GPUs at a API level.

I'm getting four, then.

Four is really the minimum number of sounds card you need for modern PC gaming; really demanding stuff like Duke Nukem 3D won't even run unless you've got at least eight installed.

Well as JC has already noted, Crossfire is by far the weaker of the two implementations, so on an AMD card (ATI don't exist anymore!) you'll be stuck with Crossfire and AMD's shonky driviers and even shonkier Crossfire. (Also note that AMD's drivers suffer badly in DX11 when paired with a weaker CPU, so an AMD card that on paper should better an Nvidia card, actually delivers less performance in reality - loads of stuff about this at Eurogamer.)

Another thing to remember is that you're limited by the VRAM on a single card, so if you Crossfire two 1GB cards you still only have 1GB of VRAM as far as games are concerned.

So in my case for example, yes I could have tried SLI-ing another 670 with my existing 670, and that may well have given me enough grunt to run GTA5 at 2560x1440, but it would have done nothing to help with the fact that my chosen settings needed 2.5GB of VRAM and the 670s are 2GB cards, and as far as GTA5 (or any other game) would be concerned - 2GB of VRAM is still what I'd have, it doesn't pool it between the two cards.

Finally, it's important to note that you can get an awful lot of GPU grunt for a reasonable amount of money. The GTX960 for example will basically top out any game you chuck at it at 1080p/60FPS, and it costs £150 - and being as it's a new card it has the latest cool-running architecture, modest power requirements, low noise, up-to-date driver support etc. (I continue to be very impressed with the 960 in Mrs Hearthly's PC.)

Dropping down to a £100 card you can still get some excellent performance, which isn't going to be a whole lot more than you'd have to drop on a second card to try Crossfiring with whatever you have now. (Unless it's a real cheap thing in which case Crossfiring it probably won't help much.)

I'm not saying it's a total non-starter and yes it may be a decent budget option to eke some extra life out of an elderly single-card PC in certain circumstances, but personally speaking I think it makes more sense to move onto a new single GPU solution.

SLI and Crossfire, ironically, are only worth it on high end cards. Few reasons really but AMD and Nvidia deliberately derp their low rent cards now. For example they only come with a max of 2gb VRAM. The last cheap way on Nvidia to get flagship performance was the GTX 460, where two would beat a GTX 480 for half the price and came with 2/3rd the amount of VRAM.

Then of course there's the dreaded scenario of no profiles or game support. In which case you have to fall back on one card and if that card is low rent you'll be reducing settings to 'not even as good as a console' levels.

I learned that the hard way when I had two Radeon 5770s. It really was nothing but pain.

So yeah, multi GPU set ups are only for complete overkill from my experience.

I'm playing the waiting game now. I want two of these new gen cards but I'm being tight fisted and won't bother until I can get a pair for around £600. One isn't worth it because what I have is faster and I'm not paying release tax again.

BAD NEWS - My £120 keyboard has two dead LEDs already. The LED under the 'K' key has gone and a couple of nights ago the LED under the 'G10' key went as well.

viewtopic.php?p=848043#p848043



A quick Google for 'K95 dead LEDs' is rather illuminating. Or rather, not illuminating, LOL. (I'm here all week.)

Basically there's a design flaw in the K95s and other mechanical keyboards by Corsair of that era whereby the LEDs aren't shielded against ESD (electro static discharge) properly and they almost inevitably start to fail after a few months of ownership. Once the first couple go, you can generally rely on one or two going every few weeks after that.

Not acceptable on a £120 keyboard.

That said, part of me was just like, 'Who cares, it's just a fucking keyboard and it's not like I really need the backlighting, it's just pretty', but then again I was like ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY POUNDS FOR A FUCKING KEYBOARD IT'D BETTER LAST MORE THAN FIVE MONTHS BEFORE DEVELOPING FAULTS.

So then, I've been going through Corsair's RMA process and have said to them that:

1) I don't want it to be replaced with another K95, the design is inherently faulty.
2) I'm very disappointed as I've bought all sorts of Corsair products over the years and wasn't expecting this sort of experience on a £120 keyboard.
3) I'd like them to replace it with a keyboard that has a newer design on the LEDs which aren't prone to failure.

GOOD NEWS:

They've agreed to collect the K95 at their expense, (normally you have to pay for the return to them and they pay for the return to you), and send me one of these

The K95 RGB which has the new LED mounting design on it, and is also a £150 (!) keyboard.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... =KB-043-CS



It's basically the same keyboard but the RGB model (16.7 million colours per key), with the updated LED design so they don't tend to start failing after six months or less....

Sexy. (2m40s for the real prettiness.)

TBH I've owned a good chunk of Corsair products and every single one of them,barring their ram, has left me underwhelmed. I bought two of their Raptor mice for £18 each. Mine broke after three weeks (scroll wheel packed up) and Mrs JC's failed at the plug end with two wires working their way loose and snapping.

I bought a 250D ITX case only to find it was all very thin steel and plastic, with a 1mm alu slither on the front. When empty the entire thing flexes it's so thin.

Then for my big rig I originally bought all Corsair AF led fans only to find them starting to make fart noises six months in.

I'm not sold at all tbh. I think people over rate their products just because they look nice.

I had a bit of a result on my keyboard. Black widow ultimate BF4 edition, french layout, £32. All blues. I switched the Q key and a couple of others but I touch type any way so the french writing doesn't put me off.

Well Corsair were originally just RAM I think? I've had loads of their RAM over the years which has never let me down, but also power supplies which have been excellent too.

I guess they've let things slip a bit with their move into peripherals, and I was absolutely insistent that I didn't want another K95 as the LEDs on it WILL start to fail prematurely by all accounts.

Mind you, as a physical keyboard this K95 is absolutely gorgeous, the nicest keyboard I've ever used or owned (and the software is fine too), they just fucked up on the LEDs.

Can't really argue with them replacing it with a K95 RGB, with both collection and delivery at their expense.

I'm sorry... for a second there, I thought you said that you paid £120 for a keyboard.