Originally Posted by storm20200
lol poor bindi. People are never happy no matter what you do XD

:'( :'( :'( :'(

People have a right to ask! At least it means it's being read!!

Originally Posted by Skiddywinks
As has been pointed out, this article (as much as I enjoyed it), really needs a DDR3 X48/X38 board running a single and multi GPU setup.

The results are biased in how much better Bloomfield and Lynnfield peform when they both have DDR3, whereas P45 is only using DDR2.

Owning a Rampage Extreme, the results don't really tell me how much better i5/i7 really are than what I have now.

You are in much the minority I'm afraid :( A very large quantity of the market that bought X48s have already upgraded to Bloomfield. We don't even have an X48 board anymore.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
You are in much the minority I'm afraid :( A very large quantity of the market that bought X48s have already upgraded to Bloomfield. We don't even have an X48 board anymore.

Suckage :(

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
LOTS of people do. And common P45 boards are DDR2, not DDR3. I could count the people on our forum who have DDR2 X38/X48 boards on 1 hand.

Yeah, but when you're specifically testing multi-GPU setups, wouldn't it make sense to choose the chipset that is designed for it?
Choosing a P45 for CrossFireX is silly unless you're running a card that won't saturate 8 PCIe lanes (which would make CFX pointless anyway).
That's Lynnfield's Achilles heel anyway, everyone knows that.

For multi-GPU X58>X48>P55/P45 (talking only electrical PCIe performance)

Originally Posted by stonedsurd
Yeah, but when you're specifically testing multi-GPU setups, wouldn't it make sense to choose the chipset that is designed for it?

No, we chose a platform that is relevant to what people actually bought. Otherwise I might have included nForce 790i Ultra SLI too for the six people on the planet that own one of those :p

Choosing a P45 for CrossFireX is silly unless you're running a card that won't saturate 8 PCIe lanes (which would make CFX pointless anyway).
That's Lynnfield's Achilles heel anyway, everyone knows that.

For multi-GPU X58>X48>P55/P45 (talking only electrical PCIe performance)

Previously people were more than happy with two x8s and the common consensus was that the bus was never flooded anyway so don't bother paying for expensive X48 boards when £100 P45s would do.

It's easy to say with hindsight that X58 is better, but for those who purchased before X58 - how much better is good to justify.

Nice article. I owned a P45 board for crossfire and was more than happy with it. Although my next board will probably be x16/x16.

There is an old article here http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2.0,1915-11.html but it shows that there is neglible difference operating at x16 in comparison to x8 when it comes to PCIE 2.0 (as was stated earlier).

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Time! We picked the most common resolution

Should have picked the resolution most people with an SLI/Crossfire setup would be using (1920x1200). But still interesting results.... I wonder if 8x will be enough for a 150GB/s+ 5870? :P

Nice review, although it would've been nice if you used higher clockspeeds to further eliminate any potential CPU bottlenecks, especially in multi-GPU. I'm also surprised you guys kinda stumbled on the x8 vs. x16 bandwidth results, most other sites and forums were keenly interested in the potential difference there between P55 and X58, although few did a dedicated comparison as you did here. I think only THG did a dedicated thorough comparison on launch day:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-gaming,2403-9.html

It does look like X58 is the more "future proof" platform for multi-GPU users, especially with 58x0 and GT300 looming on the horizon.

Originally Posted by frontline
Nice article. I owned a P45 board for crossfire and was more than happy with it. Although my next board will probably be x16/x16.

There is an old article here http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2.0,1915-11.html but it shows that there is neglible difference operating at x16 in comparison to x8 when it comes to PCIE 2.0 (as was stated earlier).

"old article" being the operative term there, those parts are 2 generations old and about half as fast as the current single fastest GPU. The next-gen looks to continue to obey Moore's law with the next-gen single-GPU approximating current multi-GPU performance, so x8 will become an even greater bottleneck.

Also, THG has since published at least two follow-ups to that article, one with the 4870 and 4870X2 which i can't find atm, and this one with P55 and X58.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-gaming,2403-9.html

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
No, we chose a platform that is relevant to what people actually bought. Otherwise I might have included nForce 790i Ultra SLI too for the six people on the planet that own one of those :p

Fair enough. /bows

Previously people were more than happy with two x8s and the common consensus was that the bus was never flooded anyway so don't bother paying for expensive X48 boards when £100 P45s would do.

Yeah, but as the newer cards start saturating the lanes, even if it's less than 16, it may be more than 8, P45/55 benches lose relevance.

What is the speed of AM3 PCI lanes in crossfire? Do the drop down to 8X?

What if you overclock both the PCI express frequency and the QPI frequency on the P55??? Would that bring it up to X58 levels?

Originally Posted by javaman
What is the speed of AM3 PCI lanes in crossfire? Do the drop down to 8X?

