Testing Sandy Bridge - 2500K

[tuanming]

Don't bother with passive solution. I had this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127519&cm_re=msi_gtx_460-_-14-127-519-_-Product and it was dead silent and not to mention much faster than the ones NaturalViolence recommends. Spend the extra money and get the 1gb, it's worth it!

[ajaxxx]

(01-25-2011, 06:12 AM)tuanming Wrote: Don't bother with passive solution. I had this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127519&cm_re=msi_gtx_460-_-14-127-519-_-Product and it was dead silent and not to mention much faster than the ones NaturalViolence recommends. Spend the extra money and get the 1gb, it's worth it!

nah, if he invested 20 extra bucks he can grab the radeon 5850. It benches higher than the MSI and the new ATI drivers and interface are nicer than MSI. The 5850 is probably still the best bang for your buck card out there.
*edit* whoops, didnt see that he wanted passive cooled. oh well.

[turingpest]

tuanming is right - don't bother with a passive solution. unless most of your pc is passive (cpu, psu, gpu, or case) then there's little point in just going passive on one component. the thing is that even if you get a passive graphics card you'll still need airflow to dissipate the heat that it creates, which means a case fan. where there's a fan there's a fan. you may as well get a card that's faster, but with a quiet fan.

[NaturalViolence]

I'll just quote what he said:

Quote:Any suggestions? I'd like one that can be passively cooled because i'm trying to build a quiet system.

He specifically asked for a passive cooled card. You don't respond to that with "don't get a passive cooled card when you can get a better card that's almost as quite!". That's not what he asked for.

[tuanming]

IMHO, passive cooling is overrated or over hyped. Passive cooling isn't the only option that is quiet. Why get something that is passive but yet slow? Why not get something that has a lot more oomph and is very quite at the same time?

[abfab126]

Gigabyte GV-R577SL-1GD is a passive Radeon 5770 with 1 Gb Ram

[smackjack22]

hey guys is there any reason to have a better graphics card than a 5870 or gtx 470 currently for dolphin?I have a i7 920 @3.4ghz and radeon 5870 and im getting slowdown with fraps on at 2560x1600 on games like twilight princess,resident evil,no more heroes and Metroid.Without fraps on however they run 100% almost all the time iv tested here tonight but can still dip a bit.Just wondering if getting a gtx 580 and overclocking a i72500 or 2600 to 4.2ghz or more will fix this or should i just keep waiting for better hardware still.Planning to do high quality lets plays this year of ps2 and wii games

[tuanming]

@smackjack22

Do you get slow down with frap at a lower resolution? I suspect it might be fraps that is causing the problem, what version of fraps do you have? If isn't fraps, then it could be either one or a combination of these issues:

- CPU (Overclock your CPU higher to 3.8Ghz - 4Ghz (if you can get that far) to verify if it's a CPU issue.)
- RAM (How much ram do you have? You probably need more...)
- GPU (Try to record at a lower resolution to see if the problem still exist.)
- HDD (if you have more than one hdd, save it to another drive.)

[ector]

(01-26-2011, 02:04 AM)smackjack22 Wrote: hey guys is there any reason to have a better graphics card than a 5870 or gtx 470 currently for dolphin?I have a i7 920 @3.4ghz and radeon 5870 and im getting slowdown with fraps on at 2560x1600 on games like twilight princess,resident evil,no more heroes and Metroid.Without fraps on however they run 100% almost all the time iv tested here tonight but can still dip a bit.Just wondering if getting a gtx 580 and overclocking a i72500 or 2600 to 4.2ghz or more will fix this or should i just keep waiting for better hardware still.Planning to do high quality lets plays this year of ps2 and wii games

If they run faster at lower resolutions, and you're using EFB to texture, then it would seem that you might see gains with fraps enabled at such crazy resolutions when getting a faster graphics card. Most of the time though your CPU matters more than the GPU. However, if I were you I'd forget about "frapsing" at 2560x1600 and stick to something like 1080p, but if you really want to do it then it's your choice

[ector]

By the way regarding Sandy Bridge in general, the new 256-bit AVX stuff is probably not so useful for Dolphin since no calculations that the GC/Wii CPU does are that wide, but, interestingly you can use AVX encoding ("VEX" prefix) for 128-bit SSE instructions and benefit from the new cool 3-operand instruction forms. If you stick to 128-bit and don't mix in 256-bit operations you can avoid the switching penalties completely. The end result of optimizing for this would probably be a few percent speed boost in floating point heavy games. However since Sandy Bridge CPUs generally will run Dolphin very fast anyway it might not worth the effort.