Strator

Awesome! I'll have to give this a try when I'm bored one day.

I've always wanted to do this actually, (currently staring at an unused hyper 212). Ignoring the fact that is not what it was designed for, which is lost on some people, let's try and troubleshoot the problems. First idea, see if you and run the coolant through the pipes in parallel, this is not going to be easy, you will have to find a 4 output manifold and or make one, but it should improve heat transfer a little, and more importantly the uniformity of the transfer. Second idea, if you have a thermocouple, check the temp of the air cooler, maybe some\a lot of the heat is not getting to the water rad and adding a fan to the air cooler will help. 3, if you do have a the thermocouple check the temps of the water going in and coming out of the air cooler, now they wont raise much, ie if you cpu is 50C the water will not be 50c, but this will tell you how efficient the heat transfer is. If the temp goes up by 10-15C(just a guess here) or so you are getting good heat transfer and your issue is cooling that back down with the rad. If it only goes up a few C then your issue is the transfer of heat from the CPU to the water, this could be from cpu to cooler transfer or cooler to water transfer. Hope this gives you an idea!

I just put together a loop with a phobya 400mm rad. As you can see I went with the notcua fans. I have some older NZXT and Bitfenix "200mm" fans and they do not fit, (not that I thought they would, I just was curious). I'm not sure of the current selection of 200mm fans and if they would work with this rad, but the fins are not dense so you don't necessarily need to find a high static pressure fan. If you are looking for one the silverstone air penetrator 180mm are the best and they do fit this rad. One thing to note this setup is thicccc, 45mm rad + 30mm fan, make sure your case has the clearance. I mounted mine on the back of my case, the P3, but thats not typically an option. As a performance note, Im running a 1700x at 3.9GHz and a vega 64, drawing about 450wats from the wall while gaming and with the low noise adapters on the they are silent, and I mean silent, and my temps are low 50s for the cpu and high 40s for the gpu with water temps reaching 38C or so. With the fans on full, still quiet and they have a nice low note to them, the temps drop about 5C all around.

Even further back in the day Asrock made a socket 775 board (4CoreDual-SATA2) that supported DDR and DDR2 as well as AGP and PCI-e. Not all at the same time obviously but it was great for using up old hardware laying around for a general use computer. It also supported CPUs from P4 all the way to the Q6600. I have one, it was in my sons computer with 4GB of DDR2, a Q6600 and an ATI AIW x800, great little XP\Win7 machine. Back on topic if the price is right I'll be picking one of these up, I am sitting on 32GB of DDR3 (from an old FX build lol) that I don't have a use for, pair some of that with a used i3 or i5 and a cheap SSD and you've got a great little computer upgrade for an aging system. Throw in an RX 470 for <100$ and that's quite a nice little gaming box. Last note: Many programs\processors or more sensitive to latency than bandwidth. Per a typical bandwidth, DDR3 and DDR4 are pretty similar. Not that it matters, the people who are going to buy this will never put it in any workloads that they will notice a difference in anyway.

Not always, the GTX 660 was a full GK106 and 660Ti was a cut down GK104, and the 560Ti 448 core was a cut down GF110. They could call it GTX 980Ti 3072 core, in reality it probably will be GTX 980Ti because all marketing cares about is how easy for the consumers to tell where a product belongs in Nvidia's catalog, i.e. 980Ti > 980.

I have a 8350 at 4.5 GHz and a R9 290x lightning (stock), while gaming it draws ~550 watts at the wall with an 800 watt 80 plus gold power supply. You could probably get away with 850 watt, but there would not be much headroom. When I have been looking at the dropping prices of the lightning and thinking about getting a second one, 1000w was my minimum. Because, why have a lightning card and not OC it, and the power consumption will quickly rise by 100w a card when oc'd. Good choices at 1000w and about the $150 mark if your patient, corsair RM 1000, EVGA Supernova 1000G2.

If you do go this route, I would suggest buying both 970's at the same time or close together. While SLI does scale well, one this it has never been good at is working with different cards, read: doesn't work. So, if you buy an EVGA GTX 970 SSC FTW+(exaggerated a bit for comedic purposes), you better hope you can find that exact model down to road AND it's not rev 2.0 or there is a strong possibility of it not working with your card. Or pick a more common GTX 970 to help minimize this problem.

