TL;DR: From my experience, gaming on 3 monitors (5020x900 or 6024x1080) requires a high end setup. An i5 2500k@4.5GHz, 4GB RAM and a 6950 CF setup is what gets me to avg 60fps on High settings @ 6024x1080 in all games.
These past months I took my first steps into gaming on PC, using eyefinity and making upgrades. I've learned a lot about what is really required to play with this setup so I thought I would share what I've been through.
My 4 year old PC was made of a core2quad q6600 2.4GHz, 2GB ram and a 8600GTS. I thought I could get away with swapping the 8600 for a 6950 (my only option for 3 screens since I only had 1 PCIe16x slot on the mobo), an extra 2GB ram and a Hyper 212+ cooler to overclock my CPU to 3GHz.
While this was sufficient to get playable performance with eyefinity in games like dead space 2 and fallout new vegas it certainly wasn't enough for f1 2010. All games worked very well on one screen (1920x1080) though. After trying to get a bit more performance out of my 6950 by unlocking the shaders and overclocking a bit I decided to do some benchmarking to see what was going on.
New Vegas and Dead Space seemed to get a bit of improvement from my overclocking and changing the settings showed obvious improvements in framerate as I turned resolutions and settings down. But F1 2010 still struggled; no matter what the settings were, I couldn't get above a minimum of 24fps but with low settings it was kind of playable.
I obviously needed more power so this week I have put in a new mobo, i5 2500k and another 6950. The result is that without overclocking the i5 I got almost triple the framerates I was getting with my q6600/6950 setup. I had believed that the q6600 was still great for gaming but now my opinion is that even with a single 6950 there was a cpu bottleneck.
Overclocking the i5 2500k to 4.5GHz has gotten me an extra 15-20% performance on minimum fps (about 4-8fps extra). I had heard that a cpu can hinder crossfire or SLI performance but this I had no idea to this extent.
These past months I took my first steps into gaming on PC, using eyefinity and making upgrades. I've learned a lot about what is really required to play with this setup so I thought I would share what I've been through.
My 4 year old PC was made of a core2quad q6600 2.4GHz, 2GB ram and a 8600GTS. I thought I could get away with swapping the 8600 for a 6950 (my only option for 3 screens since I only had 1 PCIe16x slot on the mobo), an extra 2GB ram and a Hyper 212+ cooler to overclock my CPU to 3GHz.
While this was sufficient to get playable performance with eyefinity in games like dead space 2 and fallout new vegas it certainly wasn't enough for f1 2010. All games worked very well on one screen (1920x1080) though. After trying to get a bit more performance out of my 6950 by unlocking the shaders and overclocking a bit I decided to do some benchmarking to see what was going on.
New Vegas and Dead Space seemed to get a bit of improvement from my overclocking and changing the settings showed obvious improvements in framerate as I turned resolutions and settings down. But F1 2010 still struggled; no matter what the settings were, I couldn't get above a minimum of 24fps but with low settings it was kind of playable.
I obviously needed more power so this week I have put in a new mobo, i5 2500k and another 6950. The result is that without overclocking the i5 I got almost triple the framerates I was getting with my q6600/6950 setup. I had believed that the q6600 was still great for gaming but now my opinion is that even with a single 6950 there was a cpu bottleneck.
Overclocking the i5 2500k to 4.5GHz has gotten me an extra 15-20% performance on minimum fps (about 4-8fps extra). I had heard that a cpu can hinder crossfire or SLI performance but this I had no idea to this extent.