GTX 580 or 470 sli for 3d vision

[Battery]

I'm trying to decide between an Asus GTX 580 or two MSI Twin Frozr II GTX 470's in sli for 3d vision.
Now my system is.. different. It's based around the Tyan s4985 Thunder n4250qe mother board and houses four Opteron 8356 quadcore cpus, each clocked at 2.3ghz.

So which do you think would be better for 3d vision at 19x12, and (assuming only one cpu to be used) is 2.3ghz going to bottleneck the 470's?

Thanks in advance!!

[rjbarker]

OC the CPU....sell the single 470 and get 2x 580's (SLi) ;)

Seriously...SLi 470's will provide far better performance than a single 580......BUT (in the future) SLi 580's will kick some serious _ss !! Given the lower temps, lower power consumption, higher performance...the 580's are worth the upgrade.....

NV has a real winner here......yes you can wait n see what ATI has to counter, but the realtiy is, the ATI Card, if it is a better card than the 580 (temps, Power, Xfire Scalability, performance, noise) than it will likely be priced higher and likely a dual GPU Card (good luck with the Drivers).

[vohiep84]

I think your processor will bottleneck both the 580 and 470 in SLI.

Anyone else for input?

[rjbarker]

He's definitely got to OC it a tad....3.8 Ghz would be good....

[Battery]

With a bios flash and some luck I can push the cpu's to at least 2.5, I can't actually oc the cpu's, but I can use an ancient version of ntune to increase the HyperTransport clock of the mobo (see this), which raises the core clock and memory clock. I can't do any voltage bumps either.
To clarify, I haven't bought any video cards yet and this system has four quadcore processors.

[_dangtx_]

im thinking single card, wait till amd replies, at least for some better pricing.


even at 2.5 the cpu will keep you back, although at that resolution it won't matter much.

happy to see them ...folding? :)

[rjbarker]

^^^ Thats right Dan....the OP's got to ge that CPU to at least 3.2 Ghz....or it will be holding back his GPU's.

[Delavan]

So that system with 4 Opterons uses only 1 CPU for games at all?

[Battery]

Originally Posted by Delavan

So that system with 4 Opterons uses only 1 CPU for games at all?

It's still a work in progress.. this weekend I'll be moving it from the table it was sprawled over into the haf 932 I just got.
It all depends on how threaded the game is. If it only makes 4 threads then it'll probably only use one cpu, if it can create more than 4 threads then it'll utilize more cpu's and I won't have to worry about a bottleneck.
I was trying to figure out if the dual 470s would bottleneck in a situation where the game only created a max of 4 threads, in which case only one processor would be used.
Then again, most of what I've said is based on assumptions and what I've read online. This is my first multi processor system and may be my first multi graphics card system.

All I was is concise evidence saying 'no, your system won't bottleneck' or 'yes, your system will bottleneck this badly'.

Also, Would folding benefit more from two 470s or one 580?