yep.. just ranting :)

Its been almost 2 years and it is for the huge upgrade. I'm going to get 5 7970s! 3 for my main box (it is 3 gtx 480s now) and 2 for my HTPC (it has 2 5870s).

Anyone else planning to go crazy on monday?

I'm waiting on a bunch of games to finish (batman, driver, and skyrim) on the htpc till i get them installed. better to play them with the controller on the 64" than on the PC. well.. more sofa action vs chair action :)

out on newegg.. erp! 5 of them is alot of money - i might as weel overnight it then :) (i feel kinda sick spending that much... i also went i like crazy on my music stuff too this weekend.. dac, amp, speakers, etc..)

oh boy the wife is going to kill me!

Holy fuck, 2 7970 in a HTPC? What do you need all that power for? :O

...I bought a car this morning...It's a 2001 Civic...

Dude, you are spending too much money on things that you don't need. This is coming from a guy who owns well over a thousand video games.

Unless you are gaming on 3 monitors you only need one goddam card.

No one PC should have all that power....

This is sad.

I'm a regular Giant Bomb poster, and that is FUCKED UP!

jesus titty fucking christ

play games at 2560x1600 and you need the power.

for the htpc.. it isn't over kill... batman AC with only 4x AA is 81fps with a single card and BF3 is around 50. (which is fail.. not that i'd play bf3 with a controller on the TV).

I'm i'll grownz up and i refuse to play with anything but the best graphics. a few grand is only a few grand. I'm not going water cooling for the video cards this time around and that will save me a ton of money.

getting SLI with the first voodoo2s.. now that was painfully costly :) (compared to how much i made back then).. this.. yeah.. a not chump chance, but totally worth it to me (unlike the few grand i spend on a new DAC and AMP this weekend... i still think it is a bit of the emperor's new clothes.)

... and he ate nothing but ramen the rest of that month.

That's uh....something, alright.

@nintendoeats said:

...I bought a car this morning...It's a 2001 Civic...

Dude, you are spending too much money on things that you don't need. This is coming from a guy who owns well over a thousand video games.

Unless you are gaming on 3 monitors you only need one goddam card.

@Zurv: Ok, I can see the argument for getting two cards if you are at 2560. That's excessive, but reasonable. That in no way justifies THREE. And you want to talk about the emperor's new clothes...you can't physically see framerates above 60, so why is only getting 81 fps even remotely relevant? Further, why don't you invest in a long HDMI cable to get from your PC to your TV instead of building a whole separate machine? Even if it isn't that specific solution, there has to be some way that you can get from your PC to your TV and save over 1100 dollars.

Look, the impression that I have is that you are posting here because you want validation of this stupid thing that you are doing. If you really and truly think that spending nearly 3000 dollars on graphics cards is going to make any meaningful difference in your life then the following information will not matter to you: I think that you are doing something that is wasteful and immature. At some point wanting the best of everything stops being admirable and becomes sheer foolishness.

I SAY GOOD DAY.

*slams door*

My penis is also rather small.

@Subjugation said:

... and he ate nothing but ramen the rest of that month.

Assuming his wife let him back into the house to make it...

@nintendoeats why the hate? this was more starting as a rant because while the cards come out tomorrow there was no way to preorder them till a few hours ago (pre my post). I was bitching to a group of ppl play PC games :)

One doesn't by a computer for now.. you buy for the future. the 3 gtx 480s (got the day they were released with water cooling ... and the same with the crossfire 5870 in the htpc) were much bigger jumps and because they were water cooled, more costly. They don't cut it now.

For the last 20 years i've always made sure that i had ton of the line video cards and it is worth it and needed to me.. no validation needed. honestly you sound like a old (40+?) grump man :) that in between thinking he know everything, fears the goverement is stealing his freedom away.

cost is relative (yes, it is still a bit much to spend on cards.. but it is for 2 systems). Monthly mortgage is a bit more than this and this was something i was planning for. It is affordable to me. I thought it was going to be nvidia for the main box.. but not many games uses physx.

Honestly, If i didn't get 3 480s when they came out i would have had an upgrade before this and that is the plan now. Hopefully i can get 2 years out of it.

