the gigabyte windforce card is voltage locked.
The Msi 7950 twinfrozer is NOT voltage locked. i would personaly go for the msi.
Thanks for your help. Just noticing on 4launch now:
MSI Graphics Card PCI-e Radeon HD7950 Twin Frozr OC 3GB DP Boost
Boost? Isn't that supposed to be bad?
Edit: Apparently, MSI has a Boost version and a 'norma' version. How is the one that was made for OC'ing bad?
Edit Edit: Done some research. Apparently MSI (or the retailers) find it funny to mix them up, not stating it's the boost version and then delivering one that is.
Also there seem to be different connectors? something with 6 pins or not?
All I know about PCI-E is that there is this 16x and 1x. And then I don't even know what that means. Tried using wikipedia or something, but to no avail. Anyone willing to really quickly tell me what kind of PCI slots there are, and what those things mean?
well the oc version i think you mean the single fan version, i think that one will runn a bit hotter. then the twinfrozer, please go for the twinfrozer it will run cooler and its not voltage locked.
Both have a Twin Frozr, it's only that one has a Boost Bios and one doesn't.
Edit Edit: Done some research. Apparently MSI (or the retailers) find it funny to mix them up, not stating it's the boost version and then delivering one that is.
Also there seem to be different connectors? something with 6 pins or not?
All I know about PCI-E is that there is this 16x and 1x. And then I don't even know what that means. Tried using wikipedia or something, but to no avail. Anyone willing to really quickly tell me what kind of PCI slots there are, and what those things mean?
you talk about this card https://www.4launch.nl/shop/#p-4-productid-133859
that is a good one.
about pci-e slots on a mobo. those large pci-e slots are X16 slots, and thos small ones are X1 slots. on the X16 slots you have diffrent speeds, X16/X8/X4 <-- this has everything to do if you gonne use sli of CF setups, how manny pci-e lanes availeble for that.
for example Z87 midarange boards with 3 pci-e 3.0 slots first one X16 second X8 third X4. That means if you gonne run a dual gpu setup at slot 1/2 then you will have the setup running at X8, but this is X8 pci-e 3.0 and that is equal to X16/X16 pci-e 2.0
Id look into this one http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/302259/xfx-radeon-hd7950-black-edition-double-dissipation.html comes without a boost bios but with a lifetime warrenty(if registered) and a binned chip for good OC potential. Its also a bit cheaper....
Edit: I think 1.3 V is more than enough for a first time overclocker,1.25 should push it around 1.2 if he doesnt get a dud.
XFX is voltage locked.
I'm getting rather confused now. Isn't the Boost BIOS a bad thing? messing with voltage and stuff? The 4Launch one has it (the one you linked to as well, MisteryAngel).
So, about PCI slots. That means if I were to install a single GPU in the second PCI-E slot, it would run at X8 (and that would run at inferior speed than if I had installed it in the first slot)?
Or, is it that those x16 slots are of speed x16, and it just depends on what amount of GPUs you have installed if it's to run at x16/0/0, x8/x8/0 or x4/x4/x4?
Edit: So even with the voltage lock, the xfx should be okay for slight OCing?
as far as i know the boost bios will be fine. i dont read bad things about that card. i didnt even know there where 2 versions of the twinfrozer...
about the pci-e slots it indeed depends on how many gpu's you wanne use single dual or tripple. if you only gonne use one card, just install it in the first slot. thats the X16 slot. if you put in a second gpu in slot 2, then both cards will run at X8 speed, if you gonne trow in a third card, then the whole setup gonne run at X4 with other words, the Z87 platform is not realy made for triple or quad setups. because at X4 it will realy bottleneck the cards. then its better to go with socket 2011 X79 setups, those have much more pci-e lanes availeble. Same with AMD AM3+ setups if you want dual setup, its better to go with a 990FX chipset board because those boards contain more pci-e lanes then 970 chipset boards, on most higherend 990FX chipset boards you can have X16 X8 X16 X8 pc-e 2.0 slots availeble.
Hmm. Okay. I read that it made the voltage jump up and down. So what someone did was make some sort of custom BIOS and you could flash it on the card so it would just listen properly without doing weird stuff itself.
Since we have no clue on OCing, Rolling Potatoe is saying that we won't even pass the voltage lock, in that case we might go for the xfx for price + no boost so it's a safe way to avoid any possible issues with a boost bios.
This complicated stuff. Here I was thinking we had our GPU and could just go and buy it!
in my opinnion OC only means that its a good overclockable card, i never heard about boost bios. ☺
i would still recommend the Msi 7950 twinfrozer. its just one of the best 7950´s to get.
why amd? its like 40 bucks more for a 4670k and the performance is better. not to mention better heating
We went with the XFX Double Dissipation Black Edition https://afuture.nl/productview.php?productID=344422. It's a bit cheaper than the MSI one, which does help us getting closer to our 1,000 soft-limit. It doesn't have a Boost BIOS, which is only safe, we'll just assume that indeed, as Rolling Potatoe says, the Voltage Lock won't hinder us and still allows us to OC a little bit.
We're now at 1,084 euros including shipping, so we're quite happy. It will take a few days until some stuff with the bank is sorted so we'll be buying it about tuesday probably!
Thanks for all your help, if there's still anything you want to comment on the build, feel free to. We'll tell how it all went when we're done building.
link: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1AzkX
Exact video card is not this one but the FX-795A-TDBC version (black edition + double Dissipation)
The build looks good, and ofc if you feel better with the XFX 7950 DD then just go for it, its ofc not a bad card. The only thing i hope, is that those Corsair High profile ram fits with your noctua 12 S cooler, but i think that will be allright. the nocta 12S is ofc not as big as the NH D14.
Good luck building :) post some pictures from the end result haha ;)
All right, after a lot of time we finally got to buying the pieces and installed everything yesterday.
Few issues:
the front panel of the Fractal Define R4 had a broken molex pin and lacked 2 of its 3 Fan controller cables. Within a day support told us we could get a new one.
The UEFI gave a fan error with the Noctua running <500RPM. Because of this and the setting 'stay in POST if there are Errors', installing Windows became extremely tedious.
4.5 hours of assembling, another 3 or so to install windows, and basic stuff. Certainly has been a long time since I've last done this.
Forgot to take a picture, asking my friend to make some for me!
All in all it looks super super slick, the case is perfection itself (apart from the defect-ish front panel).
Also noticed that the motherboards have become much more sophisticated, PCI ports have the click lever like RAM has always had rather than the weird push-to-the-side attachment thingy.
Also, I'm wondering how the SATA ports work now. We managed to make it work, but we had an ASUS Z87-Plus, plugging drives into certain SATA ports made them usable in the boot priority, some did not, even while recognizing them and even letting me force a boot from it in the Boot Menu.
I understand some ports have a different controller or something, but it seems plain weird to me that the BIOS recognizes all drives, and only lets set a boot priority with 2 of them.
All right, got the pictures:
Looks slick!
Got to say, I really feel like upgrading my own pc now. Just because the way the parts are put together is so much more sophisticated. I still have my SSD strapped to a HDD tray with scotch tape.