re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

It's that one. We'll see soon enough how shitty or good it is. If the cooler is deal-breakingly loud, the PCB is a reference design and will fit 7970 blocks.

As i patiently wait for my ssd to arrive I need a few answers.

Should I re-install windows on it?
(Dumb question) Do I need to uninstall games on my existing hard drive and re-install on the new SSD or can I simply move the files. I know I'm a rookie when it comes to the finer things of the computer life.

Bought the samsung 840 evo 250gig for $159.99. Little nervous since it was suppose to be in today and my tracking number has it not moving since yesterday in the home town.. hrmm

Clone your current hdd to the ssd.

There were a couple of 7870s on sale over the holiday. I bought one for my office rig but it's still not shipped.

Damn that is actually a nice "looking" cooler. Hopefully the thing performs well.

Would have been awesome for the cooler to be named "Ice^3"... get it? Ice-Cube! Okay yeah, lame.

So, in the world of custom loops, nothing is ever simple.

Thanks to the heat pipes on this fricker, my headers are in the way. That's not too horrible. I can figure out a workaround.

But also, because of the heat pipes, my tubing that leads from the bottom rad to my bottom GPU is too short. I have to remove that and put in longer tubing.

This will be a while.

Did a 3dmark11 run.

My 7970s were at their everyday gaming clocks (1200/1600 on both), and the HIS 280x was at 1040/1500. The "stock" clocks of this 280x was 1000/1500, but 1040 was sweet spot for hash rates, so I left it there just because.

Here's my result of a test run I did a while back with my 7970s at their typical daily speeds.


Graphics score 21211


And here's what happens when I add the 280x.


Graphics score 31221

Futuremark software is pretty bad at hardware identification, but I assume that it's being reported as 3x 7970s for simplification.

Nearly perfect scaling I'd say. But that's just a benchmark run. Now it's time to test games.

Will probably report back later at daylight with those results.

Regarding the cooler. As far as getting the job done, it's a great cooler. I've run a short mining session, and set the fan profile to just go to 90-100% at 60-70C. Haven't tried overclocking much and probably won't for a long time. But when/if I do, I can tell it's going to be a decent overclocker simply because it's a reference card with unlocked voltage, VRM temp monitors, dual bios, and an average-ish ASIC score of 67% (which means it will benefit a lot from water). Maybe I should pay more attention to HIS cards in the future. I've always been an MSI whore for GPUs because they generally sell nothing but reference design cards, whereas the other brands tend to lock at least one or two features, and sell different revisions under the same model number (so, for example, it becomes a crapshoot whether you'll get the one with unlocked voltage, or the new one with disabled voltage control.)

I'm going to be mining at a little over 2.1MH/s now.

You won't get very far with one 270x.

What is mining?

Yes I know, sort of just meant 7870 with a Tahiti LE. I'm not going to buy into any of it because I believe it to be a little silly. Such a large buy in for what, 50bucks a day if you 3 or 4 cards?