Decent rig, but your HDD does not fit in this setup! And maybe 12gb is a bit overkill, you wont find any use for any more than 6gb for a good few years.
I would stick with 6gb (go for 1600 if poss), drop a 60GB SSD for OS in there, it makes phenomenal difference. And go for at least a caviar black, or other branded similar.
I would agree with the solid state drive sentiment. I went from a 7200 rpm drive setup to one with RAID 0 Crucial SSDs made for Sata 6.0gb/s (which is what they are on), and the difference is phenominal. So much less waiting around, installing programs is much faster, uninstalls are nearly instant, game load times are much nicer - it's a huge improvement.
I'm not sure to be honest if I'll ever need SLI/Crossfire as I mainly play MMO's and from what I've seen there isn't much there thats going to push me into needing two video cards.
Rift for exemple, now with AA added specially SSAA, if any1 wants to play with decent fps will pretty much need 2 high-end cards.
What are you talking about...Rift doesn't require 2 high-end GPUs to max out. On the GTX275 I have I easily get around 35-42fps{yes even during massive invasions} on max, and its a rather old GPU. And I read from others during FPS discussion in-game that 8800 and 9600 can still push in upwards of 20-25fps. which is still decent and not laggy.
What he is talking about is that if you try to use the new 2xSSAA, and especially the 4xSSAA, then in order to still have a high FPS you will need 2 of the better cards. See before you couldn't even force AA. And one decent card worked, as long as your resolution was appropriate to the card.
Oh, and at least on the Nvidia side of the house, I know the 266.58 drivers have an SLI profile for Rift. So I'm looking forward to trying it out in the next beta event. (I have 2 systems, one with SLI GTX-470s, and another with SLI GTX-275s. Then again I like to run games at 1920x1200, with everything turned up. So that's why I like SLI.)
Originally posted by Xion1985 Your right I did forget to link my power supply Antec EarthWatts 650W EPS I can afford to get the caviar black, to be honest I didn't really know there was much of a difference. It actually looks like it may save me money to go the route of something like this instead Asus P8P67 LE Aud/GbLan/SATA6Gbps/USB3/1394/RAID ATX Core i7 2600 3.4GHz 8MB LGA1155 Onboard GPU
Hey, ENU, just bought a laptop hard drive there a couple days ago..
But yea, you should be looking at an i5-2500k with 4GB of ram, decent p67 mobo, WD Black OR an SSD + WD Green, ~650W PSU, Radeon 6950 or Geforce 570 GTX..
That's pretty much top of the line without getting extorted for halo products.
What are you talking about...Rift doesn't require 2 high-end GPUs to max out. On the GTX275 I have I easily get around 35-42fps{yes even during massive invasions} on max, and its a rather old GPU. And I read from others during FPS discussion in-game that 8800 and 9600 can still push in upwards of 20-25fps. which is still decent and not laggy.
When you play at 2560 x 1600 resolution with settings cranked, two high end GPUs definitely help with Rift, believe me.
What are you talking about...Rift doesn't require 2 high-end GPUs to max out. On the GTX275 I have I easily get around 35-42fps{yes even during massive invasions} on max, and its a rather old GPU. And I read from others during FPS discussion in-game that 8800 and 9600 can still push in upwards of 20-25fps. which is still decent and not laggy.
When you play at 2560 x 1600 resolution with settings cranked, two high end GPUs definitely help with Rift, believe me.
For that ridiculous resolution I would think so. For normal non over the top, single cards will be more then fine.
Owner/Admin of GodlessGamer.com - Gaming news and reviews for the godless.
Decent rig, but your HDD does not fit in this setup! And maybe 12gb is a bit overkill, you wont find any use for any more than 6gb for a good few years.
I would stick with 6gb (go for 1600 if poss), drop a 60GB SSD for OS in there, it makes phenomenal difference. And go for at least a caviar black, or other branded similar.
I would agree with the solid state drive sentiment. I went from a 7200 rpm drive setup to one with RAID 0 Crucial SSDs made for Sata 6.0gb/s (which is what they are on), and the difference is phenominal. So much less waiting around, installing programs is much faster, uninstalls are nearly instant, game load times are much nicer - it's a huge improvement.
You probably don't see much better performance from two SSDs in RAID 0 than from one SSD. One larger SSD also means fewer things that can go wrong than two smaller SSDs in RAID 0. While I very much like SSDs, there isn't much sense in putting them in RAID.