(i also have 2 30" 2560x1600 screens connected to my main box.. that said.. it is very rare that i'd use both for gaming. One is much better quality that the other. see mini bio. yeah. i also use tons of SSDs in my computers too :P)

Enjoy AMD's lackluster drivers!

I get by fine on one gtx 470, you're telling me 3 480's aren't doing it for ya? that's ridiculous. What a silly thing to spend your money on. I should report you to the silly police.

tri fire is over kill the benches for crossfire on these cards is enough to last for at least a year and half... at least.

I would like to thank you for funding the graphics card horse race that keeps pc games looking better and better every year. Sounds like you could do it almost singlehandedly.

I like my one GTX560, serves it's purpose...

lol the OP trying to show off so much with his spending is so pathetic.

If I only had half of that much disposable income...

By the way, if you're married, it's time to learn proper grammar.

I sure hope you're kidding buddy

@Zurv said:

play games at 2560x1600 and you need the power.

you can play them at that resolution all you want, at 60hz it's a waste of money. If you wanted a real gaming rig you would get a 120hz monitor and deal with the slight upscaling of the graphics. Just my personal opinion. I want a few of those cards myself but I'm in no rush to buy them.

You sound kinda dumb

The 5970 is the first time I've gone ATI in over a decade and I've decided to return to NVIDIA after some poor experiences. These mostly have to do with problems with drivers being broken, the run of custom drivers for a specific game (often requiring a beta driver or a driver that otherwise obsoletes a driver you had to install for another game) and the poor OpenGL support. What the ATI does, it does beautifully, but I think it's NVIDIA again, for me. The only thing holding me back from building a new machine to replace my machine (2gb 5970, i7@930 12gb ram, SSD) is waiting for the next meaningful generation of NVIDIA cards to come out.

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead. Besides, I can usually run every new game at max settings in either 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 (when I can no longer run a game in highest settings at those two resolutions, I know it's time to build a new machine from scratch, again).

I'm NOT a wizard, and that looks fucked up.

@Branthog said:

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead.

Yep. This and this.

I don't know many people who buy SLI/Crossfire set-ups from the start, isn't it typically a "my card is pretty old and isn't reaching the heights I want it to, so I think I'll buy a second card" type of thing; it was for me. Now I don't even bother doing that, I just upgrade.

Even at 2500x1600, a single card with 3GB RAM will be enough right now. You can Crossfire later, when the inflated price goes down (likely $499 or a bit lower), so buy one now if you must, then wait :)

@IkariNoTekken said:

@Branthog said:

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead.

Yep. This and this.

I don't know many people who buy SLI/Crossfire set-ups from the start, isn't it typically a "my card is pretty old and isn't reaching the heights I want it to, so I think I'll buy a second card" type of thing; it was for me. Now I don't even bother doing that, I just upgrade.

I was going to do that with my 5970, but would prefer to do it with the exact same card (perhaps that's the only way it can be done, even). Unfortunately, it has been hard to find my card for some time now and last time I found one, it was around $500 (only $220 less than I paid for it, originally, over a year earlier). And, still, all that trouble with dual cards, again. Hell, even with the 5970, people had a lot of problems. It's a dual GPU card, so it uses Crossfire just to run that one card (at least, to make full use of it). Some games don't support that. Others support it poorly. If you're lucky, they catch up and support it properly, later on. I seem to recall that Crysis 2 actually ran worse with it activated. So you were forced to run with only one of the GPUs on your card.

So, until things change, my view is to buy the most power I can get in a single GPU (or at least that is represented by the card to the rest of the system as a single GPU, w/o SLI or Crossfire) for the price I'm willing to pay.

@nintendoeats said:

Unless you are gaming on 3 monitors you only need one goddam card.

That really depends on the game. Even with my highly overclocked SLI GTX 570s (basically above GTX 580 speeds), gaming at 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 with max settings is generally not a completely smooth experience in a lot of games. A single card is totally out of the question if you want 60 FPS at above 1080p resolutions in ALL GAMES. The HD 7970s are an improvement upon the current HD 6970s and GTX 580s, but not really a generation leap we're used to. A single HD 7970 is still not sufficient for 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 in a lot of the more stressful titles.

