Quick Bottle-Neck Question...

[Ragga]

Quick Question...

Here are my Specs:

E8400
EVGA 780i
8g's RAM
1000watt PSU
EVGA GTX260

Thinking about getting another GTX260 for the cheap SLI upgrade... considering I have been reading more and more that in some cases, your system will be Bottle-Necked because of something that just doesnt add up... and thus you are limited untill you open the gates!

Any help would be much appreciated!

[mrcrusty]

Quick Question...

Here are my Specs:

E8400
EVGA 780i
8g's RAM
1000watt PSU
EVGA GTX260

Thinking about getting another GTX260 for the cheap SLI upgrade... considering I have been reading more and more that in some cases, your system will be Bottle-Necked because of something that just doesnt add up... and thus you are limited untill you open the gates!

Any help would be much appreciated!

The bottleneck would be caused by the CPU. Multi GPU setups take a lot of processing power to realise it's full potential. Especially Tri SLI/Fire or Quad Fire. Those mofos require nothing less than an overclocked i7 or Phenom II x6 to even have anything remotely close to decent scaling.

A good overclock would at least reduce the bottleneck.

[Wheelchair]

The bottleneck would be caused by the CPU. Multi GPU setups take a lot of processing power to realise it's full potential. Especially Tri SLI/Fire or Quad Fire. Those mofos require nothing less than an overclocked i7 or Phenom II x6 to even have anything remotely close to decent scaling.

A good overclock would at least reduce the bottleneck.

Wrong, they will scale fine. If it it was a single core then yeah it'd be unbalanced and therefor bottlenecked.

I used to have a E8400 overclocked to 3.8ghz and 2 4890's and they scaled perfectly, when I got my i7 game fps went up according to expected CPU speed/cores

[mrcrusty]

Wrong, they will scale fine. If it it was a single core then yeah it'd be unbalanced and therefor bottlenecked.

I used to have a E8400 overclocked to 3.8ghz and 2 4890's and they scaled perfectly, when I got my i7 game fps went up according to expected CPU speed/cores

I was referring to a Tri/Quad Fire system, not the OP's one.

In any case, he'll be fine with his system, but there's anything that causes the bottleneck, it's the CPU, which is what he was asking.

[Taiji]

System looks fine, I'd go for it even with a worse system.

[Ragga]

Thank you guys so much... you have not only answered my direct question, but have informed me on the basics of why/how something results in a bottleneck...

much respect!

[Big Boss]

It would actually be the hard drive bottlenecking first, but that's beside the point and irrelevant in terms of straight up performance.

[Taiji]

It would actually be the hard drive bottlenecking first, but that's beside the point and irrelevant in terms of straight up performance.

Actually I think you're pretty much 'on the money' there.

If you're getting decent framerates then a raid of SSDs is probably the best upgrade when looking at the whole picture. But if you're a gamer and not getting good FPS then it's out of the question.

[mrmouth]

Yeah, I would really have no issues with running an even more substantial SLI/X-fire setup on the E8400.

[karamazovmm]

who is mad enough to raid a SSD? it''l lose trim, and if you like use the hd (constant file moving reading and writing you'll end up in no time with a great degraded performance

[Taiji]

Degraded from what and to where? Sounds almost like you're saying SSDs in raid will be slower than singular.

I'd assume that with 3 drives on RAID 0 we'd see a substantial improvement in writes over 1 drive with TRIM.

It would be nice to see some benchmarks.

[mrcrusty]

I believe that OCZ SSD's contain active garbage collection when the SSD rests on idle, even when in a RAID-0 config, making TRIM sort of irrelevant.

So, if you want to buy an SSD with non Win7 OS or in a RAID-0 config, then make sure you buy OCZ SSD's.

[karamazovmm]

see the latest benchs from anandtech, the degraded performance over time is real and one of the remedies for this is to use trim, in raid you lose trim.

it may be faster but in the 1-2 years your ssd will be like a great 1tb spinpoint, so not worth the cost

[Taiji]

Mr MM I get the impression you're missing, or misrepresenting, the full picture.

You're only talking about write speed, but instead you say 'performance'.

Obviously if we're talking write speed then games are largely unaffected by this.

And you say it gets worse over time, but from the worst it can get an erase will reset it to original performance.

I hope you found that useful

[HansDuet]

Win7 has Trim ability which reduces degrading.


And you can indeed erase everything to reset it. These things will push HDD's out of market in few years. This I foresee.

[karamazovmm]

win 7 only enables trim if your controller has it. and can only be enabled if its not in raid, the protocol negates everything.

and I do much more than gaming in my pc.

erasing everything only adds to the less lifetime of the ssd, better read the way that the write is performed in a ssd.

seriously if you want to see a dual 160g x18m intel ssd in raid just watch a raid video from the envy 15, it a steal the price that is asked in those, its 320g for 550 bucks and already in raid 0. most at the notebookreview forums disable trim since those thing are supposed to last much less in raid, and those notebooks are supposed to last at least 3 years.

I attached some photos of a ssd raid 0 array in 2 160gb x18m intel ssds, and notebook purn is so goddamn juicy

[Big Boss]

win 7 only enables trim if your controller has it. and can only be enabled if its not in raid, the protocol negates everything.

No. As mrcrusty said, OCZ has a garbage collection tool that is pretty much TRIM, that works in RAID, so you can run RAID SSDs. Besides, if you are such an enthusiast that you are Raiding SSDs, then at the end of every month you would remove them from RAID and run TRIM.

Besides, RAID SSD in their slowest state will still be far faster than a HDD, and you probably won't notice the degradation unless you are running benchmarks.

[karamazovmm]

the benefits of trim is not to do once a month, but to do it when you're writing so it gives the driver a better longevity since it uses the allocated space in a more conscious way

[Big Boss]

Not at all. When you delete a file, or move a file, on a traditional HDD, its erased from view, but the data is still on the disc. Its fine on HDDs, because you can overwrite that data with something else. On an SSD, you can't overwrite data that's already there, and the degradation appears because when you write a file, it first has to delete the data, then write, prolonging the process. TRIM is an automatic garbage collection tool, in that when you delete a file, it actually erases it from the SSD. It's working all the time. A regular garbage collection tool, such as OCZ's ITGC, will run whenever an idle period arises during computer use. What it does is overwrite all the deleted/garbage data blocks with the binary code 1, which SSDs can write over. It has nothing to do with using allocated space in a more conscious way or doing it as you are writing. Doing it once a month is perfectly fine, unless you are a benchmarking fiend.

[karamazovmm]

yes and the longevity of a ssd is degraded thus with your explanation since the process of writing and moving the data to another location, thus incurring in the same process that is to use block heads that are large, so you're constantly writing all over the ssd. In a hd it would be fine but in a ssd the process of writing causes degration, and since a ssd usually retails around a 1.5 dollar per gb you can surely guess that most people who use it, don't own the monsters capacity of 1tb and 750gb that, if I'm not mistaken, wd offers. actually I really doubt that anyone pays more than 500 in a ssd, and those are usually with 160 to 200gb in capacity, and so the process of writing again and again diminishes the life of the ssd.

and don't think that I don't like those mean things, I like then I lot, I'm actually thinking of buying the envy 15 with those 2 160gb x18m giving me total of 320gb, but I would live, as I do now, depending on external drive, I have over 2tb of data, from uni I have 2gb of docs and pdfs, so I have a lot of small files that would cripple the ssd life, and as such I would continue to use a external drive