I am rather fond of Nvidia cards but am not very knowledgeable on the subject, can someone tell me the best nvidia card I can get in the $200 range and how it would compare say against this card?
Too bad the rest of the hardware is blah. That card is being held back. And don't no one tell me that I'm wrong. Been building PCs for over 7 years. At some point when a person needs to upgrade, it's fine to buy a new card for gaming, but retarded to put a mid/high end card in a system you're trying to save for another couple of years after it's been like 4-6 since it's original production. For something with a HDD and an AM3 proc, I wouldn't invest anything above a 6850 or 7850 with nothing over 1GB of vram. I'm running a 7870 and getting an average of 55 FPS and at the WORST an average of 35-40 FPS in cities during peak hours.
So final outlook on the 7870 is that it's a damn good card for the price that on average will keep you around the 40-80 FPS as long as you're running decent RAM and either an i5 and up or an "AM3+" proc. For this price range you won't find better. nVidia is overpriced and you pay about $200-$300 more for a card that performs no different than AMD's equivalent. However at this point in time, most 7870's are a mere $30 to $50 less than a 3GB 384bit Radeon 7950. In generally in that case you're better off going with the 7950 instead. Trust me. I thought on this past build I was saving money and getting great performance. And while I get the desired performance, I should have forked over another $30 for the next level card that blows this out of the water. However these cards will be awesome once they get down to the price point they should be. If the 7950 is $300, then the 7870 should be $200.
Originally posted by I3Lackwolf I am rather fond of Nvidia cards but am not very knowledgeable on the subject, can someone tell me the best nvidia card I can get in the $200 range and how it would compare say against this card?
What you will get in the $200 from nVidia will be quite lacking compared to what you can get for $200 from AMD. Just sayin'. But if you like the name nVidia and their green logo and are willing to pay extra for that then - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127699
Originally posted by Ozmodan Hard to say that is a medium range graphics card when it would blow away most graphics cards from a year ago. When playing MMO's the cpu is not as important as the graphic card. So your system with that graphic card can play just about any game existing on high settings. Hardware is rapidly outpacing software these days. That will change of course as some of these newer development engines come out, but most of the games today were designed around what was high end four years ago.
"When playing MMO's the cpu is not as important as the graphic card."
True. But the CPU is still important because MMO's are starting to use heavier engines and Tera specifically whether they wanna admit it or not, is pretty damn CPU intensive because of the way the devs programmed it. With Tera if I do an OC on my proc, my FPS jumps and not only jumps, but keeps a higher average framerate at a steady pace. Even borrowing my GF's 6850 1GB card, I ended up getting that 35 FPS average on my setup. I think when it's time to upgrade, you may as well do both the proc and card. Sell your old stuff and use that towards a new CPU and GPU.
I found that the EVGA GTX660 was a pretty good buy @ $200. It seems to have noticeably better performance than AMD's 7870 in Anandtech's benchmarks. Just an FYI, I've owned both cards and either one is great BUT the 7870 comes with more free games
Also, I'm not sure if the Metro: Last Light promo is still good, it was available for Nvidia GTX 660 and above but, the FarCry 3, Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite promo should be for AMD 7850's and above.
Bought 7770 Sapphire and had constant problems with DirectX10 games, many otherns on numerous forums has same problems, blackouts, graphics glitches, resets. That was the last time I buy a AMD graphics card, a very dissatisfied customer.
I'm a little confused.. why is an older card getting a review?
The 7970 been out for longer than a year, is dropping to affordable prices, and the new(but vastly overpriced) 7990 is out...
Why the writeup on a card that has to be at least 3 years old now?
Hmm ok i take that back, the two are less than 1 month apart from each other... confusing...
Tech sites typically review the hardware that manufacturers are willing to send them for free.
There are two basic types of video card reviews. First is the launch day reviews, where AMD or Nvidia will send cards to a bunch of sites at once and say, you can't publish anything before this time on this day. Those reviews are mostly about how the new card performs relative to older cards, how much power it uses, and how much it costs.
Second is later reviews of a particular SKU of a card. That's what this review is. Sapphire or EVGA or Asus or whoever will send a particular card to various sites to review it. This uses the same GPU chip as the launch day reviews, so performance is largely known in advance, though sometimes newer video drivers or a factory overclock can improve performance somewhat.
