Hardware & Technical The Graphics Cards discussion thread

High end GFX rigs?

  • Yes

    Votes: 49 44.5%

  • No

    Votes: 30 27.3%

  • Maybe

    Votes: 18 16.4%

  • Why are you asking this?

    Votes: 13 11.8%
  • Total voters
    110
  • Poll closed .

Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
Yaffle
Ben Parry said:
The heat still has to go somewhere.
Click to expand...

Indeed. Thermodynamics can be a female dog.

I have a watercooled setup. It's lovely and quiet, but still dumps the heat in the room. I had contemplated a couple of holes in the wall and the radiator outside, but I am married to a sane woman who said "no".
 

Mazhurg

Mazhurg
Yaffle said:
Indeed. Thermodynamics can be a female dog.

I have a watercooled setup. It's lovely and quiet, but still dumps the heat in the room. I had contemplated a couple of holes in the wall and the radiator outside, but I am married to a sane woman who said "no".
Click to expand...

Tie it into the central air. Good place to dump the heat!

:D
 

Tony Spaniels

Tony Spaniels
Yaffle said:
Indeed. Thermodynamics can be a female dog.

I have a watercooled setup. It's lovely and quiet, but still dumps the heat in the room. I had contemplated a couple of holes in the wall and the radiator outside, but I am married to a sane woman who said "no".
Click to expand...

Is it really bad then? You're sitting there sweatin' in a sarong?
 

Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
Yaffle
Tony Spaniels said:
Is it really bad then? You're sitting there sweatin' in a sarong?
Click to expand...

Mercifully for all concerned, no.

It is surprisingly heat generative. I have two 7970s crossfired, and the study is in the old part of the house (late 17th Century) which is very draughty and lacks such modern niceties as cavity wall insulation, or indeed insulation. It warms it well in the winter, can get hot in the summer.

It's more silence I'm looking for, and even the radiator needs fans to force air across the fins, so it's not silent. You also still need a fan or two in the case as some MOSFETS and whatnot need air circulation, and the designer will have assumed you'd have a massive fan on the CPU. Massive fans spinning slower are quieter. Moving the radiator away reduces the noise (and clears the heat elsewhere). Having a radiator outside causes other problems; if the liquid is chilled to below room ambient then it will cause condensation in the case. Nobody needs that.
 

mattyboy1509

M
Visiting planets !!

I am most looking forward to visiting the desolate planet hogg which got caught up in a runaway greenhouse effect due to the huge popularity of a space based video game !!
I think leave the high end to the one using cryengine the alpha plays lovely with a gtx 660 which you can pick up for 125 uses a much more reasonable power drain so wont cost the earth. Looks gorgeous by the way as is even with a lot of assets on screen.
I guess though everyone wants it aimed at their rig !
 

Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
Yaffle
mattyboy1509 said:
I am most looking forward to visiting the desolate planet hogg which got caught up in a runaway greenhouse effect due to the huge popularity of a space based video game !!
I think leave the high end to the one using cryengine the alpha plays lovely with a gtx 660 which you can pick up for 125 uses a much more reasonable power drain so wont cost the earth. Looks gorgeous by the way as is even with a lot of assets on screen.
I guess though everyone wants it aimed at their rig !
Click to expand...

Indeed we do. I have a 7680x1440 setup. Needs lots of heavy lifting...
 

Tony Spaniels

Tony Spaniels
mattyboy1509 said:
I am most looking forward to visiting the desolate planet hogg which got caught up in a runaway greenhouse effect due to the huge popularity of a space based video game !!
I think leave the high end to the one using cryengine the alpha plays lovely with a gtx 660 which you can pick up for 125 uses a much more reasonable power drain so wont cost the earth. Looks gorgeous by the way as is even with a lot of assets on screen.
I guess though everyone wants it aimed at their rig !
Click to expand...

Yeah I have conflicting feelings on that matter. I plan to run Elite in VR though and I want it reasonabley future proof (as much as you can be) so its going to need to be something meaty.

In mitigation I dont nor never had a car, and havent brought any children into this world (have 2 step daughters) so I think Ive a bit of room to manoeuvre.
 

Tony Spaniels

Tony Spaniels
Heard back from a mate in work who is far more knowledgable than myself with regard to GPU's...

"Don't worry about the temperatures. The review that I sent you yesterday says it's about 65C under load! That is pretty amazing. Anything around 70 is pretty good in my book.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-295x2-review-benchmark-performance,3799-17.html"

Agree/disagree?
 

jamieboo

J
Hello folks

I've been playing the Premium Beta (Alpha 1) nicely at a smooth framerate at 1920x1200 (moved down to 1920x1080 as the game doesn't seem to like 16:10) on a i7 920 at stock and a HD5850. Performance seems better than expected for my aging system.
I still want to upgrade my GPU though. Even though it seems fine now, do reckon I'll notice definite improvements if I upgrade to a R9 280x or a GTX 760??
Speaking of such choices, does it seem that ED generally prefers nvidia gpu's, or will I be fine with an AMD?

Thanks.
 

Zieman

Zieman
E: D has had some problems with planet rendering & ATI/AMD, but otherwise there shouldn't be any bias towards either AMD or Nvidia.

Upgrading to eiher of GPUs you listed should give you headroom GFX-wise, resulting in more consistent smooth framerates with more (if not all) bells & whistles enabled. AMD or Nvidia - comes down to personal preference IMO.
 
Last edited:

Juniper

Juniper
jamieboo said:
Speaking of such choices, does it seem that ED generally prefers nvidia gpu's, or will I be fine with an AMD?
Click to expand...

AMD is generally fine. I have two 7870s, but mostly played with just the one. Early on in the alpha, some people were having issues with AMD cards (not me though) which made them put in an "AMD Crash Fix" option as a temporary hackaround. But I'm not sure that's needed any more.

Worth bearing in mind as well that the code is not optimised as much as it will be for release, and has extra debugging stuff in there to help FD track down problems. So expect performance to naturally go up without you changing anything.
 

jamieboo

J
Thanks folks.
But I also wondered if nvidia might be getting the edge what with the recent driver developments. I know AMD have Mantle but isn't that depending on developers exploiting it in future, whereas the recent nvidia 'wonder'driver has seen performance boosts in existing games. And since I have an intel cpu nvidia might be the way to go. - But I really don't know - it's not my field!
 

sWi7zLe

sWi7zLe
Hi,

Does anyone know whether there is an SLI Profile for this? It only seems to be using one GPU, but although im getting about 80fps with one card, it's getting rather warm so would nice to get it running with both GPU's

Cheers
 

sqzbox1

S
Radeon R9 270X - any good?

Hi all

Well, the new Elite is finally here and I am excited - have been waiting for, well, forever it seems. So I have to upgrade my graphics finally. Actually, timing-wise it probably isn't a bad time since the latest round seems to be getting more sensible price-wise. I have a reasonable pc I think - an AMD FX-4300 Black series processor (quad-core, 3.8 GHz), 8 gig RAM and a nice Samsung SSD - but no graphics. Oh, and 64-bit Win 8.1 Pro. SO - I have done a lot of homework and I wanted to ask if anybody has tried the Radeon R9 270X card. It seems to be real good value for money and quite well recommended. Any thoughts? Is this a good enough card to get a smooth seamless gaming experience?

thanks in advance

Bryan
 
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