Expert Opinions needed - critique this set-up

[YamaRaja]

I have and have flashed a Sapphire 9750. It has to be the 2gb version, its the only one with a bios switch. Postion one will flash, two is default. So you could dead board it I guess, no reports of this particular card going dead I could find. Just switch to bios position 2, the flash is gone.

It is running flawless and cool for the last week.
The .v2 shipping soon will not have the bios switch. As well it is not flashable. Only this first series of reference boards.
I do not recommend doing this unless you are very tech smart. (I overclock every one of my machines, for over 10 years now)
I followed their directions to the letter.
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
My card matches their gpu-z report exactly

And yes its fast. With a 45% fan speed it idles below 45*C, the highest I have seen it go in AH2 is 56*C

DX11 vs DX10 as well 6950 and 5870 respectively
Buy or don't buy what you want. Just posting because I have done it.

My system:
Intel Core2Duo E6850('Conroe')3.0 @ 3.4
Asus P5E Rev 1.03 903 bios
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
OCZ EL DDR2 PC2-8800 4GB @850mhz 4-4-4-12 (1to1 ratio)
150GB WD Raptor 10,000RPM x2 Raid0
300GB Maxtor 7200rpm
640GB WD 6400AAKS x2
Sapphire 6950 2gb @ 6970  (second one on the way)
E-MU E-DSP Audio Processor 1616m
PC Power & Cooling 750 Quad PSU
Antec SX830 Modded
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
Viewsonic VX2255wmb x2

[SectorNine50]

Funny... because the 5870 uses about 180 Watts, and the 6950 uses 200 Watts.


Also, I don't buy your argument about consoles. They are totally separate markets, in all honesty. Consoles are so integrated that the underlying architecture may share some similarities, but they aren't going to be using ATI 6950 chips in Playstation 3's (for example).

Not to mention, the chip alone is part of it, but the performance is dictated by the entire combination of components on that video card. The VRAM, the other components, etc. So, you can have different performance (in a PC) using the same core GPU on 2 different graphics cards -- one with 128-bit memory, one with 256-bit memory, or one with 1100MHz memory clock and one with 2400MHz memory clock. The core alone won't be the only deciding factor. It's the whole card.

You're right, recalled that stat backwards.

You completely missed what I was saying about the consoles.  And the graphics chipsets don't matter in the sense that DirectX is DirectX no matter where you use it.  That's the beauty of using a graphics API, the hardware is irrelevant.  So yes, games made on consoles tend to have their game engines geared toward consoles.  Take the Frostbite engine for example, it was made specifically for performance and looks on consoles (which are now very aging technology).  It's pretty limited in terms of features on the PC compared to advanced PC-only games.  You can also tell when a game is made for console, it tends to use more CPU over GPU.  Neither of the GPU's on the XBox or the PS3 were ever anything to gawk at, even when they came out.  I believe this is the programmers way around this.

This is actually why Microsoft made the XBox in the first place, it was trying to deal a fatal blow to OpenGL.

Yes, in general, that is true, it takes the whole card to make a good card, however, the Tessellation units were made more efficient.  So in this case, just adjusting the core makes a difference (albeit a small one).  Read up on tessellation, it's actually cool stuff and things are going to look a whole lot smoother.

[TequilaChaser]

The WD Drives allow use of an OEM version of Acronis True Image software, so you can do backups to a second drive in the form of image files.  It's a very nice feature.

I do a Full backup every week, then differentials nightly.  It's just better being safe with data.

Backing up key data to a Flash Drive is good though, so you're on the right track.

Heya Mir,
are you using Windows 7 yet? 

Windows 7 has Disc Recovery & Disc Image built in, and from what I have experienced on several machines since beginning of 2009, I have not had any issues with it doing Disc Image back ups......... outside of trying to do a Disc Image back to DVD-R which the instructions in Windows 7, itself is worded wrongly... says to use DVD-R, except you actually need DVD-RW disc if you go this route..... you cannot "Format" a DVD-R since it is removable media / one time only media...

I used to use a program called "Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro" which is kind of similar to Acronis back when I was using WinXP....... but have decided that Windows 7's BackUp & Recovery Utilitys seem to work better for me than loading an extra program just to do this...... Paragon Pro just seemed to be un needed now...

TC

[katanaso]

Heya TC,

Yeah, I've been using Win 7 since beta, but I just ignored the built-in backups, and it appears out of ignorance with Windows 7!  I will look into the options it offers now.

I know Paragon Pro as well, so if the built-in Win 7 feature replaced it for you, it may just replace Acronis for me.

Thank you for the heads up on that!

[TequilaChaser]

Thank you for the heads up on that!

no prob Mir, anytime, Sir

also, as long as a person does not have their "pagefile size" set "manually"........... one can go in and create new partitions on the fly, resize partitions by either shrinking or increasing them........ please not though, if you have your pagefile manually set you can seriously mess up  yor windows OS partition  and/or other partitions...

you just might find that you'll like the new "Hard Drive Management" section of  Windows 7

(note *  I assuming all windows 7 versions are capable of this, but I have only ever used Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.... for the extras like network extras and bitlocker , etc. )

 

TC