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TRD 2008-01-19 11:37
I am purchasing a new computer in the next week or so, I am pretty sure I got my head around how it works now, but advice and input from the experts would be very helpful.
In terms of video cards, I am looking at one of the three following setups, either:
2 x 8800GT on a XFX MB-N680-ILT9 board
2 x HD3870 on a Gigabyte x38-ds4 board
1 x 8800GT and 1 x 7300GT on a Gigabyte P35-DS3P board
(The first two would be to allow usage of 4 monitors and then switching to single monitor SLI/Crossfire when gaming.)
Can you please confirm that these setups will allow me to run 4 monitors?
If you have any other suggestions in terms of card or boards, it would be much appreciated.
On a slightly unrelated note - with the advent of the HD3870x2 single cards, could I just use one of those to run 4 monitors?
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UserX 2008-01-20 17:07
Not sure what kind of system you're building, but I'm a big fan of DFI. Checkout their Blood Iron or DK series. I bought a P35 T2R and love it. They overclock good too. Anyway, your setup sounds good, I'm curious to hear from others too.
Q6600 CPU
DFI LanPary P35 T2R
2GB Dominator DDR2 PC6400
2 x Dell 19" LCD CRT monitors
eVGA 7900 GT OK PCI-E video card
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Gene 2008-01-24 11:11
Well, what exactly are you going to use the computer for?
If you going to game, then you will want to go for the 8800GT, GTX or Ultra, those are the best cards for now, though NVIDIA has something in the works and is supposed to be out in the early part of this year.
Now, if you want to SLI the cards then you will have to get two identical cards to do it. but SLI is not what people think it is and it does not double the performance of the setup, but merely reduces the workload of the gpu's... you are better off to spend the money that you would on the extra card and just buy a better card. An 8800 ultra would out perform any SLI setup you do unless you SLI’d the ultra.
If you choose to SLI then you can only have two of the four monitors running, because the output on the second card during SLI is disabled so that the second card can ½ of the output on the primary card.
If you don’t want to deal with the SLI (or Crossfire for ATI gpu’s), then it will not matter what you get. If you still want to game and not do the SLI, then you could always get one real good card and then the second card get something that will do what you need to do for the other monitors.
If you not gaming and you just want to run multiple apps, then get cheaper cards and aim for memory and a bigger CPU.
I could help out better if I knew exactly what you uses are for the computer.
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Gene 2008-01-24 11:27
As far as the graphics cards go the 8800GT specs are
Core clock 600Mhz/1.5GHz - Memory Clock 1.8GHz – memory interface 256bit – transfer rate 57.6GB/s Pixels/clock 112 – DirectX ver. 10
And the specs for the Radeon 3870
Core clock 775Mhz - Memory Clock 2.25GHz – memory interface 256bit – transfer rate 72GB/s Pixels/clock 320 – DirectX ver. 10.1
As you can see the 3870 look better the 8800, but depending on its use will depend on the performance gain
You can go here to see the differences with the cards. They have a few benchmarks on some games.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html
but reply with the use of the computer and I can help you out with what you want and what you will need.
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