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l2es-captreddog
Joined: Jan 23, 2007
Posts: 335
Location: PLAYING WITH A RIGHT BUNCH OF TANKERS
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Tue Sep 20, 2011 10:50 pm |
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ive always used raid 0 , unless you have a drive failure its pretty rare to lose data , buy reliable drives and you shouldnt have a prob , but i would buy the same drives , from the same vendor if i was going raid chris , and yes running windows and games for that matter is significatly faster with two drives striped , for example using 2 drives with a spin speed of 7500 , equvalents to a 15,000 single drive , raptor drives are the fastest in scsi sata terms as mrix will tell you , but do come at a premium ! . when playing games your disk is constantly being accessed and written to , the faster you can access this data the faster the program will run , loading times on maps are also reduced and it is noticble , as mrix points out , have raid and then put an image on a single drive as back up( i also store all my files and movies etc on separate drives ) , ive only once had a faliure on Raid0 and that was when a drive failed on me |
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l2es-roguesamurai
Joined: May 12, 2007
Posts: 1591
Location: Athlone, Ireland
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Thu Oct 13, 2011 5:18 pm |
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I just read 1 of the 1st official reviews of AMD's new Bulldozer cpu's. The FX-8150 (the top of the range). It's not good.
Here's the review -
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/10/12/amd-fx-8150-review/1
Basically it loses to both the i7-2600k and even the i5-2500k. I know Reddog was planning on getting 1 of these cpu's to replace his current top end AMD cpu. From the review it seems that its single threaded performance can actually be worse than the part its replacing. Even in heavilly multi threaded software, which doesn't tend to include games, it loses out to the Intel parts. By a decent margin too in some applications.
I'm not a person to stick to any perticular brand, be it cars or cpu's, I buy the part that gives the best performance per buck. But I was hoping this new cpu would be good, and beat the Intel, as it would've been in my kind of price range and hence allowed me too get a bit more performance for my money. It also would've innevetably led to Intel reducing their prices to compete, so we all win.
Roll on Ivybridge.
Ps. sorry to be the bearer of bad news Reddog  |
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l2es-RonnieBoy
Joined: Sep 10, 2011
Posts: 6
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Fri Oct 14, 2011 1:09 pm |
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Yeah, I had been waiting eagerly for the various reviews on the 8150, and must admit I'm pretty disappointed after all the touted 30-50% improvement over current generations of chips claims.
I can understand that it's a new architecture and all, but when it loses out to the previous generation of AMD's? WTF? I can see in a year or two's times that these might be worth it, as apparently Windows 8 will make use of the new architecture better, plus there'll be programs and patches that make better use of the various instructions on the chip. But at that point it'll be competing against Ivy Bridge.
Anyways I was just waiting on official reviews of the FX 8150, before deciding what to upgrade to. So now I've ordered and half finished building a new I5 2500K based system. Just waiting on a new PSU as I bricked my last one. |
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l2es-roguesamurai
Joined: May 12, 2007
Posts: 1591
Location: Athlone, Ireland
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Sat Nov 19, 2011 3:00 pm |
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Just thought I'd update this a little bit. Intel's LGA 2011 socket cpu's have been released. Here's a review.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-3960x-3930k.html
They're not as good as expected really. Like Bulldozer, they're design has servers in mind. The quad channel memory offers no real advantage in day to day use and gaming. In fact their only advantage over a 1155 socket cpu is the fact that you can have 2 x16 lanes if using sli or crossfire. Using a single graphics card, their is no performance advantage between the Sandybridge E or the standard Sandybridge cpu's. They offer adjustments of bus speeds etc for overclocking, but in reality the heat they generate needs some very efficient cooling. Xbit 'only' managed to overclock to 4.5ghz stable. Which the current Sandybridge E will reach with ease.
IMO, unless your planning on running 2 GTX580's or similar, the huge prices for the 2 cpu's that have been released aren't justified at all. The cheapest of the 2 is nearly 500 quid!!! |
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l2es-roguesamurai
Joined: May 12, 2007
Posts: 1591
Location: Athlone, Ireland
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Thu Dec 22, 2011 11:02 pm |
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The AMD HD7970 was officially launched today. It is now the fastest single gpu card available, and the 1st card to be released using the new 28nm manufacturing process. I just read the review by Bit-Tech, and it's good. It uses a whole new architecture too. Good to see some new hardware being released that actually works well, unlike Bulldozer, and to a lesser extent the Sandybridge E cpu's. Good news for all of us as it keeps pushing the competition leading to better products at better prices. Whether you actually need the stuff is another thing, as games aren't really pushing hardware at the moment. Even BF3 wasn't as distressing as was expected. (although my system sweats like a pig).
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/12/22/amd-radeon-hd-7970-3gb-review/1
It wont be available to buy untill early january, for around £440.
