RSharpe

For $700+ and that crude cooling solution, no thanks. I'm going to see what Nvidia has to offer with the 590, but I'm not hopeful there either. I wonder if I can wait until the next generation, but the current generation really isn't all that great.

Thanks

Now that the final has been released, has anyone been able to do some benchmarks comparing the performance of the final to say, Beta 4? Thanks.

Anyone having trouble logging into the site with your account and downloading?

Haha. I love how this "coming soon" thread is 108 pages, and it still hasn't come.

That's looking pretty smooth. STock CPU and no OC at all?

Does anyone have any recommendations for a triple monitor stand for 3 24" 1920x1200 monitors? I'm finding that the regular LCD stands take up too much space, and don't give me enough elevation. Thanks.

ARMA2 might be a good game to test that's also very CPU intensive... Also, to all of you early Sandybridge adopters... Some not so great news: http://www.guru3d.com/news/sandy-bridge-chipset-design-flaw-recalls/

Yeah. I've exported one MFCD to my left and another to my right of my main monitor. IT was ok, but I found it was just as easy to use TIR and the MFCDs in the virtual cockpit... I'm not happy with this 5850 at all. There's no way I'm picking up another one to Crossfire it. I'm going to wait to see how the 6990 is or the 590. If those dual cards aren't satisfactory, I'll just pick up a couple of 6950/6970 and use the 5850 in my HTPC.

Too choppy unless you're flying high and there are no other planes or units around. To actually fly a mission, I can only use one monitor right now.

Never upgrade anything that you can remain content with. Unless you just feel like spending money. Upgrade only when you start to feel the need. Price/performance of hardware doesn't tend to increase over time.

No for you, Sandy Bridge is a mostly diagonal-grade. It might be slightly up, but it's mostly sideways... for a lot of money in replacement cost. It's a worthy upgrade from someone coming from a Core 2 Duo.

Hard OCP has a good review of Crossfired and SLI video cards across 3 screens. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/01/11/amd_69706950_cfx_nvidia_580570_sli_review As usual, everything I read always raises more question rather than getting answers. Oh well. Let's wait to see what 6990 has to offer... I think Nvidia might have the more powerful GPU, but all of their cards are simply limited by memory.

This statement can only be qualified by telling us what your old rig was.

I have a feeling that the OP had a very messed up O/S before, and the performance gains came from the new reinstall of Windows, and not so much from the SSD.

I don't doubt that the new Sandy Bridge platform will perform better than what I have right now, but for those of us with X58 i7s overclocked to 4.0GHz, I haven't seen anything to indicate that its really worth the expense, and we'd be better off waiting longer for any potential upgrades. It would be the equivalent of moving from a Geforce 480 to a 580 in graphics cards. Not worth the expense.

THe 6950 exists only as a marketing strategy to fill a price point that didn't exist. It's doesn't exist because of technological reasons. The technology is forced artificially to fit in that price point.

I read that there's only one DVI-I connector avilable for monitors, and one DVI-D that will not work with monitors. I don't quite understand why this is. Apparently you have to use even more Displayports than the 5000 series. Even though I have Displayport monitors, I HATE using that interface.

I have a 120GB SSD running the main Windows 7 OS partition as well as ARMA2 and DCS A-10C. Those are the two games that seem to benefit from fast read access speeds. The rest of my bloated user folder and my programs (including Steam) is located on a 1GB WD Cavier Black HDD. I have 6 other HDDs containing various movies, TV, music, and data. I suggest you keep as many applications installed on a separate HDD. Relocate your user folder as well since that grows out of control really fast.

Yeah. Considering most of us are sitting around with around 3/4 of our CPUs not even being utilized...

I'm curious, what's your case setup like? Many people who have two 6970s running side-by-side are reporting really high temps, up to around 90-100C.

I have Nomex flight gloves that I use for shooting, but they're oil, lead and gunpowder, so no they don't go near my computer.

As much as I want to go back to Nvdia, dual 6970s is looking more and more attractive these days. I'm just going to wait for manufacturers to come out with some cooler running designs. Nvidia is having more problems than I expected. Might this be because of the portrait mode that you're using? How are you finding the current AMD drivers for Crossfire? Also, are you watercooling your CPU?

Might want to hold off for just a few more weeks to see how the new Sandy Bridge i7s perform before jumping on the old 1366 or 1156 socket processors.

Oh excellent. I bought it for ARMA2, but it would be great to try it out for A-10 for radios.