Can an Nvidia 9800 GTX run Crysis on the highest visual settings

@DBZ - Looking to get an enthusiast setup. My current build is the first system I ever assembled (with a lot of help and advice from the guys here at TS). Would love to put together a beast now. Any ideas on AMD's Bulldozer platform and how it is expected to compare against Sandy Bridge? Since I'll have to build the rig out of savings from my salary I might have to keep a watch on the budget. Or maybe I could purchase components over a period of time and put them together once I've acquired everything. Would that be good?

Also, is liquid-cooling the way to go?

EDIT: Sorry. I seem to have hijacked this thread. :)
 
I never recommend purchasing components over a period of time, because you are 'wasting' their warranty period while they are just sitting around gathering dust. Just put that money in your bank account ;) ....... you can always purchase stuff once you have saved enough money to purchase components for whole system.

I haven't had chance to dig info about Bulldozer yet (may be DBZ in a better position), but initial information shows that SandyB ridge will be roughly 10-20% faster than currently available processors (but I guess it would be better to wait and see what actually is the real numbers once the processors are out in the wild).
 
@DBZ - Looking to get an enthusiast setup. My current build is the first system I ever assembled (with a lot of help and advice from the guys here at TS). Would love to put together a beast now. Any ideas on AMD's Bulldozer platform and how it is expected to compare against Sandy Bridge? Since I'll have to build the rig out of savings from my salary I might have to keep a watch on the budget. Or maybe I could purchase components over a period of time and put them together once I've acquired everything. Would that be good?

Hows the weather tomorrow? Actually, I don't know; you'll just have to wait and see to be sure.

My (most likely outdated) understanding is that intel was shooting for similarities with nehalem, but higher power efficiency and aiming at portable computing or something. I'm probably wrong though, that was like last year's wikipedia article.
 
Hows the weather tomorrow? Actually, I don't know.
My (most likely outdated) understanding is that intel was shooting for similarities with nehalem, but higher power efficiency and aiming at portable computing or something. I'm probably wrong though, that was like last year's wikipedia article.
WTF.?
***EDIT*** I take that back. It makes about as much sense as any other comment you've made in recent history
https://www.techspot.com/vb/post912832-10.html
https://www.techspot.com/vb/post912786-8.html
https://www.techspot.com/vb/post912807-11.html
https://www.techspot.com/vb/post912786-8.html
https://www.techspot.com/vb/post912786-8.html (hint: the OP doesn't need to update his/her SLI board to accomodate SLI)

Anyhow...
@Rit
As Arch said, get all your components at the same time. Even if the chipset etc stay the same, possibly there will be a core stepping change or some doodad added to the spec to keep the customer base buying.
As for Bulldozer...who knows? I don't think even AMD's guys are sure about what it can and can't do. Once samples start getting into OEM/motherboard manufacturers hands then the benchmarks should start leaking out to the rest of us. From what I've gathered on forums and read, it won't be an overly groundbreaking CPU line-it will however close the gap between AMD and Core i7. I don't think anyones expecting it to offer better performance than LGA 2011 though-although it should be considerably cheaper.

Also liquid cooling still relies upon ambient air temp. With high ambient temp and high humidity a liquid cooler becomes less effective and you generally have to rely on higher fan cfm (and the attendant noise) to improve the heat exchanging ability of the radiator/s. Either that or push-pull (fans both side of the rad) and/or stackable radiators.

BTW: I think our OP is probably long gone so hijacking the thread probably doesn't assume the same importance as an ongoing problem they might have.
 
Doesn't matter, its still fun to talk about builds....

I don't really believe in waiting over 6 months for a new part (ie: Sandy Bridge). You end up waiting for a product that's probably overpriced (however slight), with possible bugs (Pentium 4 comes to mind). Besides, you still don't know what sort of performance increase we'll be looking at, 6 months to find out that Sandy Bridge increases performance by 5%, no difference anywhere else, and reduced overclocking headroom? Of course, that may not be the case, but we may also end up waiting for something akin to the nVidia 3xx series (which never came to fruition for desktops).
 