Rather, later reviews of a video card are more about temperatures, noise, build quality, power consumption, and overclockability. There are a bunch of Radeon HD 7870s, for example, and at the same clock speeds, they'll all perform the same. But some will run hotter or noisier than others, and a review of a particular SKU can give some guidance on which are better than which others.
I think that the real reason that Sapphire sent a card in to be reviewed is hoping that someone will see a Sapphire version of a Radeon HD 7870 and think it's a good card and buy it not realizing that you could get a HIS or MSI or Gigabyte version of a 7870 that performs exactly the same--and might happen to be cheaper that day. AMD doesn't care which brand you buy (so long as it's AMD rather than Nvidia), but Sapphire, XFX, and so forth sure do.
Unfortunately, this site doesn't have anyone on staff with the hardware knowledge and experience to do a worthwhile review. From Sapphire's perspective, that might be fine; sending cards out for review is a marketing expense to them. But from the perspective of a reader who wants to know what video card to buy, there are better reviews out there. There are a lot of sites that will run a bunch of different cards through various benchmarks and let you compare them. Hard OCP and Tech Report have unique methods that give you useful data that other sites just getting benchmark numbers tend not to, but you have to know how to read the data they're giving you.
But now question is is it bad card is it revelant if other cards are cheaper?
Its seems this was just a review showing it handle games very well at good performance with this brand at this price.
Rest is up to customer who can always choose a other brand or for other price.
This site get a card from sapphire to test and they did it performed well and card is nicely priced.
In 2 years time when most games are realy build around DX11 and up will matter then we will see which cards realy can handlle full DX11+ games. These days most cards can handle 90% of games that are dx 9.0c that almost all DX11 cards can run easely.
The new factory clocked "boost" 7850 / 7950 are your best pixel per buck. The 7870 just doesnt clock as well.
For mmos 7850 boost Is sufficient, even on something like ps2. 7950 boost worth considering if you play fps and stuff. Above that depends where you live, I'd go 680gtx in usa, but 7970 over here (uk).
Originally posted by I3Lackwolf I am rather fond of Nvidia cards but am not very knowledgeable on the subject, can someone tell me the best nvidia card I can get in the $200 range and how it would compare say against this card?
What you will get in the $200 from nVidia will be quite lacking compared to what you can get for $200 from AMD. Just sayin'. But if you like the name nVidia and their green logo and are willing to pay extra for that then - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127699
Nvidia has cut prices on the GeForce GTX 660, so they're often a pretty good value now.
I'd usually advise against blind brand loyalty, but a relative handful of people do need features exclusive to one vendor or the other.
Originally posted by Ozmodan Hard to say that is a medium range graphics card when it would blow away most graphics cards from a year ago. When playing MMO's the cpu is not as important as the graphic card. So your system with that graphic card can play just about any game existing on high settings. Hardware is rapidly outpacing software these days. That will change of course as some of these newer development engines come out, but most of the games today were designed around what was high end four years ago.
"When playing MMO's the cpu is not as important as the graphic card."
True. But the CPU is still important because MMO's are starting to use heavier engines and Tera specifically whether they wanna admit it or not, is pretty damn CPU intensive because of the way the devs programmed it. With Tera if I do an OC on my proc, my FPS jumps and not only jumps, but keeps a higher average framerate at a steady pace. Even borrowing my GF's 6850 1GB card, I ended up getting that 35 FPS average on my setup. I think when it's time to upgrade, you may as well do both the proc and card. Sell your old stuff and use that towards a new CPU and GPU.
One could philosophically argue that the most important component is whatever is holding you back. But what is the bottleneck can vary greatly depending on what components you have, what game you're playing, and what graphical settings you're using. In many situations, computations that a game wants to do can be done either on the CPU or the GPU, and simply coding the game differently can greatly impact how much CPU versus GPU performance you need. Or things that you would do on the GPU if using DirectX 10/11 may be impossible to do on the GPU if you're using DirectX 9.0c, so you have to do them on the CPU instead.
Originally posted by ShakyMo The new factory clocked "boost" 7850 / 7950 are your best pixel per buck. The 7870 just doesnt clock as well.
