Azure Envy

Sauce

The Crew and the UT alpha.

Welcome to the forums, Serena. I'm sure you'll have a great time and make many new friends.

Caesar III and Unreal, good times. Really like Alexander Brandon's work, a few examples of what he's worked on. UT - Botpack #9 Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - Jazz Castle Deus Ex - The Synapse (Hong Kong Streets)

BF4 running Ultra with AA at 1080p will use more than 2GB. Reserve RAM storage, you mean the swap file? Keep that on the SSD -- especially if you might be running out of RAM. Last thing you want to do is be paging off to an HDD. I might have come across a little bit unclear -- there should not be a significant impact to your framerate running multi-monitor, especially if you're only running the game on a single monitor.

BF4 loves RAM, so close Chrome if it's actually using up half your available RAM. SSDs also don't perform quite as well almost full, so you might want to free up some space there. Having more than one monitor enabled on any modern GPU is going to have a very minimal impact on your fps, especially if you're running a game in full screen mode on one of the monitors.

Roadkill

Removal

Got my 970 in today. Threw on a quick OC (+120 core/+500 mem) and broke 10,000 in Fire Strike. Obligatory GPU-Z shot below running Unigine Valley. Not the best ASIC quality, ~63% but still happy with it overall. No coil whine and this is all using the stock fan curve. I believe the new EVGA ACX 2.0 firmware keeps the fans off until about 65 C. 33% fan speed at load, 73 C. Heh, 30% was my idle fan speed on the old 670. Getting about 3.6 GB of memory used in FC4, which is now playable on the "NVIDIA" setting. Looks amazing even if there is kind of a dream-like haze painted over the scene.

Batallion

They still do, just not for current sockets. Would be somewhat redundant, I suppose, considering all most modern CPUs tend to have those IGPUs attached to them.

The hardware is solid (with the exception of the aforementioned 290/X reference coolers), but yes, their drivers in my experience have been hit or miss. If you don't have problems with them, I think Radeons are good value for the performance they offer. However if you DO have a problem, their track record for fixing them in a timely manner is not so impressive. That being said, they work for a lot of people, no doubt -- so if the card you're looking at is priced right, I'd still consider giving it a shot especially if you have a relatively simple setup.

Even more terrifying, the single-GPU R9 390X is rumored to use a similar hybrid cooler out of the gate. I am all for extreme PC MASTER RACE POWAA but sometimes I feel like things are getting out of control. I suppose a pair will do for the 5K Eyefinity folks.

The only card I ever purchased using a reference cooler was my 670. While it can get loud, that's simply atrocious. All while running at a toasty 95C.

Why would anyone want to put a volcano in their computer? How strange.

Fair enough. Still, it bums me out since there's nothing wrong with the hardware itself. It's super high quality and runs cool and quiet. I'm only disappointed the software doesn't match up with it.

So... you're saying the 290 is a poor quality knife? I've never had any issues with AMD CPU's and would probably be using one if they were competitive with Intel on the high-end. I'm still skeptical about the quality of their graphics drivers. I wouldn't even bother with a CF/Tri/Quadfire. If I were to go multi-GPU, it'd be SLI no question.

Honestly, I don't do the whole brand loyalty thing -- I wanted to give AMD a shot since I've heard so much about their improvements in the area of drivers. It's shocking to me that they can't consistently get display output to more than one monitor after all these years. I shudder to think what those with Tri/Quadfire with Eyefinity have to go through, especially with new game releases. I plugged in the old 670, put the drivers back in and here I am. At this point I'm willing to pay that premium to get something that will just work, and at this point in time, NVIDIA just works.

Received my PowerColor TurboDuo R9 290 today. Some of my thoughts: The card is incredibly well built, considering what I paid for it. Beefy heatsinks, dual 90mm fans and copper heatpipes. A backplate was also included. Pretty hefty, sagged a little bit but nothing big. 6 and 8-pin power connectors. It means business. Installed it, booted up. Got a display immediately on both screens in the BIOS as well as the Windows logo. On my GeForce, I wouldn't get video on my DisplayPort connected monitor until I got into Windows. Nice. Installed latest Catalyst betas. Restarted. No video on secondary display. Drivers didn't see it, Windows didn't see it. Great. Uninstalled drivers and tried the current WHQL set. Same problem. Irritated, I look it up and AMD has been working on resolving detection issues since 14.4. Finally figured out a solution to my problem. It'll be here by Friday. At least my 7850 worked with both my monitors... I don't have much more to say about this.

Let me know when I can pick up a couple of 4K on the cheap for Eyefinity since that's old junk now.

One.

Don't do it, man. You're gonna ruin the vanilla game forever for him and he's gonna spend all his time modding instead of playing. . .

Argonians, good choice.

Class.