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geekl33tgamer wrote:

Typically, 3 x R9 280X's were some 91% faster than a GTX 780, but they cost only £130 more, and cheaper than most slightly faster GTX 780Ti's. I'm warming to Intel, sure, but that graphics performance for the price is difficult to overlook. A pair of standard R9's is slightly slower overall, while a pair of R9 290X's is a fair bit faster, but also costs an additional £170.

You will find a heck of a lot more games that scale properly using a two card setup than a 3 card setup (personally I prefer one big card myself as it offers a more consistent performance across the board).

280X also lacks the GCN 1.1 XDMA engine for large data cross transfers. AMD did push out the driver that allowed for GCN 1.0 to manage resolutions larger than 4m pixels while doing frame metering, but I don't think anyone has tested how effective it is using something other than just FPS.

GCN 1.1 cards or SLI would be a better choice if you must/absolutely want to go multi-GPU. Otherwise one bigger card seems the wiser purchase.

What a third or fourth card gains in raw FPS you lose in frame-time inconsistency; and when it comes down to it, more CPU speed helps when you're actually playing a game, not when you're reviewing statistics.

My 2500k runs at 4.5GHz; I've thought about upgrading it recently.

Deanjo wrote:

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Typically, 3 x R9 280X's were some 91% faster than a GTX 780, but they cost only £130 more, and cheaper than most slightly faster GTX 780Ti's. I'm warming to Intel, sure, but that graphics performance for the price is difficult to overlook. A pair of standard R9's is slightly slower overall, while a pair of R9 290X's is a fair bit faster, but also costs an additional £170.

You will find a heck of a lot more games that scale properly using a two card setup than a 3 card setup (personally I prefer one big card myself as it offers a more consistent performance across the board).

I agree with this. I wouldn't trust synthetic benchmarks like 3dmark show real world multi-card scaling as those benchmarks are obvious targets for driver teams to make Crossfire and SLI profiles for. What happens when game X comes out that you've been really looking forward to and there is no Crossfire or SLI support for it? How happy would you be to have 2 idle graphics cards sitting in your rig while struggling to play with low fps on your 3 monitor setup? Even in the link you gave the scaling past 2 cards is essentially zero in Metro: LL and Hitman on the very high setting.

As far as this stuff goes I think the "Keep It Simple Stupid" principle applies.

Of course to some people making it all work is an adventure and tinkering with all this stuff is half the fun. If that's you then great, go for it!

geekl33tgamer wrote:

£600 3ea PowerColor R9 280X TurboDUO 3GB, 3x CrossfireX

Buying three graphics cards is a bad idea.

This is less bad for the same price:
£600 2ea Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X OC 4GB
or £660 2ea MSI Radeon R9 290X Gaming Edition 4GB

geekl33tgamer wrote:

£124 Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5

Once you move away from Triple CrossfireX, you might consider a less expensive motherboard, like the £100 GA-990FXA-UD3.

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Thing is, once the res climbs to 5760 x 1080 that I will game at

Well, the OP did mention he is playing at 3x FullHD monitors. Will 2 cards be enough?

I'm driving a 4 megapixel display (2560x1600 UltraSharp 3007WFP) with a single Radeon R9-290. Two of them (or two R9-290X cards for just 10% higher cost) should be able to drive the 52% more pixels that the OP wants. Scaling is going to be better with a pair of GCN 1.1 cards than it would be with a trio of GCN 1.0 cards.

Firstly, the feedback and advice in this thread has been fantastic. Really, a huge thank you to everyone who has contributed. I've listened, read articles, blew my mind with benchmark results and made some changes as a result of what was contributed to this thread.

To summarise:
- The 3 x 280X have been replaced with 2 x 290X. The latter is newer, and comes with free RAM's!
- I replaced the 2 SSHD drives with just regular mechanical drives. They will be used in RAID 0, and SSHD seems to be a waste for that use.
- Dropping one GPU free's up budget for a better CPU cooler + extra fan for it. Should be able to OC the FX on that now.

