R9 290x for eyefinity

[ng150716]

I'm currently using an Gigabyte R9 270 OC Edition for my gaming PC. However, I am looking into expanding to a triple monitor setup. My question is, on a budget should I add another R9 270 in crossfire, or would I get better performance from an upgrade? If I do upgrade I am looking at purchasing an R9 290X (just one, no crossfire). My end game is to have eyefinity for gaming.

 

I'm not sure how much this matters, but I am using an AMD Athlon X4 Quad Core Processor. If I were to keep this CPU would an R9 290x be an overkill? Thanks. 

[niofalpha]

That CPU would probably bottleneck the 290x.

 

The 290x Would be allot better than the 270.

[WoodenMarker]

The 290x would be better. 

What kind of games are you playing?

[thekeemo]

I can tell yuo right now either of those upgrades are going to be severly bottlenecked by that cpu

[Fate]

Get a 290x because of the vram and it's flat out more powerful than two 270's, plus you don't have crossfire issues.

 

Your Athlon shouldn't be much of a bottleneck because at higher resolutions CPU starts to become irrelevant.  @thekeemo @niofalpha

[ng150716]

The 290x would be better. 

What kind of games are you playing?

 

 Nothing really specific. I'll usually play a bit of War Thunder, some Civ 5, Microsoft Flight Sim, and a few AAA games (Bioshock, Borderlands), as well as some Arma 3 (which I'm certain no GPU I choose will handle it perfectly)

[ng150716]

Get a 290x because of the vram and it's flat out more powerful than two 270's, plus you don't have crossfire issues.

 

Your Athlon shouldn't be much of a bottleneck because at higher resolutions CPU starts to become irrelevant.  @thekeemo @niofalpha

 

So the R9 290x will have to spread its resources across the three monitors, thus allowing it to keep up with the CPU, or am I off base?

[WoodenMarker]

 Nothing really specific. I'll usually play a bit of War Thunder, some Civ 5, Microsoft Flight Sim, and a few AAA games (Bioshock, Borderlands), as well as some Arma 3 (which I'm certain no GPU I choose will handle it perfectly)

The 270 is already fine for the first half of the games you mentioned in triple 1080p with some lowered settings. Some more power would be needed to play the other games smoothly. If you're currently playing those fine at 1080p, getting a 290x wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

Honestly I'm not sure why there's such a lack of bottlenecks at higher resolutions, but that just seems to be the case. Even at 1440p bottlenecks start to diminish drastically and at 4k they're basically gone in most games (this is with 8350 vs 4930k vs 4770k; the 8350 bottlenecks SLI 980's at 1080p, but not really at all for 4k) http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/58/core-i7-4770k-vs-amd-fx-8350-with-gtx-980-vs-gtx-780-sli-at-4k/index.html

I'm not sure about the specific games you listed though.

So the R9 290x will have to spread its resources across the three monitors, thus allowing it to keep up with the CPU, or am I off base?

That's not how bottlenecking works. They don't just disappear at higher resolutions. Bottlenecks would occur when the graphics card can't perform optimally because of the cpu. If there's a bottleneck now, just worry about it later when performance is not high enough and you can upgrade the cpu.

[Fate]

So the R9 290x will have to spread its resources across the three monitors, thus allowing it to keep up with the CPU, or am I off base?

Honestly I'm not sure why there's such a lack of bottlenecks at higher resolutions, but that just seems to be the case. Even at 1440p bottlenecks start to diminish drastically and at 4k they're basically gone in most games (this is with 8350 vs 4930k vs 4770k; the 8350 bottlenecks SLI 980's at 1080p, but not really at all for 4k) http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/58/core-i7-4770k-vs-amd-fx-8350-with-gtx-980-vs-gtx-780-sli-at-4k/index.html

 

I'm not sure about the specific games you listed though.

[ng150716]

Right now my system is able to push around 40-70 frames for most of the games, and keep the frame rate steady. And  judging from responses, an R9 290x would fit ok into my system (with little bottlenecking). However, do you think it willl be able to push consistent frame rates across three monitors given my CPU. I'm not looking for 120 fps, but I'm talking around the ball park of ~40 fps. 

[Jack.EXE]

Honestly I'm not sure why there's such a lack of bottlenecks at higher resolutions, but that just seems to be the case. Even at 1440p bottlenecks start to diminish drastically and at 4k they're basically gone in most games (this is with 8350 vs 4930k vs 4770k; the 8350 bottlenecks SLI 980's at 1080p, but not really at all for 4k) http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/58/core-i7-4770k-vs-amd-fx-8350-with-gtx-980-vs-gtx-780-sli-at-4k/index.html

 

I'm not sure about the specific games you listed though.

 

I'm pretty sure that it is simply because the load on the GPU just to drive all the pixels is enough to pull it back into GPU bound territory.

[WoodenMarker]

Right now my system is able to push around 40-70 frames for most of the games, and keep the frame rate steady. And  judging from responses, an R9 290x would fit ok into my system (with little bottlenecking). However, do you think it willl be able to push consistent frame rates across three monitors given my CPU. I'm not looking for 120 fps, but I'm talking around the ball park of ~40 fps. 

The resolution doesn't affect cpu load.