Feature Articles

The Power of 3 - Investigating the Trinity

By Kenny Yeo & Vijay Anand - 1 Nov 2009

Other Considerations & Final Thoughts

Other Considerations

In terms of outright performance, the alliance of Intel and NVIDIA has the upper hand most of the time. The new Radeon 5870 might be fast, but NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 still has some tricks up its sleeves. But other than performance, there are other important considerations that one should take note as well.

On the graphics card front, both ATI and NVIDIA's latest offerings tout different features. For ATI, the new Radeon 5000 series boasts full support for the new DirectX 11 API and EyeFinity. And as discussed in our review of the Radeon 5870, DirectX 11 brings about a host of features, but tessellation is arguably the most attractive to the both the game developers and consumers as it boosts game realism with a massive memory overhead.

While DirectX 11 is sounds good and all in the long run, another consideration is the take up of DirectX 11 by game developers. As we speak, there are only a handful of announced DirectX 11 games. Games such as Dirt 2 and Sega's AVP are perhaps the two biggest names that support DirectX 11 and are set to be released in the near future. Realistically, it'll take at least a year before we get a decent library of DirectX 11 games, and by then, it is very likely that we'll be looking forward to a newer generation of graphics cards.

Of course, this is not to say that DirectX 11 compatibility is moot. Going with a new Radeon HD 5000 series card certainly future-proofs your system and that cannot be a bad thing. What's more, Eyefinity is a nifty feature to have. Gaming with three screens is an exhilarating experience, and additional real estate is always welcome when multi-tasking. But such an experience comes with an expensive investment of multi monitors, so it's not a readily accessible feature for all.

While NVIDIA's latest Fermi-based cards have yet to roll out, the current generation GT200 cards still have a lot going for them. 3DVision, for example, is something we really enjoyed (read our review ). Paired with the right games, it ups the fun factor and really improves the overall gaming experience.

Elsewhere, there is PhysX and CUDA. PhysX is a middleware physics engine, and as discussed in an earlier article , it vastly improves the gaming experience by making games react and interact more realistically. In the same vein, CUDA helps by accelerating tasks, such as video transcoding, which would normally take ages for traditional CPUs to complete. To add on, Adobe also announced that it takes advantage of CUDA to speed up its processes on its latest Adobe CS4 software, allowing professionals who use the software to increase their productivity. And there are many more CUDA enabled end-user applications coming by early par of next year. Of course they are not exactly the exclusive domain to NVIDIA as eventually these applications will use the DirectX Compute function of the new DirectX 11 API which is backward compatible to Direct X10 GPU pipelines as well.

Final Thoughts

As it stands, the three setups that we have are quite even matched. If absolute performance is your concern, then the NVIDIA/Intel Power of Three system powered by the i7-870 processor is the one to go for. Compared with the all AMD system, it is notably quicker for most games.

We also discovered, as we replaced the GeForce GTX 295 with the Radeon HD 5870 on the i7-870 setup, that the GeForce GTX 295 is generally still the faster card. It was able to outperform the Radeon HD 5870 on most of our benchmarks. There are certain exceptions to this at times such as the Dawn of War 2 game though.

But as things usually are, you pay for what you get, and it is little wonder that our top performing system is also the mostly costly. Price is a concern here as a single i7-870 processor costs a substantial US$550. Thankfully, the i5-750 processor is more affordable at US$199, but still provides comparable performance for gaming needs. The GeForce GTX 295 is still arguably the world's fastest single graphics card, and as such commands a premium as well at around US$500 a pop. For motherboards, it really depends on what features you want. The ASUS Sabertooth i55 we are using is one of the top P55 motherboards and as such costs more. But if you are willing to sacrifice on some features, relatively cheaper boards can be found and can compete with some of the AMD motherboards too.

The outright performance crown belongs to Intel and NVIDIA, but it comes at the cost of a very heavy price tag and power consumption. Plus it's not exactly 'future-proof', but it does have other experiential features to boot.

However, if you want a future proof, value-for-money, yet relatively powerful system, AMD is the one to turn to. The Phenom II X4 965 processor is slightly cheaper at US$195 and the Radeon HD 5870 goes for around US$379. Additionally, AMD 790GX motherboards are also usually cheaper than Intel P55 ones. Plus the power efficiency of this platform too can't be overlooked. Most interesting is when pairing the Radeon HD 5870 on the Intel platform which actually provided the best power efficiency of the lot.

At the end of the day, it really depends on what you want and how much you can stretch. The outright performance crown belongs to NVIDIA and Intel, whereas an all AMD setup offers great bang-for-buck and even some future-proofing with DirectX 11 support. You decide.

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