I did look a lot into Intel i5/Mobo with dual graphics in mind. Whichever way I looked, it cost more. I'm pushing the budget already with what I have, and going to Intel now would mean I need to cut back on the GPU's even further. I'm not keen to do that, as I want my tri-screens to not struggle with games.

Any feedback further advice appreciated of course, but I must order this today. The deal prices on the CPU, Graphics (Free RAMS!) and PSU ends at midnight GMT. They go back to normal prices and that adds a significant extra cost to the build!

I'll commit to this instead:

2 x Powercolor Radeon R9 290X PCS+ OC 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with FREE AMD 8GB 2400MHz Memory Kit (Includes 16GB of RAM for free)
SuperFlower Leadex GOLD 1300W Fully Modular "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 AMD 990FX (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard
AMD Piledriver FX-8 Eight Core 8350 Black Edition 4.00GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail
LG BH16NS40 16x SATA Internal BDRW - Retail
Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD (Cheaper non-SSHD type for RAID 0)
Prolimatech Samuel 17 CPU Cooler
2 x BitFenix Spectre PWM 120mm Fan - Black
2 x Aerocool Dark Force Fan - Black - 120mm (The non-PWM BitFenix fans are OOS now)

Revised items from the original build are in Bold.

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD (Cheaper non-SSHD type for RAID 0)

What makes you believe that you need RAID0 rather than RAID1? If you need more speed than a single small hard-drive offers, I will suggest that you would do better to go to an SSD or a single larger hard-drive than you would with a RAID0 array. All other things being equal, larger hard-drives have higher performance than smaller ones. A 3.0 TB 7200 rpm hard-drive costs the same as two 1.0 TB drives at £79 or £77 while a 0.512 TB Crucial MX100 SSD is £155.

I already have a 512GB SSD in my current PC I will move to this one. The extra mechanical drives will be used to move all the media I am currently storing on a USB 2.0 external drive, into the system. I'm thinking of RAID 0 those 2 purely for the sequential read/write performance, seeing as it's going to hold mainly large video files, and act as a buffer area for ShadowPlay (or whatever AMD call theirs) from gaming sessions.

The system would be configured as such:
Crucial M550 512GB - Windows, Page file, Programs and frequently played games
RAID 0 Array - iTunes, ShadowPlay Buffer, Video Encoding (temp, scratch disk), occasional use games, Movies and Pictures
2TB Seagate Drive - Backup of the RAID 0

I can't justify the additional cost of large storage space areas to be all SSD (I would like to!). Maybe if they keep getting cheaper in the future...

Just keep in mind that with RAID-0, if either drive fails you lose *everything* on the array. Furthermore, Seagate drives have had a rather spotty track record these past few years so the odds may be against you!

If you decide to go the RAID-0 route anyway, make sure anything you care about gets backed up.

Edit:

geekl33tgamer wrote:

If it's loud at idle, that will irritate me pretty quickly. I've googled the cooler for one, the fan looks weedy - Is it only 80mm?

just brew it! wrote:

I don't recall the size of the stock fan. I can measure it for you when I get home tonight if you want...

Weedy indeed -- the stock fan is only 70mm, and if that wasn't bad enough, it is also a slim profile fan. Even *more* noise! Yay!

At least the heatsink itself looks a little nicer than the ones they were using back in the Phenom II days. But without a way to attach a larger fan to it (unless you want to do something really ghetto), it's still pretty useless unless you're deaf, or your build has serious constraints on the size of the HSF, or you're building a server you plan to shove in a closet out of earshot.

It would be really nice if AMD's CPUs were more widely available in OEM packaging (sans HSF). They could save themselves the cost of the stock cooler and the cost of shipping all those useless hunks of metal around. That ought to enable them to knock $10 off the retail price without hurting their bottom line; DIYers could put that $10 towards the purchase of a reasonable aftermarket cooling solution.

Noted, thanks a lot for taking the time to look into this for us.

