SCREAMING FAST Water-cooled "Storm-Trooper GAMING rig" - my latest build.

[Jessica]

Nice rig Steve. I've been wanting to rebuild so bad. But the car audio has eaten my budget like crazy. Maybe i need a second job. I'm still using a q6600 quad core @ 2.4 and 2 9600's in SLI. But, really all i do is watch movies and browse the net, so it's does fine for that. All I really do is just add more hard drive space as needed. Since i rip my $5 walmart movies to full mpeg2 they use like 4-7 GB of space a piece. 500+movies and it goes quick. lol

[KMS]

Mine is about a year old too. I have the 600t in black without the window side. With a 2500k and a GTX 680 I just upgraded from a 560ti. Also have a 256gb ssd. The SSD is undoubtedly the biggest improvement I've ever had when building a pc. Everything is so fast and snappy now especially start up. SSD's are coming down a lot in price too. Oh and also I'm rocking the P67 chipset too lol. :\

[bjballar41]

so ive finally gotten into computers and was just wondering how exactly running two video cards works? i suppose the motherboard must have two slots? and the running three screens are they all connected dvi ports which means one is still open? what if u wanna run them off hdmi? since some only have one hdmi port do others have more? and the ones he is using are they actually two cards built to work in one slot so he is really using 4 cards? whats the benefits in having more than one card? question is open to anyone. thanks in advance

[Maxim]

so ive finally gotten into computers and was just wondering how exactly running two video cards works? i suppose the motherboard must have two slots? and the running three screens are they all connected dvi ports which means one is still open? what if u wanna run them off hdmi? since some only have one hdmi port do others have more? and the ones he is using are they actually two cards built to work in one slot so he is really using 4 cards? whats the benefits in having more than one card? question is open to anyone. thanks in advance

Motherboard must have at least 2 PCI Express x16 slots (most boards that support multiple cards have 3 slots). The monitors can be attached to whatever card you want on whatever connection you want as long as they support the resolution of the monitor. You can use HDMI for up to 1920x1200. If you're running larger screens you'll need to use DisplayPort or dual-link DVI to connect the screens.

The cards used here are single chip cards so it's only 2 cards, not 4 (though those cards do exist, just very, very expensive).

The advantage of having multiple cards is to increase the number of frames per second your computer can render to increase how smoothly games play at higher settings. For a 2-card setup each card renders every other frame. If you're playing at 60 frames per second with a 2-card setup the top card will draw frames 1, 3, 5, etc. while the bottom card draws frames 2, 4, 6, etc. Each card now only has to draw 30 frames per second instead of the 60 per second a single card would have to do. Because each card only has to do half the work it had to do before you can crank up detail settings and still keep that same smooth frame rate.

For 3- and 4-card setups the same concept applies. Card 1 draws the first frame and then the next card draws the next frame and so on until you get back to the 1st card. Lather, rinse, repeat.

[bjballar41]

sweet thanks one last question on the cards? he said something about sli mode? is that where they can work together? and if they are working together do all three monitors hook up to one card? or does that matter how they are hooked up? also it looks as tho some cards have a place for 3 dvi hook ups? would u be able to hook all three monitors up to that card?

Edited November 30, 2012 by bjballar41