Also note that there are some cheap junk SSDs on the market that you should avoid. Presumably you have the Crucial RealSSD C300, which is very good. The other realy good ones are the ones with a SandForce controller, but those aren't always labeled as such; they're most easily identified by using 60 GB and 120 GB capacities rather than 64 and 128. The Samsung 470 and Intel X25-M are decently good, as is everything on the market from G.Skill and Mushkin. None of OCZ's SSDs are bad, but the older Indilinx ones are kind of dated by now. But you don't want to buy an SSD from Corsair, Kingston, Patriot, A-Data, or a number of other brands.
Originally posted by Xion1985 HAF 932 Black Full tower NoPS Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz WD 640gb 64M 7200 SATA 3 Caviar Black 8GB(2x4GB) DDR3 PC10600 1333MHz Matched Pair Crucial Asus P8P67 PRO Aud/GbLan/SATA6Gpbs/RAID/1394/USB3.0 ATx LiteOn Ihos 104 4x Blu Ray Antec True Power 650W MS Windows 7 64bit Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic 1gb I think from what I've gathered this seems decent.
I'd still cut the RAM down to 4GB and use the extra $40 to step up to the Radeon 6950 over the 5850.
Unless you have specific needs for memory 4GB is good. Windows will only assign a 32-bit application up to 2GB of memory (99.5% of games are 32-bit still), leaving 2GB for Windows and all your background apps which is plenty.
What are you talking about...Rift doesn't require 2 high-end GPUs to max out. On the GTX275 I have I easily get around 35-42fps{yes even during massive invasions} on max, and its a rather old GPU. And I read from others during FPS discussion in-game that 8800 and 9600 can still push in upwards of 20-25fps. which is still decent and not laggy.
When you play at 2560 x 1600 resolution with settings cranked, two high end GPUs definitely help with Rift, believe me.
and 99.9% of people dont, so it's a null argument.
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
Decent rig, but your HDD does not fit in this setup! And maybe 12gb is a bit overkill, you wont find any use for any more than 6gb for a good few years.
I would stick with 6gb (go for 1600 if poss), drop a 60GB SSD for OS in there, it makes phenomenal difference. And go for at least a caviar black, or other branded similar.
I would agree with the solid state drive sentiment. I went from a 7200 rpm drive setup to one with RAID 0 Crucial SSDs made for Sata 6.0gb/s (which is what they are on), and the difference is phenominal. So much less waiting around, installing programs is much faster, uninstalls are nearly instant, game load times are much nicer - it's a huge improvement.
You probably don't see much better performance from two SSDs in RAID 0 than from one SSD. One larger SSD also means fewer things that can go wrong than two smaller SSDs in RAID 0. While I very much like SSDs, there isn't much sense in putting them in RAID.
Also note that there are some cheap junk SSDs on the market that you should avoid. Presumably you have the Crucial RealSSD C300, which is very good. The other realy good ones are the ones with a SandForce controller, but those aren't always labeled as such; they're most easily identified by using 60 GB and 120 GB capacities rather than 64 and 128. The Samsung 470 and Intel X25-M are decently good, as is everything on the market from G.Skill and Mushkin. None of OCZ's SSDs are bad, but the older Indilinx ones are kind of dated by now. But you don't want to buy an SSD from Corsair, Kingston, Patriot, A-Data, or a number of other brands.
If someone has 2 Crucial SSDs connected to a SATA III controller, then they shouldn't need RAID0. All they are doing is disabling Trim and that means those drives will dramatically slow down over time. Reminds me of some of the other conclusions that people so frequently jump to... In this case RAID is definitely not the way to go.
Asus P8P67 PRO Aud/GbLan/SATA6Gpbs/RAID/1394/USB3.0 ATx
LiteOn Ihos 104 4x Blu Ray
Antec True Power 650W
MS Windows 7 64bit
Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic 1gb
I think from what I've gathered this seems decent.
Is the power supply an Antec TruePower New? The original Antec TruePower would be very, very old by now, and probably not appropriate for a modern computer.
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You don't really need 8 GB of memory for gaming. Memory has gotten cheap enough that on a big enough budget, you can go ahead and get 8 GB just so that you won't have to upgrade later, and can stay with two modules rather than ending up with four when you upgrade.
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Ordinarily, a Radeon HD 6950 would be around $300. Prices on 5850s vary greatly, depending on how badly the site wants to get rid of them. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic is a factory overclocked 5850 with a premium vapor chamber cooler. The factory overclock is far less than 5870 stock speeds, so it's perfectly safe, too. If the site has a good deal on that (e.g., cheaper than a 6870), I'd say go ahead and get it.
