guyf2010

I've only ever used ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and Gainward. The asus card is a 560 ti, it's a bit old, but runs fine in my LAN box. Overclocks OK and haven't had any issues. Stability is rock solid. I'd recommend them. I currently use a 7970 and a 280X from MSI in my main machine. I got them cheap, the stability isn't rock solid, the temps aren't great, but I paid $150 AUD each for them. They are OK. The Gigabyte card is interesting. It's only a GT 630. But I didn't have a PCIE 16x slot on that board, and it didn't mind being run sitting on top of a box, overclocked, with a ribbon cable running through the PCIE cover into the motherboard's 8x PCIE slot. Now it runs in a friend's PC, still going strong. Great card. Now, the Gainward card was a GTX 260 core 216 edition. It was noisy and didn't overclock at all well, I don't know if that was Gainward, or just the 260, but my experience with it wasn't great. TL;DR Asus is good, MSI is acceptable and cheap, Gigabyte exceeded my expectations and Gainward wasn't fantastic in my experience.

Has anyone else noticed that the 'Get to know Windows 10' button leads to a 404?

Benchmark: Fire Strike CPU: i5 4460 GPU: HD 7970 and R9 280X in Crossfire GPU Core: 1050 for the 7970, 1020 for the 280X GPU Memory: 1375MHz for the 7970, 1500 for the 280X Score: 10037 Graphics Score: 14341 3DMark Link: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/5838495

So is that a 30 Watt SSD? That's a fair bit of power, it might have to be factored into power supply choices if they take off. I get that currently anyone buying an SSD in that price range is going to have an overkill PSU, but if they drop in price, who knows.

I've run both Nvidia and AMD cards. My main PC running Crossfire (7970 and 280X) has only had one driver crash to my knowledge; even with a decent OC. I have noticed that high temps during a benchmark can cause a shutdown when OC'd, but not driver issues for me. And this is with the Nvidia drivers installed as well. (Long story, removing them seemed to cause DirectX to fail, which is a big problem in Windows 8, even the login screen uses DX) My secondary PC (GTX 560 ti) has been pretty solid in terms of reliability. Drivers generally work fine, they might of crashed once or twice, but I've had that card a while and no issues with drivers stand out to me. However, I did (still do somewhere) own a GTX 260 core 216 edition. This had a number of driver crashes when OC'd as little as 25Mhz. It did seem alright at stock though.

I have read and commented on that thread in the past. My point wasn't to find someone saying they agree, it was finding someone in a knowledgeable position saying it.

It may not scale perfectly, but there is no reason for data to only be requested for retrieval when it's needed to draw the frame. Data could be roughly split and dynamically adjusted to not require huge data transfers. I'd be interested in seeing a reputable source to back up your claims. You don't appear to have read the link I posted. Here's another way of looking at it. Neither you nor I are capable of designing a GPU core. Does this mean it cannot be done? Obviously it can and has been. Neither of us are experts, neither of us are qualified to answer whether vram will be fully useable in future. If you can find a quote from a reputable person at AMD or NVidia saying it cannot be done, I'll believe you.

Good to hear. Make sure you keep backups. The scaling should be pretty good up to the 800MB/s mark. If you ever decide to add redundancy, Intel RST allows you to plug in a drive and convert the array to RAID 5.

Well, it was said by an AMD official. http://www.overclock.net/t/1539218/robert-hallock-on-twitter-mantle-allows-adding-vram-on-multi-gpu-configs There's a discussion about it. Regardless, to answer the original question. CURRENTLY data is mirrored between both cards, so you only get access to the memory of a single card. IN FUTURE you MAY get access to the memory of all cards.

I did say may. I'm pretty sure AMD already made the comment at some point saying Mantle was capable of this. It's not just a rumor, it can be done.

It would have been nice to get a X79 system running, but postage to Australia would have been terrible, and getting a 3930k isn't that cheap/easy either.

The only thing that doubles is core count. In future with DX12, you may have access to the other 3.5GB of VRAM. Core clock and memory clock stay the same. That said, I don't know if the Fatal1ty H97 supports SLI. A 600 Watt PSU should power everything, but it will be getting pretty close to the limit.

I've been on AC wireless for a while now, I am forced to use a USB adapter (Crossfire on a mATX board goes through PCIE lanes pretty quick). It's a TP LINK Archer T4U 1200. After my experiences with both the TP LINK dongle and an older D-Link one, don't use USB for WiFi. Of the cards you linked in the post, I'd spend the extra to get the Gigabyte one. AC wireless can come in handy, particularly if you decide in future you want to stream video locally. Bluetooth is also supported by that card. Something I didn't think I would need when I built my PC, but there have been a few occasions that it would have been nice to have.

It depends what you are using it for. RAID 0 should offer the highest performance, but least convenience will probably be the first to fail. 1TB mSATA drive is probably the easiest to install, but doesn't suit the colour theme. 1TB 2.5" will be somewhere in the middle in terms of installation difficulty, about the same speed as the mSATA drive, and I suspect the last to fail. If speed is the biggest concern, I'd go for the RAID 0 drives, and backup reasonably often. If you don't enjoy installing the drives/configuring for RAID 0, grab the mSATA drive. If you don't mind installing a single drive and want to make sure everything is going to last as long as possible (And save $30-$40), pick up the 2.5" drive. That said, I do run RAID 0 SSDs, and I'm sure some people will disagree with parts of this.

I wouldn't say I deserve the game, but I would like it I bought a second R9 280X, and pretty much the only game it has been of use on is Tomb Raider 2013. It would be nice to experience another high quality game at Ultra. That of course and the fact it would be nice to get the game before my friends spoil the ending.