Some basic questions -- SLI vs Crossfire, SSD vs Sata (?)

Hi all,

I am sure my story is similar to several others. I got a sweet computer back in 2005, and it could five-box WoW through the older content. I tried to pick WoW back up about a year and a half ago, and the ol' girl struggled to five-box. Now I want to take a crack at Rift, and it can't even really handle two Rift clients up at once.

(old comp is a Dell XPS 600 -- 2 core 2.8ghz processor, 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM, single NVidia GeForce 7800 GTX, 150 GB SATA II hard-drive)

I am not a hardware guy, even a little bit. I was forced to try and learn about hardware last night when I made the decision to go hunting for a new computer that could handle three, four, or even five boxing on Rift. Here's what I have learned from reading stuff on the web, and I'm hoping I get some corrections from you all if I'm off-kilter.

There are four important variables to look at when buying a computer with the intent of boxing. Processor, RAM, video card, and hard-drive.

Processor - Intel's new I7 seems to be the thing that most people say to get. I tried to understand the overclocking debates between I7 920's, 950's, 960's, etc, but I got pretty lost. I don't quite understand where or when the processor speed would become the cause of slow performance, and how that plays into I7 920 vs 950/960.

RAM - DDR3 is way better than DDR2 performance wise, and it is now almost as cheap, so it's a no brainer to go with DDR3. A great thread on computer specs in the Rift forum mentioned that 6 GB was not enough, and 12 GB is preferable for multi-boxing. Cost aside, is there a difference between DDR3 1333 and DDR3 1600? The first few pages I tried to read about that were all comments on overclocking and prices.. but prices between the two are identical now.

Video Card - This is definitely a category I'm still confused about. More RAM is obviously better than less RAM, but I don't know how to measure one Video Card against another, aside from it's own graphics memory maybe. For instance, what is the difference between a GTX 570 and a Radeon 5770? Is having two video cards twice as good as having one, or is it a non-linear incremental (or exponential?) difference? Some comments on these forums have said SLI is bad, is Crossfire different than SLI?

Hard-drive - Everyone says solid state drives are the way to go. How much better are they, and is that commonly the 'bottleneck' for actual gameplay?


The computer I am looking to pick up, based on what I understood of the above, is a $1,500 rig - I7 950, 12 gb DDR3 1600 RAM, 2x Radeon 5770, SATA 3.0 gb hard-drive (1 TB storage). This *seems* to me to be a good deal, but I wouldn't mind some comments on it. (I do not plan on building my own, I like software far more than hardware)

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...4&Sku=SYX-1070

Crossfire and SLI are basically the same thing - both just mean 2 video cards but those 2 names reflect the ATI and Nvidia brand cards respectively. I don't know anything about Rift, but the engine in WOW doesn't make SLI / Crossfire very beneficial at all. In most cases I'd rather buy 1 expensive Nvidia card than 2 of either brand if the same kinda money is involved.

For i7's, the 950 and up run on better gear than those below it, but you'd notice hardly any difference between all those in the 9xx series. Definitely got for a i7 950 (or higher) as opposed to say a i5, assuming available money.

Disk read/write speed is definitely a bottleneck in all games / applications and SSD drives are the solution to this. If you have a low amount of cash, I'd say get one SSD to install windows/game on, and then a 1tb one to chuck all your data on. If you have lots of cash, get 6 SSD's and put them in raid5 on a PCI controller and you'll be laughing.

Hope this helps.

As for CPU, I'd suggest going with an i5-2500k. Better performance than the previous generation and they are a breeze to overclock. You can get to 4.5GHz pretty easily on air cooling. Not bad for a $220 proc. (No need to get the i7-2600k - hyper-threading is useless in gaming)

As for RAM speed, just get whatever is compatible with your motherboard. The actual speeds make no noticeable difference in gaming.

Video card - I personally prefer a single GPU over SLI/xfire due to compatibility with various games. The GTX 570 is a solid choice. Don't worry too much about video RAM. It only makes a difference if/when you're using very high graphics settings on very high resolutions. i.e. You would need to be maxing everything out at 2560x1600 for it to matter.

Check my sig for recommended parts.

I'm kind of leaning towards getting a 2G video card (see my post about it) and staying with ata, but most people will recommend SSD. Im going to write up a 48G system ram solution that dosn't need a SSD. SSD's are great but I am concerned about degragation in speed over time (at least in non Trim systems).

Thanks for the replies.

It sounds like the SSD hard-drive is a big deal. What sort of steps are involved in adding an SSD to a desktop that is already running with an HDD? What do you install to the SSD when you're running a combination of SSD and HDD? Is it the OS and the game, or just the game?

I would just put the game on the SSD (espicially if its in raid), that way if there is a failure you just need to recopy the OS drive (I clone the whole OS drive with Arconics truehome every few weeks, if i get a virus or failure I just replace the os drive with the back up and I'm gtg in under 4 minutes).

Do not get duel video cards, just one good one. See my sig for recomended system and parts.

