New
#111
Honestly? Outside of benchmarking - it's an absolute waste of time.
You need to Overclock the CPU pretty high to avoid it being a bottleneck (holding the cards back) and quadfire scales absolutely terribly in games.
Even tri-fire shows (5970 + a 5850 or 5870) shows little to no FPS increase in the majority of games.
No one needs quad gpu. Shit few things need dual. Just get a dualgpu single card with dx11 and you will be set for the next 5 years, guaranteed. They still use pixel shader 3.0, games wont need 4.0 for a bit longer.
Oh ya, someone went nutz and OC'd with SLI.
Ok replaced TIM with Mx, applying an extremely thin layer with the card spread method (tried X method, temps only dropped 1c).
Was going to disassemble the memory side, but one of the very small screws was being stubborn, so I backed off that idea for now.
Removed my Vantech Tornado TD8038H 80mm (this thing is nuts without a fan controller!) from the side panel and placed it in the front bottom fan cage (feeds cooler air more directly to 470 fan).
I'm happy to report 46c !
Seems the combination of MX & a changed air flow did the trick.
I can say I'm very happy with the XFX 5970 BE I have. It doesn't get very hot, although my case helps that I must admit. DX11 performance, down to shader model 3.0, everything works fine. Also, drivers did not get bad for my 4890 running in my mainstream rig, like many said. AMD I think realized the issue, things have only gotten better, with "both" cards, so, well, at least one person here says the drivers are solid. I know some fear AMD/ATI because of drivers, but I've been pretty surprised... I was a total Nvidia fanboi until the 4xxx release, took me ten minutes to realize the quality and price.
Anyways, it's a "REALLY" hard choice between what I have and a 480, those things are straight up nasty. I would recommend waiting... what else can ya do?
All I can say with any certainty is it runs cooler than everyone said it would, but as with the OP, his 480 is running cooler as well, so, eh. I don't know, I guess maybe it's best to choose based on your platform, and budget. I think they're both fantastic cards. Also, please, realize if you actually need the power! I see people buying these things and running one display in 1080, and I can't believe how stupid it is... oh well.