Never get the 50 series cards unless you want to save the money. Most of the 50 series chips are really nothing more then cheap knock offs. If at all possible go with the 5870 and stay away from the 6850. Heck most of the 6k series cards are junk compared to the 5870 or duel 5870's. The 6k series was more about cutting power useage down. They where targeted at the mid range of Nvidia cards. The 58 series was targeted at the then high end range of nvidia cards. ATI hasn't released there new series targeted at the now high end nvidia cards.
It's also worth noteing the that 6k series does have improved DX11 Tessleation support compared to the 5k series. But seeing as how there are only a few games that actually make use of it. It's fairly safe to go with the 5k series. Just know that in the future its not going to preform as good with DX11 games compared to the 6k series. But with DX10 and under games the 5k takes the lead in most scores and benchmarks.
If you really want a good combo. Go with the 58 series and get two of them. Run them in Crossfire mode.
Also always get as much ram as you can afford. I run with 12 gigs of ram and even if you never use that extra ram. You can always toss it into a ram disk and toss games onto it. Your load times will drop down to nothing for the most part.
Never get the 50 series cards unless you want to save the money. Most of the 50 series chips are really nothing more then cheap knock offs. If at all possible go with the 5870 and stay away from the 6850. Heck most of the 6k series cards are junk compared to the 5870 or duel 5870's. The 6k series was more about cutting power useage down. They where targeted at the mid range of Nvidia cards. The 58 series was targeted at the then high end range of nvidia cards. ATI hasn't released there new series targeted at the now high end nvidia cards.
It's also worth noteing the that 6k series does have improved DX11 Tessleation support compared to the 5k series. But seeing as how there are only a few games that actually make use of it. It's fairly safe to go with the 5k series. Just know that in the future its not going to preform as good with DX11 games compared to the 6k series. But with DX10 and under games the 5k takes the lead in most scores and benchmarks.
If you really want a good combo. Go with the 58 series and get two of them. Run them in Crossfire mode.
Also always get as much ram as you can afford. I run with 12 gigs of ram and even if you never use that extra ram. You can always toss it into a ram disk and toss games onto it. Your load times will drop down to nothing for the most part.
The 69xx is the replacement for the 58xx series.
Might wanna muffle that ass of yours before it starts to talk again.
Originally posted by Xion1985 At least on the site I'm at theres like 130 dollar difference between the 6950 and the 5850
Oops, you're right, I read the wrong line when pricing the 6950 from enu. In that case the only step up is the 6870 and it's a little hard to justify the 6870 over the 5850 Toxic. They're probably about the same speed due to the 5850 being overclocked and the 6870 being slightly slower than the 5870. The 6xxx series has improved anisotropic filtering over the 5xxx series, DisplayPort 1.2, and MLAA (which you can enable on 5xxx by setting a few flags in the registry), none of which really make it worth $30 more than the 5850 Toxic.
However they do have the 460GTX 1GB Superclocked for the same price as the 5850 Toxic (before rebate), and I think the 460GTX wins that fight.
"Never get the 50 series cards unless you want to save the money."
Well yes, the reason why people don't buy $500 cards is that they want to save money.
A **50 card from AMD is usually a lower bin of a **70 card. Depending on yields, it will sometimes offer better performance per dollar, and usually comparable performance per watt. They'll use the same GPU chip, but the **50 is clocked lower, which often means more overclocking headroom. Even at stock speeds, not being clocked as near to the chip's limits means it is more likely to last longer.
"Heck most of the 6k series cards are junk compared to the 5870 or duel 5870's."
Err, what? A newer series is junk? The newer series is better than the older series, or at least will be once the rest of the cards are out.
Also, your 5870s are dueling with each other? Better stop them before one ends up dead.
"They where targeted at the mid range of Nvidia cards. The 58 series was targeted at the then high end range of nvidia cards."
They're not targeted at Nvidia cards at all. They're both efforts at making a full lineup of cards with what at the time are the latest and greatest features at every price point and level of performance.
"ATI hasn't released there new series targeted at the now high end nvidia cards. "
The 6950 and 6970 are out, and have been for more than a month. The 6990 is a dual GPU card and a dumb gimmick. The 7000 series isn't coming until late this year.
"It's also worth noteing the that 6k series does have improved DX11 Tessleation support compared to the 5k series."
Barts and Cayman both go with two hardware tessellators rather than one like Cypress. I don't expect Turks to do this, and am pretty sure that Caicos won't. Regardless, one hardware tessellator is plenty for any real game. You only need more tessellation power than that for synthetic benchmarks. There might be a latency or scheduling argument for having more than one tessellator; I'm not aware of the precise engineering details.
