Oh grand high lord of the circuit board, master of the electron, poobah most supreme of the NAND... hear my plea's.... 1. Windows 7 vs. Windows 8 - What's the verdict at this point? Has it been unshitified enough to warrent the upgrade? What kinds of things have been breaking as a result of it? 2. SLI or not to SLI? I've got an EVGA GTX 660 and I could proly get another for about $150. Am I really going to see enough of a performance boost out of it to warrent that step or am I better off contemplating a new gen card when I finally decide my FPS is too low? Your humble supplicant, -KM
lol People are divided on Windows 8, mainly because of the UI and how you get around the OS. I still cant stand it, but many people I know are used to it and dont mind anymore. It does provide a couple % better performance in many things, and it has the DirectX 11.2 upgrade which Windows 7 wont get. It doesn't matter at this point, but in 4-5 years a game might use features from that version of DirectX that you will need it. if DirectX is still around then. Windows 8.1 brings many of the features back that people complained about most, and it is a free upgrade to Windows 8 users. So at this point it probably doesnt matter which you go with, as long as it is Windows 8.1 vs Windows 7. I probably wont upgrade at all because Windows 7 is perfectly fine for me. If you have to buy Windows 8, but don't have to buy 7, then just stick with what you have. SLI is tricky. A lot has been worked out, but you still have to wait for the best compatible drivers for SLI to function properly. Dual 660's would probably work out very well in most games and give you some nice FPS. After having used SLI (I am currently running dual 670's) I will probably not do it again in the future. At this point it is only 6 months out till Nvidia's new cards, and the performance of the low end from that gen will probably be just as good as running dual 660's anyway. Probably best to wait IMO.
If you're a competent user, especially one that used windowskey/kb shortcuts/Start menu searchbar in W7, you basically will only see a graphical difference in using Win8. And some improvements to that style. It's also faster, in booting and in general, and has lots of small improvements to the basic stuff like the task manager. It's never been shitty, just been subject to much whining from people that get confused when things are differently slightly different shapes or animations. I haven't messed with 8.1 yet, but the early word seems to be that it's improved and Oh boy! the start button has an icon again! But yeah. If you have a Win7 license but would have to buy Win8, there's not much reason to bother. If you're building something fresh, and you're not a Luddite, there's no reason not to go 8. I don't like SLi. If you've already got a card and doubling down is really cheap and something you've got to do to get playable frame rates? Sure, I guess. Doubling up will tend to give you more raw power than getting a new and similarly-tiered new single card. If you aren't playing something using new graphics features it'll give you the better frame rates. Otherwise a newer single card is more reliable, gives you updated DX compatibility and other features and is usually much more power efficient.
so the situation is that I've got 7 Ultimate now, and I have a spare 8 pro upgrade license from back when it was on adoption pricing cheap sale. The verdict I seem to be hearing is that there still isn't much of a good reason to put it on the box as of yet... -KM
I would not upgrade personally. Win7 is pretty much what XP was, a fucking solid OS at this point. In regards to sli, i've had many issues with it in different games. So not a big fan. Many new games had also many sli glitches and required you to wait for a patch or driver updates. Thats why i bought a Titan and very happy with it. But the new AMD 290x is a beast of a card and is way cheaper then a titan, so id suggest you look into it. Check out 1st numbers here http://www.overclock.net/t/1434404/pco-first-amd-r9-290x-review/0_50
Wowza, 60w more than a Titan. I hope they've just got really shitty drivers right now. Only winning one bench against Titan when it's sucking that much more power is a poor showing for AMD's engineers. I'm seeing $699 for pricing, so better deal than a Titan (but what isn't?), good improvement over a GTX780 for $50...but over 400W power draw! In any case, the 290x doesn't have much to do with anyone attempting to game on a budget. All the sane AMD cards are rebrands like nVidia's. It's either wait for AMD's release for the price-realignment it brings or wait for the new nVidia architecture next year...kinda crappy video card generation if you wanted new tech (but decent for value - the non GK110 nVidia cards are good deals, I imagine AMD's "mid" range will be too).
Lol doxy the guy who posted your link is doc he's got boxy as an avatar too. I like win 8 myself, don't like SLI tho never works as intended.
780 ti If you don't want a titan it's the card to go to IMO if you need one right now. I think it's sad that all NVIDIA has to do is gimp their top end card to compete with the top end card from AMD. With better drivers and better power management I just don't see the 290x as an option.
290X should do a lot better in high res situations. Titan and it's variants are nothing but huge horsepower 1080p cards. And it looks like if Kinetic is debating between another $150 card or to wait then he probably isnt going to be wanting to look at a $650 GPU
Yep it is. The 280X has equal memory bandwidth as a Titan, the 290X goes with a bit hgiher frequency memory and a much larger width memory bus. However the main reason for better high res performance is the titan still has low ROP's and a shit ton of memory size and TMU's. That makes it a beast at anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing, but really limits how many pixels it can push through. However if you throw on a ton of AA and AF at the 4K resolution, the 290X starts to show more strain, but there isnt really a point to running 8x or higher AA on a 4K res display anyway. You probably dont even need to run any AA at that. The 290X has high core speed, high shader speed, and a lot of ROP's that allow it to get almost good framerates at 4k resolution. It still takes 3 Titans to get good performance at that res. The Titan just wasnt built for that sort of thing, it is a workstation card through and through that Nvidia decided to push into a second market to make a bigger name. The Titan card is still a very good and high end card, and can get very respectable scores, it just wasnt really made for gaming at really high resolutions. If Nvidia took the exact same card and doubled the ROP's it would easily be the fastest card on the market by a very large margin. I am kinda hoping that "Maxwell" will bring up the ROP count to be more geared for high res displays. We have been stuck at 1080p for WAY too long.
OMG......... no thanks I dont want a new car http://www.digitalmonster.com/Samsu...efid=Google&gclid=CJm3lauAo7oCFUhk7AodvAUAFg#.
Lol. You dont need to buy a 4K monitor now, and high res also includes 2560x1440 and 2560x1600. Those screens are readily available and for not a "lot" of money. A few of us on the forums even have some. There is also a 4K TV (32") that can be had for $700, and a larger sized (52") one available for $950.
I know the prices of the 4k tvs lol. I own a 55in as of 3 days ago thanks to a friend that works for LG ( I rather have a Samsung since I like there tvs looks). I was showing the 39k price tag on that samsung thus why I said no thank you on a new car.... lol