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Let's start out with my newly built overhauled rig... 1 to 2 months of planning, working out the parts to get, and jumping on deals.
Intel Core i7 2600k
16GB Kit by G.Skill (4x4GB) DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P Motherboard
2 XFX Radeon 6950 2GB XXX Edition (HD-695X-CDDC)
To mount my Xigmatek HDT-S1283 heatsink, I also picked up a mounting bracket (ACK-I5361). But first I had to take everything apart and clear out the dust bunnies loitering inside. That took a while to do because I cleaned out my Antec 300 case. The whole dismantling and assembly took perhaps 6-8 hours in total, not counting breaks and eating food. Once everything is put together, the first power-on was a success and I proceeded to do a fresh install of Win7. Yeah, I've heard some success stories of using the same install on Win7 between two motherboards. I prefer to go at it with a clean slate.
I still have software to install at this time. So it will be a while before it gets back up to how it was before, or close to it. And I still have yet to do any actual hardware testing to make sure everything is in working order. No Prime95 or Memtest86 were done, which I plan to do very soon. I was, though, anxious to find out how much of a boost I get going from 1GB to 2GB for Eyefinity resolutions. One of those games I managed to test was Bad Company 2. Naturally from the old settings, everything was butter smooth. Then it's time to jack up the settings. Everything except for HBAO and anti-aliasing were set to the max. And the game ran astoundingly smooth. I guess if a card has to do Eyefinity, the best resolution is probably one or two levels down.
Next step up was to enable Crossfire, which I found out rather late that I did not enable (thought it was enabled if 2 cards detected, but oh well). So about 20 minutes ago, I did a quick jump on to a server... framerate obviously jumped up. I dunno by how much... but as soon as I jumped into the action, I got pulled into the battlefield (and keeping an eye on the framerate number became a distant memory). But wow... with the additional framerate headroom available, I now am wondering how much of an impact anti-aliasing will have then.
So my personal experience of going from single monitor gaming to triple, and then going to crossfire, it's been a hell of a ride. But I learned a good deal of how much of a load a super-wide resolution can have on a card with limited memory. My old Powercolor AX5850 1GB proved that it can be limited not by just CPU but also by memory. If I were to theoretically test it on my current platform, I probably would get about 50-55fps... but still would crumble under certain circumstances like explosions and particle generation. But I do have to wonder, however, of how well the GPU would perform had it been blessed with 2GB RAM... would it turn out exactly like my 6950?
Anyway, I am extremely happy with the added performance. I now wish I had more visually demanding games to help push the cards a little. But for now, it seems Bad Company 2 is the only one I have around that can do it. Sure there's probably Far Cry 2, Crysis, and Crysis 2... but... why??? :)
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