"Just know that in the future its not going to preform as good with DX11 games compared to the 6k series."
Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series cards both fully support DirectX 11. In the games already on the market, the 6000 series cards don't fare notably better than 5000 series cards at DirectX 11 games than one would expect from DirectX 9 and 10 performance.
"Go with the 58 series and get two of them. Run them in Crossfire mode."
Err, why? One card is plenty of performance. CrossFire would mean having to pay more for a stronger power supply and higher end motherboard.
"Also always get as much ram as you can afford."
No. Always get as much memory as you need. But having massively more than that isn't helpful. If your system is only going to use 3 GB of memory, then it doesn't matter if you have 4 GB or 8 GB, provided that they have the same clock speed and same number of modules. The extra memory would just sit there idle. And if you have to buy more modules to get more memory, then that needlessly puts more stress on the memory controller and wastes electricity.
"You can always toss it into a ram disk and toss games onto it."
Even for enthusiasts who understand exactly how that works and when it is beneficial, it is only infrequently a good idea. Someone who isn't that tech savvy would end up doing more harm than good.
"Your load times will drop down to nothing for the most part."
That's what a solid state drive is for. A good SSD will save you more time than a ramdrive (because you have far more capacity and don't have to refill it after every reboot), will likely cost less than buying an exorbitant amount of memory, and will more reliably just work the way it is supposed to.
I'm not sure to be honest if I'll ever need SLI/Crossfire as I mainly play MMO's and from what I've seen there isn't much there thats going to push me into needing two video cards.
Rift for exemple, now with AA added specially SSAA, if any1 wants to play with decent fps will pretty much need 2 high-end cards.
What are you talking about...Rift doesn't require 2 high-end GPUs to max out. On the GTX275 I have I easily get around 35-42fps{yes even during massive invasions} on max, and its a rather old GPU. And I read from others during FPS discussion in-game that 8800 and 9600 can still push in upwards of 20-25fps. which is still decent and not laggy.
Well i knew this was gonna be relative but 25 fps is decent O.o?
Ya u have easly 35-42 now next beta try with only 4x AA and you'll see ur fps droping to 15-25.
But for me decent is having 45+, and my wish is to play at a constant 60 fps with 4x AA 1920x1080 which it will require me a second HD5850 to do CF.
At least on the site I'm at theres like 130 dollar difference between the 6950 and the 5850
Oops, you're right, I read the wrong line when pricing the 6950 from enu. In that case the only step up is the 6870 and it's a little hard to justify the 6870 over the 5850 Toxic. They're probably about the same speed due to the 5850 being overclocked and the 6870 being slightly slower than the 5870. The 6xxx series has improved anisotropic filtering over the 5xxx series, DisplayPort 1.2, and MLAA (which you can enable on 5xxx by setting a few flags in the registry), none of which really make it worth $30 more than the 5850 Toxic.
However they do have the 460GTX 1GB Superclocked for the same price as the 5850 Toxic (before rebate), and I think the 460GTX wins that fight.
Judging from the clock speeds, an EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1 GB Superclocked will probably only infrequently beat even a 5850 at stock speeds, let alone the factory overclocked 5850. As the GTX 460 is already a factory overclocked top bin of the chip, it's unlikely to have much more overclocking headroom, either, and pushing a card near its limits may well decrease the expected lifespan. You might be thinking of the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW that Nvidia passed around a lot last October, which was basically a press edition card with an enormous (and when commercially available, sometimes unstable) factory overclock that Nvidia tried to give the impression was typical of GTX 460s. Some disreputable review sites included it in the Radeon HD 6850/6870 reviews, which is what Nvidia tried to convince them to do.
I run tests on ATI and Nvidia cards but I tend to be a Nvidia user.
If you plan on playing a lot of games that run on heavy physics engines, the Nvidia Route has full physics support. However, Nvidia loses any form of advantage if it can not make use of its integrated technologies. ATI loses if an integrated technology is required for a game, but its not available.
Today, Video Card development is more about limiting the performance associated with running specific games when they require certain things to run under them than actually proving a raw, high-end framerate.
The two companies are opposite in philosophies.
ATI cards themselves are designed for raw gaming framerate and only that. Its follows "Specialist" properties where an object is great at one or two things, but average to below average in every other area. Of course they consume less power as well. ATI's latest series have MLAA which is something that I am looking forward to its evolution.
