I went with the XFX 9800 GX2 a number of months back, Very nice card and will
hopefully complement the Intel i7 upgrade I am looking to get over the next
week or so when I have decided on which motherboard I want. I bought the bits
for my current system just over 2 years ago, an Intel X6800 and MSI
motherboard.
Nice to be VERY rich....
And an "early adopter" .
Anandtech is taking a bunch of flak in comments on their latest batch
of X58 motherboard reviews, many of which reviews effectively say
"after a few BIOS updates everything will be OK". Comments are coming
back like "it seems that with all of these boards, none work
acceptably well straight out of the box... the early users are a bunch
of beta-testers..." It does seem, from the many reviews that I have
read, that the current generation of i7 motherboards are not ready for
prime-time, especially if you want to do any performance-pushing. And
why else would you want to fork out over $300 for a motherboard? Also
the current-generation i7 chips are optimised for servers and not
desktop use. They are far too power-hungry, so you have to put up with
more expensive cooling solutions if you are a performance-tweaker.
Plus the outlandish cost of DDR3 memory, when you can get QUALITY DDR2
memory at rock-bottom prices. $40 or less for 4Gbytes.
And for gaming, the bottleneck is at the GPU, not the CPU. A Q9550
Penryn Quad-core will keep even a triple-SLI/Crossfire fed happily for
modern games such as Fallout3 or Far Cry2 or the horribly-coded GTA4
that make full use of multiple cores. Many of the current games still
make little use of multiple-cores. Thus the current generation of quad
CPUs have a lot of gaming compute-space still available and the
upcoming game-engines are multi-core aware and make use of this
currently mostly-wasted space.
Give i7 another year and the performance/price equation might be
reasonable. Right now invest in a 3GHz Penryn Quad, eg 9650 (or
overclock a 9550) and your choice of graphics-capability on a stable
proven multiple-PCIeX16 motherboard with DDR2 memory and you are going
to end up with an exceptionally satisfactory gaming system.
Also, avoid depending on SLI/Crossfire or any other multiple-GPU
configuration for graphics. Better to buy the top-end single-GPU.
Consistent gaming-support of multiple-GPU graphics solutions is very
spotty and dependent on the driver support provided by the GPU
hardware vendor. Support for new games on older-generation
multiple-GPUs fades VERY rapidly. However, multiple-GPUs do have their
place when one or more GPUs handle, say, physics and/or AI, and one
GPU is dedicated solely for graphics. This is the upcoming pattern of
use for multiple (GP)GPU-cards. Since Intel has never shown any
ability to write 3D graphics drivers that actually work and that is
unlikely to suddenly change with the arrival of Larrabee, it is very
likely that Larrabee will find a place as an adjoint "GPU card" for
physics or AI processing. Ideal, in fact, since Larrabee is very
Cell-like in its architecture, but far easier to program.
Sorry for rambling on here a bit, but maybe my input might help you
save some money.
John Lewis