I would agree that 3 cards for a single monitor is a little overkill, especially with Crossfire (though triple SLI isn't much more efficient either), but two cards is definitely not overkill.

Anyway, I'll probably be skipping the HD 7000 series as the GTX 600 series should be launching later on in Q1. Right now I'm still pretty satisfied with my GTX 570s (i.e. I don't mind dropping down to 1920x1080 and switching to my HDTV if I need to) and probably won't upgrade until at least the back half of the year or maybe even early next year.

@Branthog said:

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead. Besides, I can usually run every new game at max settings in either 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 (when I can no longer run a game in highest settings at those two resolutions, I know it's time to build a new machine from scratch, again).

Yeah, it's really the high resolutions on 27" and 30" monitors that has made SLI/Crossfire a necessity in recent years. If I only need to run a game at 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 a single high-end card would be sufficient in 95% of cases. But at 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 we're talking about 78% more pixels than 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 respectively. A single card that can barely run a game at max settings on 1920x1080/1200 simply cannot do that at 2560x1440/1600 and I think this trend is going to continue until we hit the next big generational milestone in PC graphics hardware.

I would like to thank you for funding the graphics card horse race that keeps pc games looking better and better every year. Sounds like you could do it almost singlehandedly.

Let us know how it works out!

Have fun lol. If I had the money to spare, I think I'd be doing something similar.

So much delicious jealousy in this thread. I'm content with my i7/5870 for now, but dang son, I wouldn't mind that PC.

Sounds like too much money to me (and crazy fun).

I sometimes have to check myself on the JRPG imports I always pay over the odds for. Bu this is nothing by comparison!

@Hitchenson said:

So much delicious jealousy in this thread. I'm content with my i7/5870 for now, but dang son, I wouldn't mind that PC.

There's jealousy and then there's thinking something is dumb. I like buying smart, I do it regardless of whether or not I could just go on Newegg and add anything shiny to my cart.

I could go SLi if I wanted, I have the money, but why would I want to? I won't get any performance benefits because I can already play all my games maxed out at 60 FPS average. I bought an SSD recently because that actually makes a noticeable difference, buying a second graphics card or a third would not. OK sure, I could run every new game at 16xAA instead of 4-8x, but again, that's like the most minor difference ever, I don't think I've ever played a game where 4xAA hasn't gotten rid of most, or all jaggies.

@GS_Dan said:

@piropeople13

I would like to thank you for funding the graphics card horse race that keeps pc games looking better and better every year. Sounds like you could do it almost singlehandedly.

Well, all we need is his Nvidia loving alter ego with a goatee to buy for the other side.

You called?

Cant wait to see what kind of power the new Xbox has

@Branthog said:

The 5970 is the first time I've gone ATI in over a decade and I've decided to return to NVIDIA after some poor experiences. These mostly have to do with problems with drivers being broken, the run of custom drivers for a specific game (often requiring a beta driver or a driver that otherwise obsoletes a driver you had to install for another game) and the poor OpenGL support. What the ATI does, it does beautifully, but I think it's NVIDIA again, for me. The only thing holding me back from building a new machine to replace my machine (2gb 5970, i7@930 12gb ram, SSD) is waiting for the next meaningful generation of NVIDIA cards to come out.

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead. Besides, I can usually run every new game at max settings in either 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 (when I can no longer run a game in highest settings at those two resolutions, I know it's time to build a new machine from scratch, again).

Ive got a 5850 and havenet run into any driver problems, ive played Dirt2/3, Batman AA, Skyrim and Witcher 2 last year and had no problems.

@Bourbon_Warrior said:

@Branthog said:

The 5970 is the first time I've gone ATI in over a decade and I've decided to return to NVIDIA after some poor experiences. These mostly have to do with problems with drivers being broken, the run of custom drivers for a specific game (often requiring a beta driver or a driver that otherwise obsoletes a driver you had to install for another game) and the poor OpenGL support. What the ATI does, it does beautifully, but I think it's NVIDIA again, for me. The only thing holding me back from building a new machine to replace my machine (2gb 5970, i7@930 12gb ram, SSD) is waiting for the next meaningful generation of NVIDIA cards to come out.

