Free at last! Thank Jeebus Almighty, we are free at last!

[Fulbert]

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.

Old internal

New boxed parts ready to go.

New boxed parts

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.

Old and new cards laid flat.

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.

Old and new cards on edge.

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.

Old and new card shown from back.

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.

New system internal shot.

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.

New 780s detail shot.

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.

New system running with lights.

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

[Nehalim]

Oh man. That's beautiful. I'm fully on board the "ATI sucks" train, so I'm glad to welcome you back to the promise land that is Nvidia.

All the hardware looks great, and I like that you left room to expand the memory if you wanted to. The increase of .6GHz on those should be pretty noticeable too. I'm anxious to see what you get the CPU running at, then what kind of benchmarks you get. In 25m raids, benchmark programs, or some high end games. Maybe you should pick up Crysis 3 just to flex its muscles. Or hey, I bet Deus Ex: HR will run great.

Also how much sound were/are the two systems putting out?

[Fulbert]

Well I was running 4x4GB memory but with Haswell based on early info people are saying you have more room to OC if you are using only 1 chan or two sticks so I did 2x8GB this time. If I really wanted to later I guess could go to 32GB, but that seems a bit much for a gaming PC, I only really scratch 16GB doing non-gaming stuff.

As for the OC, most people are expecting that 4.2GHz should be a baseline that most CPU's should reach, and only about 10% of CPU's may hit 4.8 on air or light water cooling, we'll see. There's not a ton of information out there from retail purchased CPU's yet, a lot of reviewers got "golden samples" from Intel I am sure, so these 5.2GHz on water etc, are not likely to be the norm. With water cooling setup as of now, my idle temp seems to be about 24c, and the most I've tracked so far was 56c. There's a lot of room there, as Haswell people are saying is mostly thermally limited.

Sound wise, I keep my PC in another room, there's a cutout in the wall where I just pass video and USB, so it's not much of an issue, but I will say that overall it's rather quiet. I have it setup on my desk now, and while running in WoW I've never heard the CPU or video fans crank up. The AMD cards, when they were pushed hard, would make a little noise that was audible at ~5ft, but in general it was quiet also.

-Fulbert

[Fulbert]

Going to pickup some new games in the next few weeks and see how they all run at 2560x1600 with the new setup. I've also got some random benchmark stuff vs the old setup that I'll post in the next few days.

A few people had asked me about the old setup and exactly what issues I was having with it. Aside from the overall stability of the system under Crossfire, the in game experience was suffering. Sometimes it was microstutter, where it would look like for a split second there was a lag, sometimes there were issues with frame rate drops in random areas in game, and some other hard to describe but still visible artifacting.

I came across this video a while back and it does the best job I've seen in talking about multi-GPU setups and how various things can affect it. Mind you that this is being co-presented by a nVidia brand evangelist so you'll get some product bias in his comments, but the information is still solid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cH_ozvn0gA

-Fulbert