Examining the gear
Examining the gear
To be able to understand what we are doing today, we need to briefly take you through some of the key components used for Lucifer (the pet name of our PC). So I explained that we'll be using our DIY (Do It Yourself) built X58 based system.
So before we start, some custom parts we will be using I want to show to you first:
- Core i7 965 overclocked @ 3750 MHz
- Motherboard -- Intel X58
- Memory -- Corsair Dominator 6144 MB (3x 2048 MB) DDR3 Corsair @ 1600 MHz CAS 7
- 1200 Watt BFG Power Supply
- Corsair Obsidian 800D Chassis
- Three GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards
These are some pretty nifty parts and bare in mind, when you opt multi-GPU gaming, always have your gear right. You'll need that quality power supply, you'll need that beefy motherboard and processor and then, you'll need a chassis with some very decent airflow keeping the graphics cards nicely chilled down.
The cards we'll be using today are diverse, one originates from the Dutch based Point of View, another one from Zotac, plus one more, a reference card from NVIDIA.
Allow me to quickly show you the products as you'll find them in retail. Above is the Point of View GeForce GTX 470. This card is all reference based and comes with mini-HDMI and two DVI connectors. Next to the drivers and manual you'll spot an HDMI and D-SUB converter for your monitor preferences. Being reference, the card comes with reference clocks as well. Targeted at a MSRP of roughly 350 USD it still packs 1280MB of gDDR5 memory, its core frequency is clocked at 600 MHz, its shader processors at 1215 MHz and that memory at 3348 MHz (effective). This card, as you should know, is positioned directly against ATI's Radeon HD 5850.
The second company assisting in this article will be Zotac. This is their GeForce GTX 470, again a 100% reference product with the only difference being the stickers on these cards. The TDP of these cards is a little lower opposed to its big brother, a more convenient at 215 Watts. Overall, a nice dark themed looking card offering a nice powerful bite in performance. The latest BIOS makes the cards a little cooler in terms of temperatures as well.
Last photo. Let's head on over to the Guru testing zone ...
