Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[Zeph]

I'll probably be getting it the middle of next month at the latest. Semester starts two weeks later than I thought >_<.

[Zeph]

Little bump.

I saw that the 590s have dropped down from a thousand bucks, and are relatively close to the 580s so I'm thinking about nabbing one if they become available. This may seem like one of the stupidest questions ever, but can you actually use more than two monitors out of it? I was under the assumption that nVidia had issues with multi-display and SLI. The 590s are two 580s in SLI on one platter aren't they? Does the multi-display issue only effect multiple PCIe SLI or something? I mean, it seems just silly that they'd put 3 DVI ports on the card if only a max of two could be used but there was nothing about it on the nVidia website.

[Warsaw]

Another question:

Since I have literally been in the woods for the last two months, anybody have any info about Bulldozer or the Radeon HD7000 series that I might have missed? I came back and saw that the FX CPUs were not released like they said they would be. I can't build a new PC until that part becomes available.

[InnerGoat]

^^ Soon™

Little bump.

I saw that the 590s have dropped down from a thousand bucks, and are relatively close to the 580s so I'm thinking about nabbing one if they become available. This may seem like one of the stupidest questions ever, but can you actually use more than two monitors out of it? I was under the assumption that nVidia had issues with multi-display and SLI. The 590s are two 580s in SLI on one platter aren't they? Does the multi-display issue only effect multiple PCIe SLI or something? I mean, it seems just silly that they'd put 3 DVI ports on the card if only a max of two could be used but there was nothing about it on the nVidia website.

Those can do multi-display just fine. Nvidia cards need to be in SLI to use more than two displays

[Amit]

Those can do multi-display just fine. Nvidia cards need to be in SLI to use more than two displays

I still find that retarded. What are you doing nVidia?

[Cortexian]

Nvidia cards need to be in SLI to use three displays in spanned mode for gaming purposes. If they're not in SLI you can use up to two monitors per card.

[Cortexian]

There's no 1155 socket motherboard that will run two PCI-E slots at full x16 speeds is there? Well this sucks... I was about to run over to Memory Express and grab an i5-2500k ad a Gigabyte P67A-UD4 along with 8GB of DDR3 memory since they've got a pretty nice sale on the UD4 right now. I'm still going to hold off for Ivy Bridge though I think, so long as my current rig lasts that long since it should be able to run two PCI-E cards at full x16 speeds.

I woke up this morning and my rig wouldn't even POST. Had to take out both GPU's and all my RAM, reseat the RAM, then reseat 1 GPU for it to POST. It barely POST'ed then (had to reboot a couple times) so I reset the motherboard back to factory settings. I think I'll leave it there for now until I can get an Ivy Bridge setup.

[Warsaw]

Damned if you upgrade now, damned if you don't. Same here. Just plugging away on the old machine.

That said, there are x16/x16 capable 1155 motherboards, but they are approaching the $350 mark.

[Cortexian]

Yeah well if I were to upgrade now I'd try and keep all three components below $400... So that's not going to happen. Would there be much of a visible performance difference running both my GTX 470's at 8x instead of 16x speeds?

This is what I was thinking of getting:
• Intel Core™ i5-2500K Processor, 3.30GHz w/ 6MB Cache
• Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3
• GSKILL Sniper Series 8GB PC3-12800 Dual Channel DDR3 Kit (2 x 4GB)

It comes out to $399.97 or $419.97 with tax. Does anyone have any suggestions that could make that better (products available on Memory Express please) while keeping the price under $420 without tax? Just so you know, I try and match my RAM to my motherboard colors. Obviously it's not the primary choice but it's something to consider, if another set of RAM will get me a tiny performance increase but it's red or something silly I probably won't go for it.

I really wish I could get my hands on a quality socket 775 board that would take DDR2 but include PCI-E 2.0 spec.

[Warsaw]

There would be little to no performance difference running your GTX 470s at x8/x8 instead of x16/x16 assuming the PCIe spec is 2.0 or 3.0 and not 1.0 or 1.1. Only the highest end cards can approach saturating the bandwidth available.