I think your main problem here is your SLI is not working correctly, I do agree with most of the previous posts that a 1090t will bottleneck dual 980's in games, but the Valley benchmark is almost completely GPU bound, I have an FX8350 and r9 290x, and use to have CF 7950's, and get similar scores to people with i7's and 290x's or 7950's. I still think the 560ti is messing with your set up. When you removed the 560Ti did you do a driver re-install? and I mean driver clean, remove card, reboot, install, reboot then test. I don't have personal experience with SLI but with crossfire hardware and drivers have to installed in a specific order to run correctly. I would keep trying to get SLI to scale rigth on this set-up before upgrading or you are just going to have the same issues. Depending on what games you want to play upgrading might not be worth it. For example today tom's published a Shadow of Mordor review and a FX 4170 was only 10% slower than an overclocked i5-4690k or stock i7-5930k using a single 980, BF4 is also not very affected by CPU. Other games, the civilization series is a big one, the FX-4xxx processors can be only half as fast as the Intel offerings.

Dual x16 is x16/x16

I had this problem with my 6870's and 7950's, i.e. one card running at 2x PCIe speed. Two things, because of AMD's power saving features the second card will run at 2x speed until stressed, try running furmark of MSI afterburner AT FULL SCREEN (crossfire will not work while windowed most of the time) and see if the speed goes to 8x using GPUz. Also disable ULPS in MSI afterburner or sapphire Trixx, will cause the same issue. Lastly, this happed to me both times, one card seemed to want to be in "first" or "top" card in crossfire. With the 6870's I had a reference XFX card and a MSI 6870 HAWK, I wanted the reference on top for airflow but crossfire would not work, it only worked with the HAWK in the first slot. So as weird as it sounds, just inverting the cards, 290 in slot 1 and 290x in the lower slot, might fix the issue.

Yes, I removed a link to a $119 GTX 750ti because it was for U.S.

Grab a ITX version of the 970 when it hits the shelves and a quality 500W psu and your set. The CPU should not bottleneck it much, if any, a quad core sandy bridge is still a very good chip. I would take a close look at your case and make sure the new power supply will fit, OEM's like to use SFX or other weird for factor power supplies. Also it looks like that case only has one smallish fan on it, and while the 970 is efficent one low flow fan on a case might not be enough to get all the heat from the 970 and the other components out of the case, a new case would be good investment.

I would seriously doubt we will see a GTX 980ti on the sole reason that it has no room in the current product stack. What I mean is since the GTX 980 is a full GM204 core the "980ti" would have to be a diffrent core, the fabled GM200. Since you always need a place for all the GPU's with defective cores, i.e. what the 970 is for the GM204 with one broken SMM, what would they call it? GTX 980tiSE, GTX 980 boost, GTX 980 plus, GTX better than a 980 but not a good as a 980ti. We will more than likely see the GM200 core just not until the next series, just like they did with the 600 and 700 series. The 980 will be rebranded the 1070 and we will get a 1080 and 1080ti. Lastly it makes no sense becase AMD has nothing that will better the 980 so why start using a core of you don't need to, they did the same thing again with the 600 and 700 series, they also had some manufaturing issuses becase GK110 is so big, but can you imagine if they released the 780ti when all AMD had was the 7970, what a waste.

It's $40 for the CPU, and if your getting a K version it would be silly not to overclock it which requires a Z series mobo, IIRC Intel blocked overclocking on most H series boards, which is another 10-30$ depending on your needs, and probably $30+ for a aftermarket cooler. All this to see very little to no gain in FPS with the cards you are looking at, not worth it.

The 280 might be EOL because of the 285 being out now, the 280 is still around here in the US so I'm not sure. In my son's computer, FX-6300 and MSI R9 270, I have this mobo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128651&cm_re=GA-970A-UD3P-_-13-128-651-_-Product , don't know if it's available or reasonably priced where you are but here it's cheap and does the job well. If you cant find it look for a 970 chipset board with heatsinks on the VRM's, they will be the best option for cheap but good. The only bad thing is they are all ATX form factor no mATX.