I'm going to be running crossfired Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB soon and I have a corsair 800Watt power supply will this be sufficient or should I upgrade to 1000Watt? Other specs: ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AMD Phenon IIx6 1090T Corsair Dominator GT 6gb SSD OCZ Vertex 2 3.5" 90G Sata II 1TB Caviar Black 7200 RPM 32MB Cache
Um ya...nice job copying my build almost exactly. Glad you listen in ts lol....almost. Looks like the wrong ram. Is that tripple or double channel? If you plan on OC'ing anything then I say go 1000w+. Course im using a 1200w psu now in my comp but I have way more in it. Edit: Looked it up and yea that's tripple channel ram. You cant use that on that mobo. You need double channel.
haha lol what ever man theres only so many products out there I was gunna go ASUS extreme board but there is no point. Um I'm reading that there are dual and triple channel Dominator GT on there website however, I cant find 6GB of Dual channel probably because 6GB is triple only 8GB and 4 so guess I'm going with 8 lol. The question is do I want DDR3 1600 Timing: 9-9-9-24 or DDR3 2000 Timing: 9-10-9-27 I do plan on OC'ing my Video Cards I'm going to flash the BIOS to 6970 speeds however, I'm worried about the temp though, are after market heat sinks for GPU recommended?
Timings are more important when it comes to ram speed. But good ram timings will cost you much more. Unless you are watercooling I dont recommend aftermarket air coolers for gpu (unless Enigma knows of one I dont). That mobo has great spacing between the pci-e lanes when doing a dual card setups so cooling shouldnt be a issue as long as your case has good air flow.
I am currently using the Antec 1200 case with the extra side fan for video cards on high. I was hopping you were going to say the faster timings because they are cheaper . though already my 5850 idles at 51degrees and increasing my case fan speeds lower it maby 1 degree lol. I've just figured out how to adjust fan speed on my card so I'm currently running it at 45% at idle temp 39-41degrees
How about you dont want either of those kist with that setup unless you cant afford the better kits. This is what you want: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231401
You can't use DDR3 2000 on AM3 boards. You'd need chips tuned for AMD chipset (all others are tuned for Intel) : http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/phenom-ii-x6-ddr3-2000.html So I'd say get the DDR3 1600 Timing: 9-9-9-24. I am devising an upgrade plan if a single HD 6950 is insufficient for TERA in triple 1680*1050. That would be : AMD Phenom IIx6 1090T Asus M4A89TD PRO/USB3 G Skill 2x1 GB DDR3 1600 6-7-6-21 PSU Akasa Freedom Power 1000
Um... Yes you can use ddr3 2000 on a am3 chipset. Not many boards for amd take it but the Asus Crosshair IV Formula does: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131644 It's just amd ones cant do triple channel while intel ones can.
The six core black edition CPUs can do DDR-2000 with quite a few kits, but you have to overclock to get there. I dont think anything above 1600 is a "supported" RAM speed by divider change only. You best bet for speed is to have DDR-1600 with 6-7-6-21 timings. Like what Saffaya has. But hopefully with higher density sticks. I know it can be done pretty easy with 2GB sticks now, and if you are lucky you can do it with 4GB sticks. I posted a link in my last post to the ram kit that is probably best for you. 9-9-9 timing are not recommended unless you are starved for money and really trying to keep the price down.
Zalman isnt in the upper tier heatsink manufacturers anymore. Hasnt been for a while. Your best heatsink for the money is the Prolimatech Megahalem with a 1800rpm fan.
It is not often recommended to use an aftermarket gpu cooler because most dont adequately cool the memory and vrm's. If you want to improve heat dissipation then just clean off the card of the stock thermal paste/pads and replace it all with the proper amounts of good thermal paste. Arctic Silver MX-3 or another good one. I think there is better than MX-3 now days.
Everything you need to know is in the article I linked to. You want your 2000MHz RAM to run at that speed, not slower.
DDR-2000 with 6-7-6-19-1T timings, coupled with a 3.4GHz northbridge core, is the best performance I have ever seen on RAM. It has about 25ns total latency If you can run that, you are amazing. As to the power question, 800W can probably cut it but 1000w would be better