For mmos 7850 boost Is sufficient, even on something like ps2. 7950 boost worth considering if you play fps and stuff. Above that depends where you live, I'd go 680gtx in usa, but 7970 over here (uk).
I have a 7850 2gb and I absolutely love it, plays all my games on high settings at 1920x1080.
But now question is is it bad card is it revelant if other cards are cheaper?
Its seems this was just a review showing it handle games very well at good performance with this brand at this price.
Rest is up to customer who can always choose a other brand or for other price.
This site get a card from sapphire to test and they did it performed well and card is nicely priced.
In 2 years time when most games are realy build around DX11 and up will matter then we will see which cards realy can handlle full DX11+ games. These days most cards can handle 90% of games that are dx 9.0c that almost all DX11 cards can run easely.
If the card reviewed cost $100, it would be an incredible deal. If it cost $500, would that make it a bad card, or merely a stupidly high price on a card that was good, but not good enough to justify that price tag?
While there are likely to be many games that nominally use DirectX 11 in a few years, if you're only using them to do stuff that you could have done just as well in DirectX 10, does it really matter that you're using DX 11? The headline feature of DirectX 11 is tessellation, I'm not that optimistic that we'll ever see a widespread embrace of what tessellation can really do, simply because people coding the games don't have the math background for it.
On the other hand, I'm a lot more optimistic about geometry shaders getting widespread use, and that was the most important new feature of DirectX 10. That's probably coming soon, but we'll need for game developers to decide that they no longer care to support Windows XP, Intel HD Graphics or earlier, or Radeon X1000 series or GeForce 7000 series or earlier cards. Geometry shaders can see an entire primitive all at once, rather than only one vertex or pixel at a time. They can also read in one primitive and output several primitives or none at all. That adds a ton of flexibility.
Yeah you'd only get the benefit on a single monitor setup of a higher gpu on a select few games, e.g. farcry 3, crisis 3 (not worth it, even more dumbed down than crisis 2, skyrim with a bunch if hd mids, the new metro etc..
In which case you'd be better off jumping up to a 7950 / 670gtx
Originally posted by ShakyMo Sapphire are a decent make.
His, asus and gigabyte would be your top tier AMD cards
Sapphire, powercolor and msi the second tier. E.g. reliability is still good, just might be a bit more noisey
This is actually very backwards. Sapphire is the premier AMD card company, tier one. Sapphire has actually led innovation in the video card market for a long time.
XFX and Powercolor represent the tier two and the motherboard manufacturers represent tier three.
In fairness in using video cards from AMD my experience is Sapphire is number one, with MSI and Gigabyte making number two. After those three I do not bother.
Comments
Too bad the rest of the hardware is blah. That card is being held back. And don't no one tell me that I'm wrong. Been building PCs for over 7 years. At some point when a person needs to upgrade, it's fine to buy a new card for gaming, but retarded to put a mid/high end card in a system you're trying to save for another couple of years after it's been like 4-6 since it's original production. For something with a HDD and an AM3 proc, I wouldn't invest anything above a 6850 or 7850 with nothing over 1GB of vram. I'm running a 7870 and getting an average of 55 FPS and at the WORST an average of 35-40 FPS in cities during peak hours.
So final outlook on the 7870 is that it's a damn good card for the price that on average will keep you around the 40-80 FPS as long as you're running decent RAM and either an i5 and up or an "AM3+" proc. For this price range you won't find better. nVidia is overpriced and you pay about $200-$300 more for a card that performs no different than AMD's equivalent. However at this point in time, most 7870's are a mere $30 to $50 less than a 3GB 384bit Radeon 7950. In generally in that case you're better off going with the 7950 instead. Trust me. I thought on this past build I was saving money and getting great performance. And while I get the desired performance, I should have forked over another $30 for the next level card that blows this out of the water. However these cards will be awesome once they get down to the price point they should be. If the 7950 is $300, then the 7870 should be $200.
7950 - $300 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131478
7870 - $260 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150606
Getting too old for this $&17!
What you will get in the $200 from nVidia will be quite lacking compared to what you can get for $200 from AMD. Just sayin'. But if you like the name nVidia and their green logo and are willing to pay extra for that then - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127699
Getting too old for this $&17!