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead. Besides, I can usually run every new game at max settings in either 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 (when I can no longer run a game in highest settings at those two resolutions, I know it's time to build a new machine from scratch, again).

Ive got a 5850 and havenet run into any driver problems, ive played Dirt2/3, Batman AA, Skyrim and Witcher 2 last year and had no problems.

ATI are notoriously bad about driver updates. These days, it mostly seems to be with lots of conflicts with actual games (maybe their fault - maybe developers of games; doesn't really matter, either way), but in the past, the issues were primarily in . . . you know . . . actually making any driver updates. The thing that turned me away from ATI over a decade ago was when games flat out wouldn't work with the ATI Diamond Viper. Vampire: Masquerade was one specific example (after loading the game, it was just a big grey screen). If I recall correctly, it took them six months to issue the first driver update for the card. My next card was an NVIDIA and has been ever since (except for the 5970, which I chose primarily because it was the fastest thing around a little over a year ago and because it was quiter and lower power than the NVIDIA options at the time). Other than the poor support of many games on ATI, their sad implementation of OpenGL support is enough to keep me back in NVIDIA's arms again.

@BabyChooChoo said:

@Subjugation said:

... and he ate nothing but ramen the rest of that month.

Assuming his wife let him back into the house to make it...

You can totally cook ramen over a trash can fire.

@Zurv: As long as you're going balls-deep anyway, you should throw a liquid helium cooling system in there for good measure.

@A_Deep_Mushroom said:

No one PC should have all that power....

I'm Senator Ravenlight and I approve this message.

@Subjugation said:

... and he ate nothing but ramen the rest of that month.

hahaha

@nintendoeats said:

Look, the impression that I have is that you are posting here because you want validation of this stupid thing that you are doing. If you really and truly think that spending nearly 3000 dollars on graphics cards is going to make any meaningful difference in your life then the following information will not matter to you: I think that you are doing something that is wasteful and immature. At some point wanting the best of everything stops being admirable and becomes sheer foolishness.

I SAY GOOD DAY.

*slams door*

I'd like to second this completely and shake my head vigorously.

VIGOROUSLY.

On a side-note: I'm thinking on investing in a single 7970 next month, and I'm doubting the need for that if truth be told.

@Branthog said:

@Bourbon_Warrior said:

@Branthog said:

The 5970 is the first time I've gone ATI in over a decade and I've decided to return to NVIDIA after some poor experiences. These mostly have to do with problems with drivers being broken, the run of custom drivers for a specific game (often requiring a beta driver or a driver that otherwise obsoletes a driver you had to install for another game) and the poor OpenGL support. What the ATI does, it does beautifully, but I think it's NVIDIA again, for me. The only thing holding me back from building a new machine to replace my machine (2gb 5970, i7@930 12gb ram, SSD) is waiting for the next meaningful generation of NVIDIA cards to come out.

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead. Besides, I can usually run every new game at max settings in either 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 (when I can no longer run a game in highest settings at those two resolutions, I know it's time to build a new machine from scratch, again).

Ive got a 5850 and havenet run into any driver problems, ive played Dirt2/3, Batman AA, Skyrim and Witcher 2 last year and had no problems.

ATI are notoriously bad about driver updates. These days, it mostly seems to be with lots of conflicts with actual games (maybe their fault - maybe developers of games; doesn't really matter, either way), but in the past, the issues were primarily in . . . you know . . . actually making any driver updates. The thing that turned me away from ATI over a decade ago was when games flat out wouldn't work with the ATI Diamond Viper. Vampire: Masquerade was one specific example (after loading the game, it was just a big grey screen). If I recall correctly, it took them six months to issue the first driver update for the card. My next card was an NVIDIA and has been ever since (except for the 5970, which I chose primarily because it was the fastest thing around a little over a year ago and because it was quiter and lower power than the NVIDIA options at the time). Other than the poor support of many games on ATI, their sad implementation of OpenGL support is enough to keep me back in NVIDIA's arms again.