Seagate drives swapped to Toshiba ones (cost exactly the same, and have same cache, spin speed and storage), and only 70mm on the AMD cooler? What even? No wonder it sounds loud - I don't feel so bad calling it weedy now, infact it deserves it.

I've added to the build a massive slab of metal in the form of a 6 heatpipe thing from Prolimatech. It looks like it will fit, as it's kind of flat and wide, rather than being insanely tall. It rises up about 60mm off the CPU socket, and spreads itself about over the VRM's to the top, and RAM's to the right. I added an extra 120mm BitFenix PWM fan to put on-top of it @ 2000rpm max. Should fare better pretty easily by the sounds of it!

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Seagate drives swapped to Toshiba ones (cost exactly the same, and have same cache, spin speed and storage),

Just keep in mind that you're still increasing your odds of data loss by going RAID-0.

geekl33tgamer wrote:

and only 70mm on the AMD cooler? What even? No wonder it sounds loud - I don't feel so bad calling it weedy now, infact it deserves it.

Yup, a 70mm fan has to work really hard to get rid of 125W of heat!

just brew it! wrote:

Just keep in mind that you're still increasing your odds of data loss by going RAID-0.

Yeah, but I'll run the risk. Found out I can use RAID 10 on the board, so it should auto-mirror the stripe array of the 2 1TB drives to the single 2TB one?
Edit: Apparently it doesn't work like that! I'll use software to copy it as originally intended.

just brew it! wrote:

Yup, a 70mm fan has to work really hard to get rid of 125W of heat!

Won't beat around the bush - That's crap! I agree AMD should offer these out as a CPU only option, and let the end user go for a vastly superior cooler of their choice.

Anyway, the deal is done - It's been ordered. Bring on build day tomorrow!

Thanks for the help everyone, got there in the end!

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Yeah, but I'll run the risk. Found out I can use RAID 10 on the board, so it should auto-mirror the stripe array of the 2 1TB drives to the single 2TB one?
Edit: Apparently it doesn't work like that! I'll use software to copy it as originally intended.

You may want to read up on the robocopy tool. It's basically an "intelligent" copy that only transfers files which are new/changed.

The OP stated he would be doing video encoding/transcoding, so there may be a use for RAID-0. Although I would say given a 512GB SSD, temp/scratch should be set to that anyways.

Here is a thing that you can do: test the RAID-0 config, then break it up and test again. Whichever configuration wins stay.

just brew it! wrote:

Yup, a 70mm fan has to work really hard to get rid of 125W of heat!

Not only is it just 70mm, but it's also quite thin, probably 15-20mm. Luckly when I bought my 8350 last year my who-knows-how-old Thermaltake 120mm heatpipe cooler fit the retention mechanism. I then used it's stock cooler to replace the even-crappier (all aluminum, AFAIK) stock heat sink on the FX-6100 it replaced.

SuperSpy wrote:

Not only is it just 70mm, but it's also quite thin, probably 15-20mm.

I didn't bother to measure the thickness, but I'd be surprised if it was even 20mm. I think it was 15mm or less.

Flying Fox wrote:

The OP stated he would be doing video encoding/transcoding, so there may be a use for RAID-0. Although I would say given a 512GB SSD, temp/scratch should be set to that anyways.

Here is a thing that you can do: test the RAID-0 config, then break it up and test again. Whichever configuration wins stay.

The SSD will be faster for seq read/write by a mile. The striped mechanicals should be good enough - Used to run RAID 0 on this before it got the SSD, and could get about 230MB/Sec read and write sequentially. plenty fast enough to store approx 12GB/Hr video files and temp storage.

An article about ShadowPlay I was reading some time ago if used with an SSD was also interesting. Because that feature stages a continuous 20min buffer to your disk when you play, it writes about 4.5-5GB per 20 minutes whether you use it or not. It suggested that from a wear perspective it could speed up the degradation process. It's not proven, but theoretically makes sense. This site's good articles show SSD's take a long time to die though, so maybe it's a non-issue. I don't know.

