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7990 or 2 r290x's


camaro_dude15

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i was ready to hit the buy it now button on a 7990 and the thought came accross my mind, maybe 290x's or two would be better points wise what do you think would be best

 

I'm even toying with the idea of two 7990's

 

and yes i'm going to try to build a steam roller

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Assuming you want to actually USE the machine and not just benchmark/fold it I think the obvious choice becomes the 290X route.  I could try to explain why but it's easier and much more in depth to just go read this page of a 295x2 review.

 

So far I'm not as happy as I had hoped with my 290x (and I'm certainly not the only one) but it's a very strong card and as long as you get a good cooling solution it (and please note some of the brands like ASUS missed the mark badly with their "custom" solutions that the pulled from other cards that don't work as well for the 290x) they aren't the throttling 90c+ beast that everyone complains about.  They STILL dump an insane amount of heat but as long as you can get it away from the card the ~300w isn't that big of a deal. 

 

Putting two 7990s together seems like the worst of everything once you start talking about scaling of all 4 GPUs combined with the frame pacing issues.  Sure it would likely beat out two 290x cards in CF for benchmarks, but you could always add more 290s :)

Edited by cchalogamer

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i would be worried if you only are going to upgrade the gpu's if you keep that FX processor, the cards will get bottlenecked for sure.

I don't think GPU folding needs all that strong of a CPU.

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i would be worried if you only are going to upgrade the gpu's if you keep that FX processor, the cards will get bottlenecked for sure.

I don't think GPU folding needs all that strong of a CPU.

 

 

Isn't it the same principal then?

 

I mean, how  different does folding work compared to, let's say, gaming?

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I mean, how  different does folding work compared to, let's say, gaming?

Completely...

 

Running F@H is a completely different animal as Waco pointed out. My daily rig when I am not working on it puts out about 175K a day with a Core I7 920 and a reference 290X. Depending on the driver used for the GPU you may or may not see an increase in PPD. The 14.4 seem to be more aware of multitasking and slows down the GPU folding when you are working on the computer so you do not see the slowdowns previously seen. The 13.12 I was running did not do this as bad but I'll be fine at 175K a day until I add a card. 

 

Just make sure that if you get a non reference cooled card you have enough chassis airflow to keep from heating up the rest of the parts and in turn negating the effects of the cooling solution.

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Have you ever folded before with a gpu? On my machine my cpu barley sees any usage at all.

 

What he said, granted my 7770 is not going to bottelenck my CPU but as far as %CPU load when folding the GPU, it's minimal

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