hey I am planning on getting a new system that i wil use for gaming and a bit of 3d drawing on a dell 2408 screen. I wil go to the core i7, 6gb of ram and sli grafics. I have windows vista ultimate 64 bit. A: core i7 920 3x nvidia gtx 285 1x nvidia 9800gt (as a fhys x card) Asus P6T6 WS Revolution OCZ Gold 6 GB, PC3-12800, 1600 MHz, 8, Non-ECC, Kit Of 3 B: core i7 940 2x nvidia gtx 295 Asus Rampage II Extreme Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D 6 GB, PC3-12800, 1600 MHz, 8, Non-ECC, Kit Of 3 C: core i7 940 2x nvidia gtx 295 1x nvidia 9800gt (as a fhys x card) Asus P6T Deluxe OCZ Gold 6 GB, PC3-12800, 1600 MHz, 8, Non-ECC, Kit Of 3 witch one should i take? ,rambo
Is the GTX285 a dual GPU card? If so, you can't have 3 of them, I wouldnt see the point in having a dedicated PhysX card either. That's all I can say as that's all I know really.
I have to say, I wouldn't at all do a GTX 285/295 setup. I know the raw graphics horsepower is there, but the entirety of both the launch and execution is a replay of the 9800 GX2. The biggest thing to be concerned about is that it's a soft launch - it's very likely that only a few thousand of these cards will ever make it into retail channels, and in a year, a year and a half, the driver support simply may not exist for it anymore, as it currently doesn't with the GX2. If you're intent on getting the maximum graphics horsepower available to you outside of that, get three overclocked GTX 280s (BFG's highest-clocked version, if it's available to you). nVidia's driver support for Tri-SLI, unlike Quad SLI, has rarely if ever faltered. If you really want to get a separate PhysX card, most tests with GTX 280 Tri-SLI have shown a 9600 GT to be very well matched for the task. That being said, a GTX 280 Tri-SLI setup will have headroom left in every PhysX-capable game today for some extra PhysX processing work, so if you aren't really that into GRAW or Mirror's Edge, save yourself the money and don't bother with an extra card. As for the motherboard. The major difference between X58 motherboards once you get beyond two graphics cards is how much bandwidth they allocate per PCI-Ex16 slot. All have x16/x16 for two cards, but once you get to three, some are x16/x8/x8, some are x16/x16/x8, and x16/x16/x16 setups are currently limited to the P6T6 WS Rev and the Rampage II. The difference between the high and low end of those choices is 10% or usually less. Beyond that (x16/x16/x4 or less), Tri-SLI is a bad idea if you can get it at all. So if bleeding-edge performance is what you're looking for, go with the P6T6, but it's probably a better idea to go with an x16/x16/x8 board if you can (the third card in a Tri-SLI setup doesn't get used very often anyway). If you don't plan on getting a sound card (since the expansion slot layout wouldn't allow for it with three air-cooled GTX 280s), EVGA's board would work quite well. So if I were you... CPU: Core i7 920 GPU: 3x BFG GTX 280 MB: EVGA X58 RAM: OCZ Platinum 3x2GB DDR3-1600 CAS 7 (one guy on Newegg managed to get his to DDR3-1800 CAS7 at 1.6 volts stable!) - Diosjenin -