I would put the money aside first, and then purchase everything at the same time. Otherwise, depending on your budget and how long saving takes, you could end up with some items with only half the period of warranty left, having not even been tested to see if they work.

The only time I order hardware one at a time is if I'm updating a current system over time. But that said, I always make sure whatever I order is useable from day one, so I get the benefit of the full warranty period should any problems arise.

That said, since I only really use my PC for my server maintenance, office tasks, graphics editing and occasional programming (I'm trying to learn). lol. For me a Core2quad Q8200, a Radeon HD4670, 4GB RAM and 2x 22" Viewsonic LCD's is MORE than adequate! lol.

I actually don't even have the slightest idea how my system would handle games, as I've never played one on a PC. (well not since Civilisation II run through DOS on Win3.11!).
 
Leeky said:
I would put the money aside first, and then purchase everything at the same time. Otherwise, depending on your budget and how long saving takes, you could end up with some items with only half the period of warranty left, having not even been tested to see if they work.
This is a good practice, IMO. Besides what Leeky said, if you discover that something is defective early enough, you often can return it to the retailer or online etailer instead of having to deal with the manufacturer. Usually this period is 30-60 days. With the retailer or etailer you have the possibility of a refund if you don't like the item (depends on the shop) but with the manufacturer, you can only get a repair or replacement.

In other words you have more options the earlier you discover problems.
 
Thanks for those insights guys. I think my system (with an X3 720 @ 3.6GHz, HD 4890 and 4 Gigs of RAM) should be able to handle most games till 2011. Around which time are the new CPU architectures expected? Q1 2011? I'll wait and take my call then.

Also, is it worth immediately to upgrade from the HD 4890 to something like the GTX 460? I'm gaming on a 20" widescreen @ 1600x900.
 
I think LGA1155 will arrive earlier some time in Q4/Q1 window. LGA2011 will be launched in early Q3/2011 I think.

It will help I believe, but frankly you would be better off not doing that upgrade right now. Because by the time you have enough money to assemble your new system, no matter how good 460GTX is, it would be reduced the lower echelons of the mainstream market, and much faster incarnations or new architectures from both players may be around the corner. So, I believe 4890 is pretty good graphic card for the time being, stick with it until you build totally new system, and save every penny you can :)
 
"LGA2011 will be launched in early Q3/2001 I think"
LOL

@Rit
I'd second Arch's thoughts re the 4890. If you buy a GTX 460, except for DX11, you probably wont get a massive step up in performance. With the new lineup of cards due out towards the end of the year - you could conceivably pick up a HD 6770/6850(?)/GTX 475 (with HD 5850/5870/GTX 480 performance) or a current gen card at a better price/performance point.
Unless the 4890 is struggling on some games, I'd stick with it. Having said that I used to have a 4890 in my secondary rig (before I won the 5770) and I have an MSI GTX460 Cyclone 1Gb card coming next week. If you'd like I can swap out the 5770 and run some benches/post results and give you a subjective evaluation between any gaming differences of note.

EDIT: Strike the last part. One of my customers just bought the Cyclone in a staight-up trade for a XFX HD 5850 Black Ed. I have a second Cyclone coming on 12th Aug (was going SLI to replace the GTX 280's) so I can get some comparison stuff happening then.
 
dividebyzero said:
If you'd like I can swap out the 5770 and run some benches/post results and give you a subjective evaluation between any gaming differences of note.

That would be really nice. Thank you so much. Also, have you noticed any differences between the HD4890 and HD5770 in terms of performance? Can the HD5770 match the 4890?
 
From a gameplay aspect there isn't a great deal of difference. The game IQ is a little lower for the HD 5770 in some games ( GTA 4 draw distance the most visually noticeable) but in essence, any game I could play with the 4890 still had similar gameplay ability with the HD 5770. Crysis and Crysis Warhead are supposed to run slightly smoother on the 4890 but I couldn't detect any difference using an optimized DX9 setting (as opposed to the unoptimized stock DX10 path)
Games I've played with both cards would include: Crysis, Warhead, Stalker (ShoC and CS + mods Oblivion Lost, Priboi Story, 1935 build, Lurk, Stalker Complete), Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, most of the Call of Duty games, GTA: VC, SA and 4 (VC and SA very heavily modded), Far Cry 2, UT2004 (Out of Hell mod), FEAR+Extraction Point, FEAR2, World in Conflict, CFS3and probably a few more.
I had a reference HD 4890 and the difference in noise and heat between it and the 5770 is quite noticable- the 5770 is a reasonably quite card. Also, neither card was much in the overclocking department so they were both run at stock speeds . For the amount of extra heat/stress/fan speed it wasn't worth a few extra fps.
 