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Originally Posted by Sam DeathWalker

Do not get duel video cards, just one good one. See my sig for recomended system and parts.

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Stop pimping your goddamn site.

As far as dual video cards go, I disagree (to an extent), if the graphics card/graphics performance of multiple clients is all that's keeping you back and your software used to multibox supports it, splitting rendering of game clients between GPUs can certainly boost performance, assuming the increases power/heat is worth it to you vs building another box, and assuming you can just pop another card in.

Note this solution does not use SLI/Crossfire. You're using two graphics cards independent of each other, not in tandem.

Well if you use 2 monitors you might consider two video cards, again as stated not in SLI or Crossfire. But still I would go with one really good one.

Not sure if you can use 2 video cards if you only have one monitor.

My site has good information on it, as far as recommened multibox systems, (did you see my new post on a 48G no texture lag system?) so I refer people there like I would refer them to Intel's site or Tomshardware. Plus there is a really good write up as to the Killer NIC and how to set your nvida video card to maximize for wow (from the nvidia site).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sam DeathWalker

Well if you use 2 monitors you might consider two video cards, again as stated not in SLI or Crossfire. But still I would go with one really good one.

Not sure if you can use 2 video cards if you only have one monitor.

My site has good information on it, as far as recommened multibox systems, (did you see my new post on a 48G no texture lag system?) so I refer people there like I would refer them to Intel's site or Tomshardware. Plus there is a really good write up as to the Killer NIC and how to set your nvida video card to maximize for wow (from the nvidia site).

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You don't need multiple monitors to use multiple video cards, since we'd be using the GPUs for rendering on the main screen anyways.

As far as your site, I don't want to register, nor do I have to look at you. For a recommended system, go i7/newest gen CPU/mobo/Loads of ram, newest video card, and a couple of SSDs. Your site is NOT unique.

With gigabit LAN in onboard chipsets unless that little bit of latency REALLY matters to you a Killer NIC is not needed. At all. If anything the TCP ACK (I think it is) registry tweak will do more for you.

It's also annoying since you just say: "Check out my site in sig" versus linking to a relevant thread within your site.

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Originally Posted by Sajuuk

You don't need multiple monitors to use multiple video cards, since we'd be using the GPUs for rendering on the main screen anyways.

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Speaking of links, if you have one where I can read up on it, I'm not up on using two gpu's onto one monitor and getting better results hows that work exactly, I have a ton of extra video cards and if two (not in sli or crossfire) can render different parts of the screen or something that would be nice (do you need to run tiled to do that or can you do it full screen)?

Or does one do one part of the rendering and the other gpu a different part like two gpus one would do physx and the other the other stuffs, if wow supported physx.

Seems you would have to run textures into both video card rams; would that not affect performace. Well I don't know I just use one monitor and one gpu per computer and play in full screen and alt tab between them.

Ya killer nic is usless but I spend 4000 words to say the same thing as to why it is.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sam DeathWalker

Speaking of links, if you have one where I can read up on it, I'm not up on using two gpu's onto one monitor and getting better results hows that work exactly, I have a ton of extra video cards and if two (not in sli or crossfire) can render different parts of the screen or something that would be nice (do you need to run tiled to do that or can you do it full screen)? .

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The tools we would be using are ISBoxer/Innerspace, and possibly a dummy plug. (making a dummy plug here: http://www.overclock.net/folding-hom...ml#post4538942 )

Now, I'm not at all sure if you'll actually need the dummy plug, but when using folding at home on extra GPUs/dual-GPU cards where you don't have extra monitors it would trick your card into thinking a monitor is attached. You might not need it, but if you can't defer rendering of other clients to isboxer/innerspace without it, try with and see what happens.

http://isboxer.com/index.php/compone...le-video-cards

While that says you must use monitors, I'm sure in innerspace you can still make new profiles for games and assign them to different GPU cores. I'd got into more detail now, but you get the gist, right?

I see each gpu goes to a different monitor and deals with whatever clients you tell it to. Can't use two gpu with single client or with single monitor. And switching from main to slave (assuming on different video cards and monitors) isn't going to be as fast as people would like, even at same resolutions.

Still I guess for 5 boxers on a single cpu, one gpu/monitor for the main and one gpu/monitor for the 4 tiled slaves is optimal.

You might not quite get what I'm trying to say. While the automatic function within ISboxer has changed, I don't see why we couldn't do as I did before, when I was running dual 9800GX2s, only using two monitors (although I had four connected)

I had separate profiles set up for my clients. I would assign two clients to each core of the GX2s, boosting performance.

Ex:

Game 1--->GPU1, Card 1 (This would be my main, only one instance of this profile is launched)
Game 2--->GPU2, Card 1 (Slaves 1 and 2)
Game 3----GPU1, Card 2 (Slaves 3 and 4)
The last GPU core was not used. While I did have four monitors attached, I only really used two. Slaves were tiled and were easily (and quickly) swapped around thanks to innerspace. So I was really split across three GPUs. I'm certain the functionality I'm discussing is still within Innerspace.