"When playing MMO's the cpu is not as important as the graphic card."
True. But the CPU is still important because MMO's are starting to use heavier engines and Tera specifically whether they wanna admit it or not, is pretty damn CPU intensive because of the way the devs programmed it. With Tera if I do an OC on my proc, my FPS jumps and not only jumps, but keeps a higher average framerate at a steady pace. Even borrowing my GF's 6850 1GB card, I ended up getting that 35 FPS average on my setup. I think when it's time to upgrade, you may as well do both the proc and card. Sell your old stuff and use that towards a new CPU and GPU.
Getting too old for this $&17!
I found that the EVGA GTX660 was a pretty good buy @ $200. It seems to have noticeably better performance than AMD's 7870 in Anandtech's benchmarks. Just an FYI, I've owned both cards and either one is great BUT the 7870 comes with more free games
Also, I'm not sure if the Metro: Last Light promo is still good, it was available for Nvidia GTX 660 and above but, the FarCry 3, Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite promo should be for AMD 7850's and above.
Guess that makes 3 of us.
But now question is is it bad card is it revelant if other cards are cheaper?
Its seems this was just a review showing it handle games very well at good performance with this brand at this price.
Rest is up to customer who can always choose a other brand or for other price.
This site get a card from sapphire to test and they did it performed well and card is nicely priced.
In 2 years time when most games are realy build around DX11 and up will matter then we will see which cards realy can handlle full DX11+ games. These days most cards can handle 90% of games that are dx 9.0c that almost all DX11 cards can run easely.
7850 / 7950 are your best pixel per buck. The 7870 just doesnt clock as well.
For mmos 7850 boost Is sufficient, even on something like ps2. 7950 boost worth considering if you play fps and stuff. Above that depends where you live, I'd go 680gtx in usa, but 7970 over here (uk).
His, asus and gigabyte would be your top tier AMD cards
Sapphire, powercolor and msi the second tier. E.g. reliability is still good, just might be a bit more noisey
Nvidia has cut prices on the GeForce GTX 660, so they're often a pretty good value now.
I'd usually advise against blind brand loyalty, but a relative handful of people do need features exclusive to one vendor or the other.
One could philosophically argue that the most important component is whatever is holding you back. But what is the bottleneck can vary greatly depending on what components you have, what game you're playing, and what graphical settings you're using. In many situations, computations that a game wants to do can be done either on the CPU or the GPU, and simply coding the game differently can greatly impact how much CPU versus GPU performance you need. Or things that you would do on the GPU if using DirectX 10/11 may be impossible to do on the GPU if you're using DirectX 9.0c, so you have to do them on the CPU instead.
I have a 7850 2gb and I absolutely love it, plays all my games on high settings at 1920x1080.
No signature, I don't have a pen
If the card reviewed cost $100, it would be an incredible deal. If it cost $500, would that make it a bad card, or merely a stupidly high price on a card that was good, but not good enough to justify that price tag?
While there are likely to be many games that nominally use DirectX 11 in a few years, if you're only using them to do stuff that you could have done just as well in DirectX 10, does it really matter that you're using DX 11? The headline feature of DirectX 11 is tessellation, I'm not that optimistic that we'll ever see a widespread embrace of what tessellation can really do, simply because people coding the games don't have the math background for it.
On the other hand, I'm a lot more optimistic about geometry shaders getting widespread use, and that was the most important new feature of DirectX 10. That's probably coming soon, but we'll need for game developers to decide that they no longer care to support Windows XP, Intel HD Graphics or earlier, or Radeon X1000 series or GeForce 7000 series or earlier cards. Geometry shaders can see an entire primitive all at once, rather than only one vertex or pixel at a time. They can also read in one primitive and output several primitives or none at all. That adds a ton of flexibility.
In which case you'd be better off jumping up to a 7950 / 670gtx
And your point was?
This is actually very backwards. Sapphire is the premier AMD card company, tier one. Sapphire has actually led innovation in the video card market for a long time.
XFX and Powercolor represent the tier two and the motherboard manufacturers represent tier three.
In fairness in using video cards from AMD my experience is Sapphire is number one, with MSI and Gigabyte making number two. After those three I do not bother.
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