Since ATI re branded to AMD, I haven't noticed a single driver issue and even before that they were rare. It's not like AMD ever put out drivers that actually destroyed video cards http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-196.75-drivers-over-heating,9802.html

and getting driver updates through Steam is great.

@Kidavenger said:

@Branthog said:

@Bourbon_Warrior said:

@Branthog said:

The 5970 is the first time I've gone ATI in over a decade and I've decided to return to NVIDIA after some poor experiences. These mostly have to do with problems with drivers being broken, the run of custom drivers for a specific game (often requiring a beta driver or a driver that otherwise obsoletes a driver you had to install for another game) and the poor OpenGL support. What the ATI does, it does beautifully, but I think it's NVIDIA again, for me. The only thing holding me back from building a new machine to replace my machine (2gb 5970, i7@930 12gb ram, SSD) is waiting for the next meaningful generation of NVIDIA cards to come out.

As for going crazy with SLI/Crossfire? Meh. I would gladly drop a couple grand if it was going to make a significant difference, but there is far too little support and far too much lost overhead. Besides, I can usually run every new game at max settings in either 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 (when I can no longer run a game in highest settings at those two resolutions, I know it's time to build a new machine from scratch, again).

Ive got a 5850 and havenet run into any driver problems, ive played Dirt2/3, Batman AA, Skyrim and Witcher 2 last year and had no problems.

ATI are notoriously bad about driver updates. These days, it mostly seems to be with lots of conflicts with actual games (maybe their fault - maybe developers of games; doesn't really matter, either way), but in the past, the issues were primarily in . . . you know . . . actually making any driver updates. The thing that turned me away from ATI over a decade ago was when games flat out wouldn't work with the ATI Diamond Viper. Vampire: Masquerade was one specific example (after loading the game, it was just a big grey screen). If I recall correctly, it took them six months to issue the first driver update for the card. My next card was an NVIDIA and has been ever since (except for the 5970, which I chose primarily because it was the fastest thing around a little over a year ago and because it was quiter and lower power than the NVIDIA options at the time). Other than the poor support of many games on ATI, their sad implementation of OpenGL support is enough to keep me back in NVIDIA's arms again.

Since ATI re branded to AMD, I haven't noticed a single driver issue and even before that they were rare. It's not like AMD ever put out drivers that actually destroyed video cards http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-196.75-drivers-over-heating,9802.html

and getting driver updates through Steam is great.

Have you actually tried to play a game shortly after release on ATI? They have recently been riddled with problems and almost always require a one-off beta patch (unless you're willing to wait weeks or more for the official release) specific to the individual game. In the meantime, that patch is exclusive to other games. As an example, you might want to play Red Orchestra 2 and Rage. There is a beta patch out that ATI will advise that you use if you want to overcome some significant issues with performance on Rage. They also advise that you use a beta patch to overcome significant issues with Red Orchestra 2 (or another game - just an example). However, these are not roll-up patches, meaning that you can have the fixes for one but not the other.

Maybe this is the way the world is, now, but I don't ever recall before the last couple of years having to make a habit of going and manually installing specific pre-release game-specific drivers from a videocard manufacturer to make a game playable (and this happens with the release of every big game - Rage, Red Orchestra, Crysis 2, Skyrim, BF3, etc).

As for getting driver updates through Steam - I'll pass, thanks. I prefer to have control over my own drivers instead of having a third party application do it for me. Not to mention, with Steam, you're getting the latest vetted full release (and after a certain delay). When you buy Crysis and it has game crippling glitches and ATI says "you need to download 11.3.pre.14whatever" and it'll be weeks before that's included in the full driver update (and perhaps longer than that before it's available via Steam), it becomes more of a nuisance than anything else.

Anyway, ATI has pretty great cards. It's just their history with driver support that has historically sucked. Of course, with my luck, NVIDIA will become regularly sucky as soon as I return to them. Such is life.

No one PC should have all that power!

Edit; Aw, someone beat me to it.

My 560Ti plays all the new games at high settings just fine, spending large amounts of money on technology that will be outdated in 2 years, seems a little ridiculous