Legit Reviews

Personally thinking....I don't think dual video cards are going to be a long term solution, it may be available, but I believe people are going to pass on buying two video cards for a system, especially two $400-600 video cards that are basically "old" technolgy six months down the road.
We all know that the cutting edge techies will do whatever they need to to remain "cutting edge" or have the best systems, but I think that accounts for less than 5 of the people who buy or build systems..

capper5016 wrote:We all know that the cutting edge techies will do whateverthey need to to remain "cutting edge" or have the best systems, but I think that accounts for less than 5 of the people who buy or build systems..

Some peeps have too much $ and free time on their hands

I think the real issue is that companies are pushing it as a huge performance boost, hoping that buyers will look at the here and now instead of six months down the road whena better solution will arrive. Granted, that will always be the case, but sewriously, how many people will flop down $1000-1200 for a dual card solution, then want to spend another $600-800 for a top of the line FX or EE, then the rest of a system? to be the performance doesn't justify the price. I'd much rather just get an FX-55, good 939 board, some Corsair XMS or kingston memory, a good monitor and a couplr monster HDD.
build a good "balanced" system, one that can be tweaked and upgraded as needed.
I persoanlly don't have to be first to have something, I'd rather wait for the technology to mature a bit, improve, and become worthwhile.

Only thing your going to do by waiting for the dust to settle is save your self some hard earned cash and patience, especially when it could end up being another dead end for a dual grfx card setup.

As an update (I know you all care so much ) I built my rig with hardly any issues at all. I was sweating it waiting for the components because after my order I read that the AV8 boards that have the pre 1.5 bios did not work with the Winchester CPU's. Also, the Antec power supplies sometimes had a conflict with the boards as well, especially the older ones. I ended up lucking out on both fronts and everything seems stable. I'm going to give it a week or so and then maybe overclock a tad for some gaming goodness.

ABIT AV8 3rd eye
Athlon 64 3500+ Winchester
Zalman CNPS700B-CU
Antec NeoPower 480W
Corsair XMS3200XLPRO 2x512
Sapphire ATI X800 Pro
Maxtor Diamond Max 10 (2x200) w/16MB buffer
NEC-3500A DVD/CD-RW Dual layer
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum

Congrats man, that's a super rig you got going there.................

yeah man winchester == 2.5ghz easy with decent air cooling, dont know if the zalman will be up to it but i bet you can get in that range no prob.

I ran Half-Life 2 @ 1200 x 1600 with full AA, etc and the hottest it got was 50 (if the uguru display is to be believed). There's a lot of specualtion on how accurate the temp measures are. At least mine seem to be consistent, even after I flashed to BIOS 1.7. I forgot to mention I am using a Lian Li PC-60 case which has very good cooling properties. I really like the case although I wish the front USB ports were at the top and not the bottom.

If I were you I'd look into the Thermalright XP-90/120, very good air cooling solutions. I just bought a CNPS7700-Cu, and to be honest am not really that impressed with it

The xp-90 with a good fan is awsome, i have been using it with 92x38 mm vantec tornado, running at only 1800rpm and it sits happy at ~ 47.

Yeah, when it comes to quality heat sinks, IMO it is really hard to beat thermalright, they are the standard.

Thanks, guys. I'll keep it in mind if the Zalman doesn't work out. Is there no fan on the Thermalright? From the pic on Newegg it looks like a heatsink radiator type? If it does a good job of cooling it would be preferable as there would be less power consumption and less wires - and we could all do with less wires!

you'd need to buy a seperate fan, I'd recommend a Panaflo fan, grear performance to noise ratio. the thermalright HS uses heatpipe technology, it is a much better solution than the Zalman, which isn't bad itself

The zalman's a good heatsinks for grandma's and grandpa's, they are quiet and do a better job than any stock heatsink from AMD or Intel. the real problem with them is that they are not designed for extreme overclocking. And when i say extreme, i mean pushing your chip as far as you can go. There are overclockers out there who only bump their systems up a notch or two ( thank god i dont know any) and for them the zalman is just fine, but if you want to get the most out of your chip and your money then i would look at the thermalright. Like i said i got a $150 chip, 3200+ 90nm, and an XP-90 with fan for ~ $60. so for ~ $200 im now running my friends system in the $600 (4000+ 2.4ghz) to $900 (FX-55 2.6) range. thats a min of $400 of saving just by using a thermalright heatsink.

infinitevalence wrote:There are overclockers out there who only bump their systems up a notch or two ( thank god i dont know any) and for them the zalman is just fine, but if you want to get the most out of your chip and your money then i would look at the thermalright.

So what's wrong with overclocking "a notch or two"? Not everyone has the need to be Mr. Extreme Overclock Guy. My system seems to run the newest games etc. just fine at "factory" speed. I may bump it up a little to get a little extra performance. I'm not sure I see the need to wind it out when I'm really not benefitting from it. Besides, you might save a little $ now by buying a slower processor and OC'ing it but if it prematurely craps out on you and you have to buy another, what's it saving? I'd rather have the stability, especially when video editing where I may lose work. Just my thoughts.

Nothing is wrong with overclocking "a notch or two"............ That's the way my systems run unless I'm doing some benches or testing..............

Your Swartz is weak. To hell with your warranties, push the chips till the bleed electrons!