New PCs/1080 SLI Beta performance.

[Gman]

Finally after waiting a long time, since the 980/ti came out, the 1080s are here, and I've had a week or so to play around with them.  Broadwell E came out late last week, and we built a couple systems, a 6800 and a 6850k that are virtually identical - 6850k, x99 Strix MB, 2 1080 in SLI, 16gb ram, Samsung9 950 m.2 and 850 SSDs, and 750D cases (reused one, and got another for 90$ CDN on blow out, so wth, why not).  Pretty fast - I'll post some vids/screen shots of the beta and AH2 running, suffice it to say, even with an SLI profile that is essentially self created and not optimized by nVidia (booo nvidia for this), the frames per second have taken a massive jump over the 980sli and 980ti systems I replaced with these 2 new boxes. 

I'm pushing 1440p on a 34" Asus ROG and a 27" Asus ROG right now, and also 4k on a 28" Acer.  I think 1080SLI for popular AAA titles on 4k and 1440p just might have solved the "constant" 60fps no matter what issue.  Heh.  Again, I'll put up some more data once I finish the films and shots compilations.  For now, the 1080 is a great card IMO, a lot quieter than I thought, and on stock fans, even without the new driver "fix" coming soon to end the thermal throttling with the high overclocks, I'm seeing 1950 on both cards in both systems if I crank the fan up to a more aggressive profile, and have ran 3dmark and all the other usual suspects and not had any artifacts, lock ups, or problems at this mid level o/c.

I will say this much - off of the airbase in beta I fly off mostly, the one to the SE of the base you start off at when offline, I'm pegged at 144fps right from the instant I load in, and I haven't seen it drop yet, and it doesn't seem to matter a whole lot if I have SLI enabled or disabled on that score so far...

http://www.mediafire.com/view/xfqv68bmb2a7spx/newpc.JPG

[Copprhed]

I got the Asus 1080 FE and love it so far. If you can afford two to run in sli, I envy you, and ask...will you adopt me? I'll be a good son!!!

[Gman]

Is yours really quiet compared to your last card?  I've got mine overclocked up into the 2000 range now, and even with the fan profile really aggressive, they are about 1/3 as loud as the 980ti and 980s I had.  I had a new enclosed Fractal case for the 2nd machine I built, but somebody bought it off the floor before the staff there realized it was sold, and I think if I had that case, it'd be almost silent, even with 4 fans, 2 rad fans, and these new 1080 GPU fans.  Just for laughs I tried my 4 year old 850 psu, and it ran the 1080 SLIs just fine along with a bunch of drives et al (I'm using 1300 and 1200 PSU in the actual builds). 

These new cards are a marvel compared to the predacessors, and there are bios and driver updates OTW from nVidia already that'll improve them even more so they've said.  I think the 1070 will be the best bang/$ in the history of video cards - plus the 970 price will drop like a rock, I've seen used ones going for 200$ up here which is 150$ or less USD right now, but for under 400$, the 1070 will all anyone really needs for 1080 and even 1440p gaming on 27" or smaller monitors.  I still think for 1440p/4k and for larger 30+ or triple screen you would be better off with a 1080, but I wouldn't doubt that a 1070 would even run just fine.  I'm going to build a micro 1070 build once the cards are available up here, be tiny, but more powerful (gaming wise) than my last x99 5960x build with a Titan. 

[Copprhed]

In default it's not audible over my water cooler fans, which I keep at a moderate level. My case is an OLD tower case that I've modded to attach the water radiator to the side, so those fans are outside the case. I'm more into function than aesthetics,lol. When I tune the card up, I set the fans on manual/max and then I hear them, but not as loudly as the fans on my STRIX 970.

[Easyscor]

I just read a disappointing report from wccf tech this morning while looking for new info on the 1070. It seems that ASUS and MSI have a history of tweaking the video cards they send to reviewers so their cards show running faster then the competition. The retail cards they ship don't preform as well as the sample cards without additional software.

http://wccftech.com/asus-msi-review-samples-accusation/

[Copprhed]

Probably so, Easyscor, but usually it evens out farther down the road, with the mature chips. I admit that I did something that I haven't done since the first Geforce card came out,which is to buy early. I usually wait a while...even up to a year, and the chips will usually OC easily and well. Mine is doing all that I expected of it, so I'm pleased.

