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6950 vs 560ti
Well its that time of year again. Time to betsy up my computer.
Specs-
AMD Phenom II Tri-core BE 720 OCed 3.2ghz
4gb DDR3 1333mhz
Variety of Highspeed Harddrives
ATI 4870 512mb Oced
600w Antec PSU
Mostly looking into getting into the Dx11 market. I'm not to clear which graphics card to get these days. Im a fairly ardent Ati fan but I have had Nvidia cards in the past. Not to keen to switch though because my current card isnt lacking for speed. In fact it goes to max settings on everything. It just doesn't have DX11.
The biggest contenders for the gpu's seem to be the AMD 6950 , 560ti and the 6870 if your on a budget. Im leaning towards getting 4gb more of ram and a 6870. What are your guys and gals opinions?
Comments
The 6950 easily outpaces the 560ti unless you selectively choose only games that are written for nVidia GPUs. I would recommend the 2GB version just because the multi-monitor support is a major selling point of the GPU and it comes in handy when going to high resolutions. The 560ti performs more at a level similar to the lower priced 6870. This is how its been in the GPU industry for some years. nVidia is 1 price bracket higher then AMD for a similarly performing product.
i would recommend checking out http://www.tomshardware.com/us/#redir
they compare cards and and stuff, a pretty good site for that.
and btw, ill be bying the ati 6950 for the exact reasons above poster stated
Techleo, since you already have 4GB of memory, adding four more will literally give you zero increase in any kind of meaningful computing performance. Games are never coded to take advantage of more than two gigabytes at the moment anyways, so unless you plan to have more than that in background processes, you'll never address your full 4GB of memory.
Getting the 6950 over teh 6870, on the other hand, will net you a substantial increase in performance.
All games are mainly made for nvidia plus support with drivers is better, but ATI very good card if drivers are ok and thats not always the case even today some still have problems.
On one note gaming industry is on stand still sinds vista developers are main concentrated for consoles and all PC games are dx9.0c even some games are going backwards instead forwards.
DX 11 is sofar a huge failor developers just dont make fully capable dx11 games they all stick in XP era:(
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Right now, I'd say don't upgrade until you come across a particular game in which you want better performance. Maybe that won't happen for a year, and then the next generation of cards will be out and you'll get something much better.
A GeForce GTX 560 Ti typically performs between a Radeon HD 6870 and a Radeon HD 6950, and closer to the 6950. You can get a 1 GB version of the 6950 for cheaper than the GTX 560, makin the 6950 a clearly better deal at the moment. If you play at unusually high resolutions, there are a lot of 2 GB versions of the 6950, and those crush 1 GB cards at 2560x1600 or higher just because of the extra memory.
Also, there is no such thing as a high speed hard drive. Hard drives are an intrinsically slow technology that cannot be made fast. To say that one is fast for a hard drive is to say that it's not fast at all, even if it is faster than most other hard drives.
Also the fact that some 90+% of 6950's can flash to 6970 and run at that performance level with no problems...
I think the 6950 is the best bang for the buck that has come around in years.
1 GB versions of a 6950 cannot flash to a 6970, and while a lot of the early 2 GB versions can, I'd expect AMD to crack down on that as soon as practical, so I wouldn't be terribly shocked if pretty soon, basically none of them can flash to a 6970.
Also, I'd be very surprised if 90% of 6950s can run at 6970 speeds, even before AMD tries to break that up. That would be an extremely unusual bin split, and nearly impossibly high yields for that large of a die. Now, quite a few of the early 2 GB 6950s could flash to a 6970. But not all of them.
Reference point for the 'gamble' that is unlocking the 6950: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/159
Eleanor Rigby.
It's best to unlock by using a modified 6950 BIOS with the extra shaders unlocked rather than using a 6970 BIOS. The 6970 BIOS is set to higher clock speeds for RAM and GPU, and the 6950 RAM isn't suited for the higher clocks.
It allows you to increase one thing at a time before becoming unstable - shaders, then gpu clock, then memory clock, rather than tweaking all 3 up at once.
I dare you to optimize your hard drive by assigning a few gigs of dump file to it(double of the ram), and then defragmentate while you installed the games you want to played on a freshly in stalled OS, while using a new sata hardrive(with good RPM and shizzle) vs. using a IDE harddrive without the above stuff, and you'll notice the difference that a harddrive, and how it is used can matter in game performance!"You resist. You cling to your life as if it actually matters. You will learn."
buy the biggest most affordable from ati!why?cause amd and ati tie are very strong!
by the way ssd will give you more performance increase then changing card.
You can partially work around the various problems that hard drives have that make them intrinsically slow. Yes, some hard drives are a lot slower than others, but none are fast. The real fix is to get a good solid state drive. That's many times faster than any hard drives can possibly be, even with RAID arrays of very expensive, high RPM enterprise drives.
Great comments on the Hard Drives. Very true its hard to get them to be fast. Its all a matter of relative speed in comparison to the dinosaurs I used to have. I have a few SSD's now and to me they are fast. Very fast in fact. Funny part is, I didn't pay for them. Someone gave them as payment for a job I did.
Managed to find a HIS H695F2G2M Radeon HD 6950 2gb for 239 bucks off of newegg on a special code deal. Planning to scrap the cooling shroud and put on one of the customs I make. I may be rusty at this but at one point I LOVED doing custom computers. Sigh, unfortunately not much work in the field.
I also managed to find a 27 inch large format monitor for 80 bucks on Craiglist ill be picking up. LOl they broke the HDMI output. Which I so happen to know how to fix. Feels a bit like X-mas.