I predict Captreddog reaching for his wallet in the new year, and a pair of 6970's going up for sale 
Nvidea's 700 series wont be getting released untill early next year, they will also be made using 28nm process. |
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l2es-roguesamurai
Joined: May 12, 2007
Posts: 1591
Location: Athlone, Ireland
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Sat Jan 28, 2012 2:05 am |
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l2es-roguesamurai
Joined: May 12, 2007
Posts: 1591
Location: Athlone, Ireland
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Sun Apr 29, 2012 9:14 pm |
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Intel's IvyBridge cpu's have now been released, along with their new z77 chipset motherboards.
The main advantages with Ivybridge over Sandybridge is the PCI Express 3 connections and the onboard Intel 4000 series gpu.
If used with the Z77 chipset motherboard then there are other advantages available. Native USB3 support, the Lucid Logix software, and the ability to use overclocked memory upto around 2600MHZ.
Here are a couple of articles giving more info from Bittech and Xbitlabs.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/04/23/intel-core-i7-3770k-review/1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-3770k-i5-3570k.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/intel-z77.html
I like the sound of the LucidLogix abilities that are available with the setup. Here's the jist of it coppied and pasted from Xbitlabs. -
Lucid Logix has also been doing some work to make Intel’s new platforms more attractive. The previous Z68 chipset for LGA1155 processors came along with Virtu technology that allowed using both the CPU-integrated graphics core and a discrete graphics card concurrently. This technology has progressed since then and Z77-based mainboards will support its next version called Virtu MVP. The graphics virtualization from Lucid Logix can work on older systems (and even on systems with AMD processors) but the marketing efforts will be focused on promoting Virtu MVP as a key feature of Intel’s 7 series chipsets and mainboards based on them. That’s why we’re going to discuss Virtu MVP in this review.
So, let’s see what Lucid Logix offers this time around. The point of the original Virtu technology was to provide access to the Quick Sync engine, which was part of Intel’s integrated graphics, on platforms with a discrete graphics card. Quick Sync helps transcode high-definition video at a very high speed, but the CPU-integrated graphics core is normally turned off when the system uses a discrete graphics card to output video signal to the monitor. Virtu solved this problem by allowing applications to access both the discrete and integrated graphics core without rebooting the system or reconnecting the monitor.
Virtu MVP takes the concept further. Instead of using either the integrated or the discrete graphics core depending on the specific task, both cores can now be used simultaneously. And while the CPU-integrated graphics was previously limited to multimedia tasks such as HD video decoding, Lucid Logix suggests that the different graphics cores can now be used together to achieve higher performance in games.
As a matter of fact, hybrid multi-GPU subsystems of this kind are quite a viable idea as was proved by AMD with its Dual Graphics technology implemented in systems with Llano processors. It really works and improves performance. However, a hybrid graphics subsystem is only going to be effective when the integrated and discrete graphics cores are more or less similar in computing power. Otherwise, the synchronization overhead may result in a lower frame rate compared to the single discrete solution.
Therefore Lucid Logix suggests using the resources of each core at different stages of the image rendering process. With Virtu MVP, a high-performance discrete graphics card is employed at the first and most resource-consuming stages: transformations, lighting, shader computations, primitives generation, projection transformation, rasterization, texture mapping, etc. The integrated graphics core, which has fewer resources, is only used as a frame buffer and is responsible for outputting the final image to the display.
Coupled with some undisclosed algorithms, which are Lucid Logix’s know-how, it helps implement two features that make games more responsive and improve their visual quality, at least theoretically.
•The first feature is called Virtual Vsync and it helps you get the benefits of both enabling and disabling Vsync in games. The point is that the image is delivered from the integrated graphics core’s buffer to the monitor in sync with the latter’s refresh rate. However, the discrete graphics card renders frames as fast as it can, as if Vsync is turned off. On one hand, this helps get rid of the Vsync-off artifacts like image tearing. And on the other hand, the frame rate is not limited from above, which helps minimize the game’s reaction lag which can be observed in some shooters when Vsync is turned on.
In other words, Virtual-Vsync produces the same image as with enabled Vsync but the frame rate is not fixed and can be either higher or lower than the monitor’s refresh rate.
•The other feature is HyperFormance. It helps increase the frame rate by not rendering those frames that never get to be displayed on the monitor. As far as we can make out from the rather vague explanation, HyperFormance works in two ways. First of all, the discrete graphics card does not do anything about frames that are identical to the image already being displayed on the monitor. The integrated graphics core’s frame buffer storing the image, the latter is just being output to the monitor until there are any changes in it. And second, some frames are not rendered because they would never be displayed on the monitor due to the latter’s limited refresh rate.
Combining these two tricks, HyperFormance promises a substantial increase in frame rate. Of course, this is a kind of cheat because the monitor won’t get any more frames per second to display. Moreover, the number of frames fully rendered by the graphics card doesn’t seem to increase, either. However, HyperFormance really helps make a game more responsive since it reduces the time lag between a user action like pressing a button or moving the mouse and the output of the next frame that shows the result of that action.
All the fps testing etc I've read so far are with using a sandybridge cpu as the ivybridge wasn't yet available. With the Ivybridge's better onboard gpu the performance benefit should be better as the 4000 series gpu is said to be a significant upgrade from the 3000 series. |
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