[Gman]

The new nVidia/EVGA high bandwidth SLI bridges just came out, got 2 of the first batch into the country here in Canada.  Couple pics of both sides next to the old "pro" ROG bridge, if anyone who plans on getting 1080/1070/1060 SLI ever in the future.  It truly works great with SLI optimized games on 1440p Gsync panels, 4k as well, and it can hold 100fps on the 34" 1440p no problem, especially now with the added throughput the new SLI bridges will give (hopefully, we'll see, but that's the news at least so far).

The new bridges are huge compared to the old or standard motherboard ones - 4 plugs now instead of 2 as well - again, time will tell if it makes any impact on SLI games with well made profiles.

I wonder if one was to call up nVidia and offer $ or bribes (scotch etc) if they would consider making a good SLI profile for AH3...

[Chalenge]

Please, wait until the first patch out of beta at least.

Gman, you stated the 1070 and 1060 also, yet I think this bridge is only compatible with the 1080 and that the 1060 will never support SLI. Have you found otherwise?

[Gman]

Good question, I'll let you know when/if I find out about the 1070, as I have 2 on order for a smaller sized build.  2 1070 SLI for users of AAA/SLI supported games isn't a bad option $/performance wise IMO, if they are users like you using really, really high DSR resolutions or large monitors like my 34" 1440p unit.  We'll see with the 1070 directly, as I'll try one of the new bridges on them directly myself.  Stand by to stand by.

[Gman]

One thing I can say with certainty that as cool as the Broadwell E platform is, that if you're only doing gaming, and no real video editing or other such desktop apps that are intensive, but JUST games and browsing say, the Skylake 6700k platform blows away Broadwell E in price/performance ratio.  Big time.  6850x vs 6700k with 1 or 2 1080GTX, the 6700 in some games has a slight lead, and only by a slim minority is it behind the 6850 in terms of fps, in a cross sections of sims/games I've tried.  Yet, for a good MB for both platforms in the mix, Skylake is about 500$ cheaper in CDN dollars, say 325$ ish in USD. 

I like the 6800 and 6850, but doing it over again, considering my purpose with PCs is gaming and browsing, I'd have gone with 3 6700k systems, and left Jess with her 5960x for her desktop work (she is still using it for that).

Skylake is a hard platform to argue against for people looking for new gaming focused systems IMO - lots of good MSI and Asus MBs out there for it, and with a 1070, 1080 (SLI with either if you really want it, as it DOES work with many optimized games), or even a 970, 980, or 980ti, will run most games, especially AH2/Beta, just fine for the foreseeable future still. 

[Pudgie]

One thing I can say with certainty that as cool as the Broadwell E platform is, that if you're only doing gaming, and no real video editing or other such desktop apps that are intensive, but JUST games and browsing say, the Skylake 6700k platform blows away Broadwell E in price/performance ratio.  Big time.  6850x vs 6700k with 1 or 2 1080GTX, the 6700 in some games has a slight lead, and only by a slim minority is it behind the 6850 in terms of fps, in a cross sections of sims/games I've tried.  Yet, for a good MB for both platforms in the mix, Skylake is about 500$ cheaper in CDN dollars, say 325$ ish in USD. 

I like the 6800 and 6850, but doing it over again, considering my purpose with PCs is gaming and browsing, I'd have gone with 3 6700k systems, and left Jess with her 5960x for her desktop work (she is still using it for that).

Skylake is a hard platform to argue against for people looking for new gaming focused systems IMO - lots of good MSI and Asus MBs out there for it, and with a 1070, 1080 (SLI with either if you really want it, as it DOES work with many optimized games), or even a 970, 980, or 980ti, will run most games, especially AH2/Beta, just fine for the foreseeable future still. 

Hi Gman,

So in your tests was the Intel I7 6850X OC'd or was run at stock clocks?

Good to know that it performs on par w\ the I7 6700K.......