SuperSpy wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Yup, a 70mm fan has to work really hard to get rid of 125W of heat!

Not only is it just 70mm, but it's also quite thin, probably 15-20mm. Luckly when I bought my 8350 last year my who-knows-how-old Thermaltake 120mm heatpipe cooler fit the retention mechanism. I then used it's stock cooler to replace the even-crappier (all aluminum, AFAIK) stock heat sink on the FX-6100 it replaced.

Another FX user - How long you had the CPU and how's it working out for you? (Temps, overclock and performance) ???

just brew it! wrote:

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Yeah, but I'll run the risk. Found out I can use RAID 10 on the board, so it should auto-mirror the stripe array of the 2 1TB drives to the single 2TB one?
Edit: Apparently it doesn't work like that! I'll use software to copy it as originally intended.

You may want to read up on the robocopy tool. It's basically an "intelligent" copy that only transfers files which are new/changed.

You based in England? I think I owe you a beer...

That simple command line looks to be just the ticket. I can presumably add it to task scheduler to run every few days at say 3AM?

Longer term storage can be satisfied by a green/red drive for cheaper. For scratch, you can always get a single new cheap SSD (the Crucial MX series comes to mind) and replace it when its useful life is up. One less drive to deal with, plus the noise and other aspects. Then I think a 1000W PSU may suffice.

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Another FX user - How long you had the CPU and how's it working out for you? (Temps, overclock and performance) ???

Yeah sorry for not piping up earlier. I've had this CPU since April 2013 IIRC.

Overclocking has been pretty disappointing, only being able to boost it to 4.2 without really laying into the voltage. Anything past that, and it will either fail prime95, or randomly crash every few days.

Temps right now (Remote Desktop FTW) are 43c idle in a 24c room, and between 56-62c with prime95 running on all 8 threads. Keep in mind this is with a beefy 120mm cooler in a well ventilated case.

Performance is hard to gauge in my case, I'm an avid Eve-Online player, and a heavy multitasker, so my workloads tend to prefer more cores over faster cores (which is why I ended up with a FX-8xxx over Intel anyway). I get slow-downs in games from time to time, but with my HD6950, performance is acceptable at 1080p playing most of the stuff I can throw at it. I don't tend to play recent FPS games so that could be as low as 30 fps and I probably wouldn't notice. When I'm not playing several Eve accounts, I tend to play Company of Heroes (1 & 2) and I only notice when there's a ton of action going on (explosions) that the frame rate dips.

Sucks about the low overclock - I've seen you typically need about 4.5Ghz to get to within touching distance of i7's under threaded workloads. Your temps are not to bad, but I have to use a smaller cooler because of case clearance probs if I get a tower style one. The case has fantastic ventilation though, but as we all know mileage varies. Some review sites said this board's power phases droop under heavy load too and the CPU powers off. Seems to happen when it uses more than about 23A power draw (yikes).

As far as performance goes, I'm not too fussed as long as it don't feel slow to me when I'm using it. My current PC gets very noticeable slowdown in multiplayer games, and FPS in BF4 dips well below 20 frequently as it's trying it's hardest to keep up (I also suspect it's massively starved of memory bandwidth, given how the FSB works on the Core 2's).

Lets see how mine fares then, as my C2Q is now destined to become my living room casual gamer as...

...some toys arrived this morning.



Let the building commence, once I've had a coffee...

It's built!!! Pictures taken along the way, so will put them online in a bit.

It's sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much faster than my older PC.

Did we fail to talk you out of the 3x Radeon R9-280X setup?

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Did we fail to talk you out of the 3x Radeon R9-280X setup?

See above.

geekl33tgamer wrote:

To summarise:
- The 3 x 280X have been replaced with 2 x 290X. The latter is newer, and comes with free RAM's!

I was looking at the OP's shiny new signature.

glg's sig wrote:

The Piledriver Beast - AMD FX-8350 | Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 | 16GB Elite Group DDR3 1600 | Tri-Crossfire R9 280X | Crucial 512GB M550 SSD

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Did we fail to talk you out of the 3x Radeon R9-280X setup?

