Hi, Long time lurker first time poster, and hopefully to be first time build logger soon too. Presently running 3x Asus GTX 470 in Triple SLi on a Rampage III Extreme MB with an I7 950 plus 12GB ram running 3x 24" monitors in portrait @ 3299x1920 in NV Surround, all water cooled. I'm entertaining the idea of adding a GTX 460 or 465 as a 4th card, mainly for PhysX, anyone got any experience or opinion for or against this addition ? The main use of the PC is gaming, which hopefully is obvious. Any input gratefully appreciated ! Uerseya
I gather it adds nothing if we're talking about a GTX 470 Triple SLI system which is more than capable! Also pictures please!
This is modding, nothing is to extreme, put another 470 and if it does nothing, so what, it'll look cool though.
Think of the poor children who have no high end GTX400 card? Donate a graphics card this christmas. Haha
Dedicated PhysX cards when you have a decent Nvidia-based setup already are a complete waste of time, especially of the calibre of a GTX460 - an 8600GT would be enough!
Ive actually got a 3rd identical GTX 460, thats going in as a Phys X card purely for the hell of it....lol All under water of course
Talking of my sanity, or lack of it, I've got 3 8800 GTX's with DD water blocks, going to be using them in a little TRI SLI build/ mod, back up rig.
Chuckle .... because at the resolution of 3299x1920 even 3x GTX470 in Tri-SLi struggle with some games, i.e. Crysis 2, Rage, Bulletstorm, etc. Most older games Dead Space 1 & 2, Prototype, Bioshock 1 & 2, Borderlands, etc. the PC just goes nom nom nom nom and spits out decent frame rates. Here's some, though it's a bit of a mess, function over form and it needs a good clean, but I'm rebuilding another WC'd PC at the mo' plus we've just moved houses hence the Snoopy wall paper from the previous owner, tho' that's growing on me so between that and sorting stuff for the missus and our 2 mod-kittens I'm surprised I have any time but hopefully these satisfy for now : True on both counts but 470's are still costly, ~£200 at least for a 4th Asus one so they'd all play nicely together, tho' the AquagraFX water block is the same for the 465 and 470 so <scratches chin> ? you may be onto something. No ..... just no I guess your right, I've bought a Gigabit Ethernet card that supports Jumbo frames to try and remove the option of having a 4th Graphics Card so as to remove the temptation that nags at me knowing there's a 4th PCIe slot begging to be filled, but the network card is PCI so there's still room for a 4th card. The daft thing is the Intel ethernet controller on the MB doesn't support jumbo frames to work with my other PC and my 2x NAS's. But that 4th empty slot is still nagging at the back of my head, I wish I'd gone quad-SLi with 4x GTX480's when I built the PC but they were almost twice the cost of the 470's at the time, so reading all the reviews and comparisons I could find it seemed 3x 470's would be adequate, but some games still bring the system to it's knee's i.e. Rage, with the HD config' from the Steam forum I can't go above 4x AA. Hell even Crysis with all the patches and tweaks running at the highest possible settings can bring the system to it's knees if you try playing it at 3299x1920 So I'll probably go quad-SLi with my next build once Ivy Bridge, Maho Bay and Panther Point come out as I'd like to move to 27" 3D capable monitors as well so quad-SLi will be a minimum I guess, so depends what NVIDIA has out at the time, with what is available now I'm thinking 2x GTX 590's plus a GTX 470 helper card left over from this build or GTX570/580 money allowing, or 5x GTX 580's if I happen to win the lottery or rob a couple of banks
The only thing is, of all the game titles you mentioned, not one has PhysX features. This is the crux of the problem - PhysX isn't really used by anyone, except occasionally when Nvidia lobbies the developer to do so. Also, simply adding a fourth GTX470 often doesn't work out well due to the myriad issues with 4-way SLI and 4-way Crossfire (which is why most people ran a 5970 + a 5850 or 5870 instead of two 5970s, because it often gave the same or better FPS, with less compatibility issues).
True, re: PhysX games, though I have a few unplayed as yet to play, i.e. Batman AA+AC, and a few more on this list, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#PhysX_in_video_games, tho' Bulletstorm does use it. I'll have to ignore the nagging thought and put the outlay toward the 'new' build once I've finished planning and order some extra time from eBay
580s are welcome As everyone's said, a rig like that has much more than sufficient power to ever warrant the need for PhysX. The reason it's lagging on some games might be to do with a GPU Memory bottleneck though. Most 2560x1600+ resolutions warrants 2GBs at the least, especially when gaming.
Are you sure there's room for another card in there? Or is it a tardis special case? Wouldn't it clash with the PSU, or atleast the WC block/pipe would wouldn't it?
The GPU cooling could always be changed (upgraded?) to parallel instead of serial if the 4th card is too close to the PSU. That way both inlet and outlet can be on the top card.
Well I think I've decide a 4th card in this situation would be as useful as extra pair of buttocks, so gonna put the money, ~£200, toward the build I'm planning, hopefully it will cover all the material costs. I assume by ~2GBs memory you mean graphics memory ? as the rig has 12GBs and the cards are toting 1.75GB each IIRC ? Possibly tho' I've experimented, not extensively, with different NVIDIA drivers as the problem can be evident with all the drivers release since around the middle of last year when I built the PC. It would fit, I've got a Koolance connector that would fit on top of the outlet of the 4th card between that and the 3rd card, this one http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/product_info.php?product_id=648, or .... Re: Parallel, I never understood/liked that as it seems counter intuitive to have the flow colliding with itself to an extent, tho' I tried both serial and parallel when building it and didn't notice significant differences, but I like to run the PC a bit warm as the rooms I end up calling my 'man cave' are invariably cold so the PC saves on the heating the place I'm living now has single glazed windows and a preservation order on the front of the building so double glazings' a tricky and expensive option. So it works out fine until the missus twigs it's nice and warm in my cave and brings the laundery down to dry ....... aaarrggghhhh no peace