Widescreen Gaming Forum

Well, after today's news from nV. I've decide to just not wait for the fermi. I dont think its going to be anything earth shattering anyway. but now I have the cash set aside to do some upgrading. I only get this opportunity once a year during tax time. I was thinking of 2X 5970. But I have a feeling that I would be creating a bottleneck. so the question is should I get these cards and do some overclocking of the CPU. Or should I just upgrade something else and just be happy with these 2 5870's I have.
Question?
Will 2X 5970's be bottlenecked by a stock i7940 2.93 GHz. running 5670 X 1200 resolution.
will I need to overclock this CPU. If I decide to go this route

My original plan was to throw these 2 5870's in my other computer and put the GTX 480's in this one

I'm planning to do a comparison/review of the 5870, the Eyefinity6 and the 5970 when ATI has the hardware ready for me. I never got into the 5970 as Full CF+EF support didn't come out until just the recent 10.2. I don't think I'll get enough cards to do a CrossFireX setup on the 5870 or the EF6 card, but I can provide some comparison numbers on these single cards on my i7 920 at stock speeds.

Cool, I always see reviews with Overclocked CPU's . Which is understandable as you want to see the full potential of the card. but seeing one at some stock speeds would be a nice comparison.

I'm even beginning to wonder if I'm not getting some bottlenecking already?

Your comparison/review of those cards on a stock 920 would be a nice treat.

Your cpu is already holding you back a good bit. The performance numbers between stock and OC'd i7's is pretty sick. They are capable of 4ghz with little to no voltage increase. I am pretty sure even the demo systems AMD uses when showing off systems with 2-3 cards and Eyefinity are heavily overclocked.

Quadfire is bottlenecked by the CPU almost all the time, at least from what benchmarks I've seen in the past. A quad GPU setup will almost always see a boost from a further increase in CPU speed...

Having said that, I'm sure there are some games out there now that are more GPU limited in that scenario (mostly from lack of VRAM...)

Cool, I always see reviews with Overclocked CPU's . Which is understandable as you want to see the full potential of the card. but seeing one at some stock speeds would be a nice comparison.

I'm even beginning to wonder if I'm not getting some bottlenecking already?

Your comparison/review of those cards on a stock 920 would be a nice treat.

You can see what I've done so far by clicking the Benchmark link in the upper-left hand. Still have more games to test, and more stuff to post.