From a gameplay aspect there isn't a great deal of difference. The game IQ is a little lower for the HD 5770 in some games ( GTA 4 draw distance the most visually noticeable) but in essence, any game I could play with the 4890 still had similar gameplay ability with the HD 5770. Crysis and Crysis Warhead are supposed to run slightly smoother on the 4890 but I couldn't detect any difference using an optimized DX9 setting (as opposed to the unoptimized stock DX10 path)
Games I've played with both cards would include: Crysis, Warhead, Stalker (ShoC and CS + mods Oblivion Lost, Priboi Story, 1935 build, Lurk, Stalker Complete), Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, most of the Call of Duty games, GTA: VC, SA and 4 (VC and SA very heavily modded), Far Cry 2, UT2004 (Out of Hell mod), FEAR+Extraction Point, FEAR2, World in Conflict, CFS3and probably a few more.
I had a reference HD 4890 and the difference in noise and heat between it and the 5770 is quite noticable- the 5770 is a reasonably quite card. Also, neither card was much in the overclocking department so they were both run at stock speeds . For the amount of extra heat/stress/fan speed it wasn't worth a few extra fps.

Out of curiousity, what sort of temps are you getting with these cards while playing games?
 
HD 4890 was around 65-70C during extended gaming- not too bad, but the idle temp on a reference card is 45-50C (say 40-45C and 20-25C over ambient respectively). The HD 5770 is about 5-7C cooler (with reference fansink/shroud) under load and about 10C cooler at idle.
That's in a chassis with fairly good front-to-back cooling (150cfm approx.not including zone cooling)
Running a benchmark like Furmark or Kombuster would add around 5C to the load temps in each instance (rough estimate as I don't run benchmarks generally). All things considered, the temps are reasonable- at the other end of the scale my GTX 280's in SLI would run at around 85C if they weren't liquid cooled (43-45C max load temp w/ waterblocks)
 
HD 4890 was around 65-70C during extended gaming- not too bad, but the idle temp on a reference card is 45-50C (say 40-45C and 20-25C over ambient respectively). The HD 5770 is about 5-7C cooler (with reference fansink/shroud) under load and about 10C cooler at idle.
That's in a chassis with fairly good front-to-back cooling (150cfm approx.not including zone cooling)
Running a benchmark like Furmark or Kombuster would add around 5C to the load temps in each instance (rough estimate as I don't run benchmarks generally). All things considered, the temps are reasonable- at the other end of the scale my GTX 280's in SLI would run at around 85C if they weren't liquid cooled (43-45C max load temp w/ waterblocks)

Is that pretty normal for GPU's under load then?

Water cooling clearly makes a monumental difference to temperatures. I did consider it for my PC, but deducted it would be more of a gimmick for me than functional, as my computer rarely gets hot anyway.

My 4670 sits at 43-45'C and never any higher - But its not like it ever needs to really do anything! lol. In fact I don't think I've ever even heard the fan speed up at all. lol.
 
Is that pretty normal for GPU's under load then?

Probably depends on ambient air temp and air flow in and around the chassis. Like you I keep my systems up on the desk-mainly for airflow and to avoid vacuuming the carpet and temps in New Zealand are fairly temperate. So it's very much a case of your mileage may vary.

Having said that, those temps are probably ballpark average with most good cooling chassis, and maybe a few degrees lower than a bog-standard mid-tower chassis or open air testbench (some tech site reviews) that has limited directional airflow passing over the card/s.
Virtually all AMD/ATI gaming cards will max out 70-80C, while some of the large monolithic die nvidia cards (GTX2xx/465/70/80) will add 10-15C to that figure...to a degree that's fairly routine. I'm pretty sure all IC's are rated at 105C+ these days, and nvidia cards' thermal limit is 115C in most cases, so while the temps couldn't be considered "normal" by any rational person, they are well within manufacturers tolerances-if not that of a large number of potential customers.