Now if only Gigabyte will get a UEFI stable enough so that I can flash my mobo..........have already tried flashing up to the F22 UEFI (brings Broadwell-E support on my mobo) but it had some issues recognizing my SSD's in UEFI which ended up messing up my OS start up....ended up having to reflash back to F20 then do a format & reinstall of OS to recover, but in the process I think I may have found out that on this Gigabyte X99M Gaming 5 mobo it likes PCI-E add-in SSD's better over the dedicated PCI-E lanes to mem instead of going thru the X99 chipset thru the M.2 slot (I just put my Plextor M6e BK 512Gb PCI-E SSD back in in 1 of the PCI-E 3.0 16x slots & the process went very smooth using Windows Boot Manager). Most likely due to the various UEFI issues that I've ran across w\ this mobo (1st USB issues now SSD issues when using UEFI mode instead of legacy mode thru the chipset).

Sure wished Asus would've made a micro-ATX version of X99.................

 

[Gman]

I've run my 6800 6850 and 6700ks all at stock, and at O/Cs of various % depending on the machine - all three have AIO coolers, the B-Es have Nzxt Krakens and the  6700k has a Corsair 115i, just stock AIO nothing special coolers, I haven't set up closed loop on any although I do have the blocks from Ek for the 1080s (2 of them) and may do so soon.

Comparing the 6800/6850 vs the Skylake 6700k, the results are close to the same if you compare stock vs stock and o/c vs o/c, even though the 6700k overclocks better depending on how you look at it, in terms of % of the stock clock it does IMO at least.

That was just for gaming, and a variety of games I play, soup to nuts sort of thing - NOT desktop/editing apps, where even the 6800k beats the 6700k by a fairly noticeable and significant margin, and the 6850 really would be worth the $ if you did a lot of youtube video and such sort of crap IMO, or music editing, whatever - stuff I don't do.  The 6900 and 6950x, I've only seen one of each, and they are very fast for desktop app type work from what I saw in the shop, but not at all worth the $ for gaming - 6700/6600k and whatever is replacing Skylake soon will be the best $/performance CPU so far as newer than 1-2 years old out there IMO for a while.

I am impressed with the Broadwell E motherboards, the Strix Gaming MB I have for both systems has been pretty solid so far, easy to use Bios/desktop apps, pretty pretty rgb lights, all the newer stuff like m.2 and 3.1 work, etc.  Always got the Sabertooths before, but I'm happy with these -  https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-X99-GAMING/

Doing it over, I'd have just gone with all 6700k/6600k systems, and maybe even 1 1080 instead of SLI.  There have been a lot of issues with SLI/Drivers with this release, the HBM bridge isn't even necessary it turns out unless you're running 5k (no difference at 4k so far), DCS doesn't like 1080 SLI much, I got 980sli with nvidiainspector to work ok-ish, but it's been a struggle so far.  Sold one 1080 out of one box to a local guy who wanted it badly (they are out of stock in Western Canada, at least were up till last week) for cost - 15$ shipping, so their value is holding, haha.  Once the 1080ti or whatever comes out I'll sell the others and go to just a single in the other SLI machine too.  I've had it with SLI I think, no more.  I think I've told myself this before, but I really really mean it...this time.

[Pudgie]

Thanks, Gman!

 

[Chalenge]

. . . DCS doesn't like 1080 SLI much, . . .

I helped a friend through the issue. Of course I use SLI with the GTX 980s, but it was balking and crashing on his 1080 system. What we did to get it to work was to use the DSR and push the resolution as far as it would go, use SLI x16 AA, and reboot before starting the game. So far he hasn't reported anymore crashes.

I think it's just a fledgling driver issue.

[Gman]

I'll give that a whirl tonight Chalenge, thanks - I agree, and hope too, that it's just early days with drivers.

My Vive and Rift both showed up on the same day, today - can you believe HTC didn't even send me a notice it had shipped, I ordered it Friday, and have been looking, and waiting for something beyond the initial receipt, and checking my order # too, which still says in process.  That's nice, I should cancel it and get the $ refunded then, since at 8am the courier was banging on my door with a surprisingly large box.  Then the Rift came as scheduled this aft.  Be messing with both of these, but I'll get back to SLI optimization tomorrow probably.