Hardware R600: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT

It's pretty disappointing to me too because I really did want to go back to the red side, but...I just can't justify spending $430 when I can get a GTS 320 for $299 and not really see any difference in performance at my resolution.

 

essentially, if you have a psu rated at 620 watts and 85% eff (corsair hx620 maybe?)...it would failt to power that crossfire rig under load...wow...

why spend $299 on a 320 mb when a 640 only costs $30 more?

 

That test set up is great compared to the High Speed Tech Station or whatever it was, almost makes me want to go and make one for the p3 rig that's begging me for a home.

 

yeah, and that should be awhile right? a shame for sure though. was hopin it would smoke the gts, so they'd drop the price further for my birthday (may 28th)...o well...

 

You're right. I was just checking the prices at newegg and the 640 I was looking at was $60 more and had a $30 rebate.

 

Company of Heroes/Supreme Commander and Oblivion please

 

That's a **** PSU then.

 

**cough.....Thermaltake.....cough**

 

This do the job? Tagan Dual-Engine 650W PSU

 

I wouldn't recommend anything less than a good 750W unit in CrossFire.

 

Even for the 8800? bugger, thats about all i was wanting to pay.

 

single card will be fine on a 650W unit.

 

but not sli? ahh nuts i can just see this upgrade going up.

Just out of interest how much overhead should you allow on a PSU, for example your test rig was drawing 522w at load with the cf 2900xt would a 200w over head be enough so a good 750 or would you go higher? Excuse the questions i've not actually bout a PSU in several years.

 

These power requirements are getting out of hand, CPU wattage plummets, whilst GPU has skyrocketed. My credit card would weep at the very sight of a pair of these.

I can just see it now "1kW PSU Required" = there goes the mortgage payment. That's it, I've decided, back to wiki.. *cough* I mean a real, book form encyclopedia, typewriter and candlelight...

 

Tim do you think driver maturity will show a significant increase in performance to raise it above GTS levels?

 

Anti-aliasing performance may increase when ATI starts to tweak the ring bus a bit, but I believe what you see in these games is what you're going to get (with AA disabled). Therefore, I think the massive performance improvements are going to come if games are developed to make the best use of ATI's architecture. If they're not, then you'll see the GTS outperform it (take Supreme Commander as a good example of this).

 

Since it's also a lot more flexible then previous iterations performance should increase as they improve the hit/miss ratio with memory management updates.

 

Ehrm...my system is happily running with 500W... Seasonic f t w.
Or did you mean a R600 single card?

 

Of course, but it's not going to improve performance in games that aren't written to take advantage of all five stream processors in each shader unit.

 

I thought DX10 handled that side of things?