AM3 is a socket. The 790FX chipset (AMD's current flagship) has 16x + 16x electrical, with a third at 4x or 8x, I can't remember. Basically a total of 42 PCIe lanes for all I/O

Originally Posted by friskies
What if you overclock both the PCI express frequency and the QPI frequency on the P55??? Would that bring it up to X58 levels?

Perhaps, but AT seems to suggest that overclocking them is, in fact, the hard part.

Originally Posted by javaman
What is the speed of AM3 PCI lanes in crossfire? Do the drop down to 8X?

On a 790X/GX chispet it's x8/x8 For 790FX it's 16x/16x or 8x/8x/8x/8x for the quad crossfire MSI

I'm always happy for the reviews/articles.

Originally Posted by stonedsurd
Yeah, but as the newer cards start saturating the lanes, even if it's less than 16, it may be more than 8, P45/55 benches lose relevance.

Then when DX11 finally arrives with all the new cards, we might do a more in depth re-look at X58 versus P55 :)

Platform cost, multiple GPUs, multiple resolutions? It all depends on available time to do it :) You it's either can get a lot of things half arsed done, or one thing completely. We chose one lot of complete here :)

Lol, You beat me to it! I was going to run my 920 system against my 750 system when I got it up and running testing exactly how you have against my qx6700 system at 2.67ghz on a gtx295, 4870x2 and gtx285. Was very nice to see this review and I suppose you saved me my weekend there lol!

Fantastic in depth review there, am looking forward to the 5xxx series reviews when they come out, hopefully they wont run as hot as the 4xxx series cards. I am by no means a fan boy but they ran far too hot for my liking.

Anyway, Nice one!

Andy

Originally Posted by stonedsurd
AM3 is a socket. The 790FX chipset (AMD's current flagship) has 16x + 16x electrical, with a third at 4x or 8x, I can't remember. Basically a total of 42 PCIe lanes for all I/O

Perhaps, but AT seems to suggest that overclocking them is, in fact, the hard part.

Thanks thats what I meant.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Then when DX11 finally arrives with all the new cards, we might do a more in depth re-look at X58 versus P55 :)

Platform cost, multiple GPUs, multiple resolutions? It all depends on available time to do it :) You it's either can get a lot of things half arsed done, or one thing completely. We chose one lot of complete here :)

I really loved Custom PC's rundown of SLI vs crossfire ages back. It was around the same time the 9series launched. Seems it wasn't worth it back then compared to now.

This is the sh!t mate! Who gave you the idea for such an excellent subject? :D

I am running a Core i7... 870 on P55! So you could have replaced the way you name the platforms, too bad Intel never came up with a proper name for them either
I guess 775/1156/1366 would be the best way to get out of the pickle, but penryn/lynnfield/bloomfield would be nice aswell.

I'm a bit bummed out by the rresults though, as i'm planning to run multi-gpu on 1156... :(

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Platform cost, multiple GPUs, multiple resolutions? It all depends on available time to do it :)

And if you even have the hardware to do it, evidentally :P

How do you think the infernal engine would work on an i5? Its been looked at on [H]ardforums and it works pretty well on i7s.

superb article!

thanks for this.

i was wondering though, could you do a 4870x4/gtx295sli maxed out at 2560 with lots of aa/af, with cpu scaling?

ie a stock i5/i7 (both kinds) c2q. c2d phemon ii x4 and Oced aswell, so we can see which cpu is the best for the enthuiast?

I think people need to step back on the "DDR2 versus DDR3" question considering EVERY single test shown on socket 775 show DDR3 rarely exceeding a 5% real world performance lead due to the chipset based memory controller.

In fact, in general, the same goes for AM2+ versus AM3. DDR types don't make huge performance differences for off-CPU memory controllers.

You did fine with the DDR2 setup, bindi. The difference would have been next to nothing anyway.

Originally Posted by moshpit
I think people need to step back on the "DDR2 versus DDR3" question considering EVERY single test shown on socket 775 show DDR3 rarely exceeding a 5% real world performance lead due to the chipset based memory controller.

In fact, in general, the same goes for AM2+ versus AM3. DDR types don't make huge performance differences for off-CPU memory controllers.

You did fine with the DDR2 setup, bindi. The difference would have been next to nothing anyway.

I agree with everything you said but DDR3 is becoming so mainstream now for system builders/techies that you'll always get people saying "You used old tech, this review isn't valid, use the newer stuff" no matter how much of a difference there is, hell look at the amount of P45 vs X48 complaints there's been already :(

You could use my DDR2, Crossfire 4870 1GB, P45 Chipset, setup. I can run my 2 x 2GB sticks at 1260MHz with my Q9550@ 4.335GHz. I think that would even out any wrinkles. From the research I have done the P45 chipset actually comes out ahead of X48, a lot.