Mortimaxis

I would get the GTX 295 FTW. es bro go for ti.

chadamir

There's always going to be some bottleneck in your system. You'll end up upgrading forever.

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Lord Xeb's Unoffical Intel Overclocking Guide for Newbies

tipsycoma

Nice review but frankly, you're proving basically the same thing that tweaktown said. There is bottleneck at x8 CF 4850s. So imagine 4890s. It's basically twice as powerful as a 4850.

-iceblade^

5% is by no means crippling

OP, go for it. I don't think 1 or 2 fps, heck, even 5 fps is enough to cry over

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tipsycoma

Also the board you used for x16/x16 is a GX. Wouldn't that scale to x8/x8 as well?

tipsycoma

But what about in the future when higher and higher performance cards come out. There will be more than just a couple FPS difference between x8 and x16. Imo, go with the better chipset, it will save you money in the long haul.

almighty15

I'm getting tired of explaining this

The PCIEX bus is used for transferring game data between the VRAM, System RAM and CPU, other graphics cards....etc...etc...

Now IF a game streams data constantly it is going to suffer a BIG hit as the bandwidth it has to transfer data across is effectively HALVED when running in x8 mode.

Most games games fit just fine into VRAM and hardly stream at all, those are the games that show little to no performance hit when running in x8x8

Now games which use a crap load of VRAM will suffer quite bad as they have to store all the textures and game data that won't fit into VRAM in the system RAM and swap the data between VRAM - Sys RAM

And again, they only have half the effective bandwidth to do this with when running in x8 mode.

You can get around it and make the performance hit less by having as much VRAM on your GPU as possible, the more VRAM there is to store game data in, the less data has to stored in System RAM and thus resulting in less data swaping over the PCIEX bus.

Crysis ( And Warhead )
STALKER Series
Flight Sim X

Those games stream ALOT and will suffer quite bad, also games running with texture packs will be hit aswel, Oblivion with Quarls and Half Life 2 with the Fake Factory MOD.

Hope this helps

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Phil_Boggild

Changing chipset isn't an option for me. I haven't got the funds to get a new mobo as well as a new monitor and new card/cards. Also my OS in an OEM version with copy protection up the bum, so I wouldn't be able to install it if I formatted and changed chipsets.

rpm666

Those won't really be bottlenecked on a P45 board. Look at what I have running on my P45 board - the only bottleneck I have is benchmarking in 3dmark06 and Vantage - 21K in vantage is bad though...right?

No worries on the bottleneck

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almighty15

Your PCIEX bottlenecked and your extremely CPU bottlenecked..

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