I ordered 2 290X's with free RAM's to offset their higher cost. Glad Overclockers called about the order before it was shipped, as apparently the ordered cards were triple slot wide and they were checking they would fit. A quick check of the board's slot layout's spell bad news. The 2nd PCI-E 16x slot only has 1 slot between it and the other 16x slot above, so the first card will cover up that. There's an 8x slot 2nd from bottom of the board I would have shoved it into, but then the top of the card is pressed right up against the bottom of my case. Advice heeded and the cards were switched back to the 280X's.

They offered to waiver shipping too, which was nice and offered a further £15 off each 280X for buying 3 of them. Despite having to re-add RAM's to the order again (as these cards didn't include free ones), it come in overall just shy of £100 cheaper than the 290X build as ordered. I took the refund, and can use it to pay the electricity bill!

Jokes aside, it's not the ideal system I wanted, but by the time I paid a bit more for either a different mobo, new case, or slimmer 290X's (then having to still but RAM's anyway), it made it go over budget even further and wasn't going to happen. If things don't work out with it, I can always look at changing some bits of the GPU area later, at around Xmas time if need be.

Overclockers had half a dozen different two-slot Radeon R9-290X cards in stock. Otherwise, the less expensive motherboard that I linked had the PCIEx16 slots spaced appropriately for the triple-slot graphics cards that you selected. It's your money to spend, of course. You're not obligated to pay heed to the recommendations of the community. I will suggest that when you get the urge to upgrade from the Radeon R9-280X / HD7970 cards that you purchased, you should wait at least until 20nm GPUs are available.


Since you switched from 4 ea 4 GiB DIMMs to a pair of 8 GiB DIMMs for your memory, you should have an easier time overclocking.

Ty. I looked at the other cards, but I could only fit the £350 PowerColor one into my budget as it come with £70's worth of RAM's for free (So I obv took the RAM's I ordered off, and it offset the higher cost). The £330 290X's run to £660 + I need to buy RAM (about £120-130 for 16GB). It was way to over budget sadly, I also looked at a more expensive board (but was out of stock) or a new case, but again - budget limited that.

I settled for the 280X's that they eventually offered up for just £185 each + free shipping. The RAM's were £100 and it come in a fair but cheaper than the pair of 290X's I had paid for, so I was due a refund.

I really tried to justify fitting them in somehow, someway, or spending extra but can't do that currently.

I like how this performs tho, and really - BIG thanks to everyone who contributed. I've learn a lot more these past 2 days about PC hardware as a result. It is very much appreciated, even if my order couldn't actually fit. I'll see what new toys arrive in the new year GPU wise and look at it accordingly. It's a nice base system otherwise tho - Dam it's speedy compared to my older PC!

I've finally got USB3 too. Yay!!!

Edit: Will have a crack at the overclock tonight. With the cooler I have and the graphics running full temp (the heat rises to the CPU a bit), the CPU's load temp stock is between 42-45C. It idles in the low 20's. What temp should I stop at???

JustAnEngineer wrote:

I will suggest that when you get the urge to upgrade from the Radeon R9-280X / HD7970 cards that you purchased, you should wait at least until 20nm GPUs are available.

I agree, but I don't see that as even being a temptation anytime soon. I got two 6970s in crossfire when they first came out, and the 970 is the first card that is even close to tempting because prior to their release, I'm spending ~$700 to get a decent performance increase over the 6970s. I imagine the 7970/280x will be even moreso.

I'd like to upgrade just for cooling purposes though; two 6970s at full tilt with an OC 2600k in an 8'x10' room is challenging to keep a comfortable temperature.

Sounds like l33t did his research and has a very nice system that should last him a few years at the least.

Wondered why in the world triple 280x crossfire with an AMD processor, until he said he's gaming at 5760x1080. He's right that at those resolutions the cpu doesn't matter that much.