@hk
That kind of depends on a number of other factors I would think rather than fps.
Does the early upgrade allow for a better resale price on the old card?
Will using a DX11 path with it's attendant performance gain over DX10/10.1 make a previously unplayable game (or upcoming games) viable at your preferred screen resolution?...
Even if it doesn't, what increased level of eye-candy can you add to settings with a lower impact on framerate ( dynamic lighting, ambient occlusion etc...)
Does the upgrade allow for a quieter enviroment ?
Does the upgrade allow for Eyefinity/3D surround that wasn't an option with the earlier card?
Is lossless bitstreaming audio desirable for HD content?

So maybe a few other considerations to take into account
 
dividebyzero said:
Also liquid cooling still relies upon ambient air temp. With high ambient temp and high humidity a liquid cooler becomes less effective and you generally have to rely on higher fan cfm (and the attendant noise) to improve the heat exchanging ability of the radiator/s. Either that or push-pull (fans both side of the rad) and/or stackable radiators.

Since I stay in Calcutta, the temperatures will be soaring in summer (40C +/- 4). Humidity is pretty high as well during summer and monsoon. Winters are pretty fine. It can get cold but not too much. So am I better off with air cooling? I must add that the air conditioner in my room usually runs whenever I'm working on the PC (I keep it at about 23C).
 
I noted that you were in the sub-continent so I tailored the answer to be specific to you.
If your ambient temp is fairly consistant (ac @ 23C) then an air cooler is probably going to suffice unless you plan on either a 4+GHz OC - which won't help gaming performance to any great extent (if at all), or you like the idea of putting together a liquid cooled system just for it's own sake.
A couple of things to take into account with liquid cooling are that the system should have its coolant changed once a year (good brand coolant) with the loop flushed to keep it free of deposit buildup and that the CPU block should be dissassembled (ideally) and the micro pin (or fin) array cleared of any buildup and the possibility of needing a fresh O-ring installed. So a little more intensive than air cooler maintenance of 1.clean fan and 2.blow compressed air through the cooler fins.
Liquid cooling is fun and aesthetically pleasing but I wouldn't say it's cost effective.
 
o_O, we're going into liquid cooling :D

I was seriously considering liquid cooling about 3-4 years ago, and after some serious thought, I decided that its not worth it.

No, its not the risks, but the high maintenance that they require. Like dividebyzero mentioned, you need to change the coolant every once in awhile, flush the loop, and maybe even disassemble the block, all of which is much tougher than the cleaning anyone needs to do with an aircooling setup.

Not to mention that the radiators DO need the same cleaning as well.

Temperature wise, its not much better, unless you splurge on the better setups.

And every time you disconnect/reconnect something in the loop, you'd need to go through a test run and check for leaks. Recommended you do this for 24 hours unconnected to your comp.



However, I'm willing to put good money and say that most people who have watercooling setups do not ever do any of the maintenance involved, until some major blockage bring their temps up (or creates a mysterious, misty environment in the case due to steam)....
 
Thanks for all the insight guys. Sorry for the late reply but I've been a little busy with some work.

Presently I'm using the OCZ Vendetta 2 CPU cooler. I keep it as clean as possible but I can't find any place where compressed air cans are available. Any alternative ways to clean the fins?
 
@RitWik7
This sounds a little funny.... But...

Compressed air - Available from car tyres (its under pressure). Your local garage have compressed air? Might be worth asking them if you could borrow the air line for a minute... Also, the compressed air used to blow up car tyres at petrol stations.

Probably cheaper using the tyre inflation pump at your local petrol station... lol.
 
Problem with pumped air is the possibility of static being generated by the pump. This isn't a problem with canned air.

Personally, I believe static issues are overblown. Some precautions are necessary of course, but in a home, static is rarely an issue. Unless you love the feel of your carpet rubbing against your leg while you work on your comp.....
 
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