Ok now on to the next thing I guess Ill get. A gaming mouse. You guys have any recommendations for a simple gaming mouse. Mostly for Mmorpgs. I made custom computers, I never used peripherals though.
just use ssd in raid 10 config!whatever you do make sure your graphic card is hooked via hdmi to screen.you cant?wait till you can then!
Thats one thing about my 4870 I was sad about. Not being able to do a direct HDMI outpout. With the 6950 and some fiddling I should be able to hook it into my sound system. Phew cant imagine how smexy that will sound.
And SSD (or hard drive solution in general) will help your overall system feel faster and perform more snappy, but it won't give you any more FPS in games.
I like SSDs, don't get me wrong, and they do amazing things for your boot time and game load/zone times, but they won't improve your frame rates - the video card has the single biggest impact there.
Also, be wary on HDMI output. On some card/monitor/TV combinations it will require the use of overscan correction. It's usually preferable to use DVI instead for video, and then a separate cable for audio, as you won't have to deal with the overscan.
I found the sweet spot for just gaming to be 6gb RAM. BUT since that means either 2x 3gb (i dun think ive seen this but i heard there was a company making 3gb in one stick) or 3x 2gb. First takes advantage of dual channel, 2nd takes advantage of triple channel. Idk which is better but i guess it depends on how many slots you have. Adding another 2gb will be cheaper than adding 4gb and you really wont need more than 6GB for games.
I run 4gb but I cant turn off virtual memory on quite a bit of games so...Im leaning towards increasing RAM.
''/\/\'' Posted using Iphone bunni
( o.o)
(")(")
**This bunny was cloned from bunnies belonging to Gobla and is part of the Quizzical Fanclub and the The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club**
Why do you want to turn off virtual memory entirely? There are a lot of things that will basically never be accessed, but need to be in memory for programs to function, and virtual memory is great for that.
Regardless, unless you have a Bloomfield processor, 6 GB is simply the wrong amount of memory to get. Memory chip capacities are always powers of two, and it's the same with memory modules. You cannot get 3 GB modules, and if you could, they would be horrible. You can get 2 GB or 4 GB modules. Most modern x86 processors have dual channel memory controllers, meaning you want either 2 modules or 4 modules, and all modules that you get should be identical. For most gaming systems, the appropriate thing to get is two 2 GB modules, and for most of the rest, two 4 GB modules are appropriate.
for the one that want to just use ram,just use ram disk or ram drive ,depending on brand,then deactivate paging file
you will need around 6 to 8 gig of ram!reserve 4 gig for ramdisk and that leave you with 4 g of ram ,faster then ssd so no more need to buy an ssd unless you have a game with lot of loading time!
To emphasize what Quiz said:
Unless you only have an SSD hard drive, and no other drive, and a large amount of physical RAM, it's highly recommended to leave your swap file "ON", even if you have a massive amount of memory.
It does absolutely nothing to hinder your performance, and turning it off will only save you a few G on your hard drive, while very possibly making your system unstable should you run into a situation where you did need it.
The memory manager in modern operating systems are very sophisticated. Many programs will request large amounts of memory when they initialize, just in case, but 99% of the time will only use a fraction of what they requested. The excess requested and unused memory is safely mapped to the swap file (but it isn't being used yet, and no data was transfered, so absolutely no performance penalty at all), and only the actual operating part of the program is kept in memory. But you get to keep all that physical RAM that otherwise would have been requested and hogged by the program.
The only reason it is recommended on a pure SSD system, with a large amount of physical memory, to disable to page file is because the excess write cycles on the drive can (marginally) reduce it's lifetime, since SSD drives have a limited number of write cycles. But you need to have enough memory (and this varied from person to person) to be able to support that. Even with a swap file on the drive, SSDs are still rated to provide upwards of 5 years of performance.
hmm for the mouse i really enjoy my razer naga http://store.razerzone.com/store/razerusa/en_US/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/categoryID.35208800 .
Its as simple as it gets, you dont have to use all the buttons but theyre there if you need em. you can make macros for em, and profiles. for example i have a profile for sto one for ddo one for gw and one for firefox (i use 1 and 2 to make text bigger or smaller via ctrl - = )
Ive had for about 1 year and it still works great even though my 2 year old son likes chucking it on the ground and it gets lots of use by me as i dont watch tv my spare time is spent on the net/gaming
lol i really enjoy being able to play my games with one hand while using the other to drink my beer or eat a sandwich xD
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
I've had two Razer mice, and both have been disappointments for me, the first broke after 6 months, the other seems to just quit randomly, and you have to unplug and plug it back in. As far as form, they are very well made and hold well, I just don't care for their quality. Maybe I just got a bad one, twice in a row. Just a small note of caution, as Razer mice are on the expensive side.
Personally, I liked the older Logitech G5's, but the newer ones don't seem to feel as solid, and I'm having trouble finding a replacement.
As a side note - this thread is all over the place
ram disk and page file dont work well toguether unless ms made w7 firendly with ram disk and page file!
Thanks for the compliment. I hate threads that are to coherent :-)
Well I got the 6950 in the mail and did some limited testing this morning. VERY solid performance. A bit quieter then my 4870 when its at idle. The cooling system is simply unacceptable as I expected. When will they learn to use wider heat sinks*facepalm*? I'll be having my friend bore out a aluminum heat sink tuesday and ill be putting in similar fans to what the frozr series uses with MSI cards. The nice thing is, the fans will be independent of the cards power systems, so I can do some unique tweaks. As for the grill, dunno yet. Nice thing is, I can get custom Aluminum work for free. YAY for a nice cousin
As for the mouse, I borrowed a friends Naga. I'm definitely looking for something cheaper but similar. The key pad was awesome with WoW! I'll keep ya informed if I find one. Truth be told I wish I still had my 20 year old Alps Touchmouse. Sigh, that mouse was a beast!