The tyranny of AMD/ATI crossfire has ended, I've finally rebuilt my system. Newegg tried to screw me with some new free shipping that involved FedEx getting it to my local hub and then handing it off to the Postal Service to perform the final home delivery which would eat an extra whole day, but I got FedEx to just put in on their truck so I was able to get it a day earlier than estimated shipping. I guess the days of free shipping from Newegg being 2 day service for me are over! The rest of the parts came from MicroCenter and Amazon. Amazon was the only place I could find the 780's in stock and not being sold for $50-70 over MSRP. I was refreshing the Amazon page like mad last Friday since the first time I tried to order them I lost out. I had them in my cart, and by the time I logged in and confirmed payment details, they were out of stock and my order was canceled.
The old system, minus the video cards which I'll be selling, will be demoted to my OSX desktop at the house. Let's get to some details and some quick pics.
Old system:
i7 2600k running at 4.6GHz on sealed loop water cooling, 1x120mm radiator and push pull fans.
16GB (4x4) Corsair memory running around 1800MHz
2xMSI Lightning 6970 super OC cards in Crossfire
Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3 mobo (chose because it can run native OSX)
New system:
i7 4770k running at 4.2GHz (so far, have not pushed it at all yet) with sealed water cooling, 2x120mm radiators with just pull fans.
16GB (2x8) of memory running at 2400MHz (why have we not started to note memory speeds in GHz yet??)
2xEVGA GTX 780 SC cards in SLI
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H mobo (again selected because in the future it should be good to run native OSX)
Old system internal shot with side panel off.
New boxed parts ready to go.
Here's a quick comparison of the old MSI 6970's vs the new EVGA 780's. The MSI's has a large dual fan cooler on it.
Another shot of the new and old cards, this time on edge, you can see again that because of the dual fan cooler the MSI's are super long.
Finally here is a new and an old card shown from the back, you can see that most of the extra length on the 6970's is the fan shroud.
New parts all installed. Since I didn't replace the power supply running all of the cables was really fast, I only had to reroute some fan headers.
Detail shot of the 780's, that logo text is all backlit. The build quality feels pretty solid, they weight more than the 6970's even without the large fan setup they have.
And a quick shot of the system running showing the backlighting on the 780's and the Corsair water block. It's not as clear as it could be, I didn't setup a tripod to get a good low light shot. The Corsair logo is actually nice and crisp but it's pretty blurry in the pic.
I didn't have a ton of time to benchmark stuff, and I don't have the final OC on the CPU dialed in, but just loading into WoW and doing some Pandaria flight paths with water and all near, I never saw drops below 60FPS, and all the micro-stutter that the crossfire setup was showing was gone, it was buttery smooth. Some other quick tests I ran, Furmark, same settings, old setup was pulling about 70FPS, new is running closer to 115FPS on the same test.
Overall I'm really happy to be done with Crossfire. I can't fault AMD for single card setups, but I know now that their Crossfire is garbage. I don't wish it on anyone, I in fact would think twice about selling someone both of these 6970's.
-Fulbert