Nvidia cards themselves are designed for their well roundedness. They follow the "General" properties where an object has no clear master-specialization, but performs average to above average in every category. They consume more power due to their integrated technologies and the fact their processors are hybrids between a pure GPU core and a Physics Processor. Nvidia cards have full support for HDR and they also support the latest OpenGL (which is has surpassed and defeated practically every element of Direct X 11). By "Well-Roundedness" if you are a gamer who likes to make Mods and Program graphics and accelerate the desktop and run physics..Nvidia cards do it.
This creates Advantages and Disadvantages in Crossfire and SLI.
SLI advantage is the fact you can set one card to completely run itself as a physics processor and actually have a physics processor on the card to use. Crossfire is there for gaming itself, Just a second card that works and delivers..and there is nothing wrong with that.
Oh yes.
The last point:
The major difference between an Nvidia card and an ATI when looking at the big picture is that
an ATI card can play games on Windows and Mac OS X (which most of them are games that exist on Windows)
an Nvidia card can play games on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Of my top five current favorite games. Three of them are natively on Windows. One of them is on a Console and the last one is on Linux. If I owned an ATI card, I would be able to play my windows games, but my Linux game would crash (yes, it crashes the 6XXX series cards still)
If you read the thread, he says he's getting Windows 7, not Linux.
GPU PhysX is a stupid idea. Even if I had an Nvidia card and a game that did GPU PhysX, I'd probably still turn it off in favor of better, smoother frame rates in the game. There are what, three meaningful games now that use GPU PhysX? And to support it properly, you need a second video card that would only be used in those few games.
And no, the reason Nvidia loses so badly in performance per watt isn't that they're trying to be too general purpose. It's that they've got a bad architecture and/or haven't yet figured out what to do with TSMC's 40 nm process node. Going from GT200 to Fermi only brought maybe a 20% improvement in performance per watt, in spite of being a full node die shrink. That's awful.
Originally posted by Quizzical You might be thinking of the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW that Nvidia passed around a lot last October, which was basically a press edition card with an enormous (and when commercially available, sometimes unstable) factory overclock that Nvidia tried to give the impression was typical of GTX 460s. Some disreputable review sites included it in the Radeon HD 6850/6870 reviews, which is what Nvidia tried to convince them to do.
Indeed I was considering the FTW edition, but because this SC is 763MHz and the FTW was 800MHz (if I remember right). If the FTW was 850MHz which I'm starting to suspect it was then yea.. 5850 Toxic should be better.
I did totally disagree with review sites using that FTW in the 6850/6870 reviews.. FTW shoulda been a special review on its own, not part of a review of stock release cards.
The GTX 460 FTW was 850 MHz. The next highest factory overclock of a GTX 460 that anyone else released was either 815 or 820 MHz. If Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, Galaxy, and so forth all wanted to release as big of a factory overclock as they possibly could, and couldn't even come close to 850 MHz, then Nvidia probably had to do the binning, not EVGA.
As I said, it was basically a press edition card. New Egg only intermittently had them in stock, and they've long since been gone from New Egg by now. A few other sites had them at inflated prices. Tiger Direct was the only other site that sold them in the US. I'm not sure if they were sold at all abroad. A lot of the New Egg reviews complained that the factory overclock was unstable, too, so it wasn't a sensible card to get over a stock 6870.
Comments
I would agree with the solid state drive sentiment. I went from a 7200 rpm drive setup to one with RAID 0 Crucial SSDs made for Sata 6.0gb/s (which is what they are on), and the difference is phenominal. So much less waiting around, installing programs is much faster, uninstalls are nearly instant, game load times are much nicer - it's a huge improvement.
What he is talking about is that if you try to use the new 2xSSAA, and especially the 4xSSAA, then in order to still have a high FPS you will need 2 of the better cards. See before you couldn't even force AA. And one decent card worked, as long as your resolution was appropriate to the card.
Oh, and at least on the Nvidia side of the house, I know the 266.58 drivers have an SLI profile for Rift. So I'm looking forward to trying it out in the next beta event. (I have 2 systems, one with SLI GTX-470s, and another with SLI GTX-275s. Then again I like to run games at 1920x1200, with everything turned up. So that's why I like SLI.)
But yea, you should be looking at an i5-2500k with 4GB of ram, decent p67 mobo, WD Black OR an SSD + WD Green, ~650W PSU, Radeon 6950 or Geforce 570 GTX..
That's pretty much top of the line without getting extorted for halo products.
When you play at 2560 x 1600 resolution with settings cranked, two high end GPUs definitely help with Rift, believe me.
Owner/Admin of GodlessGamer.com - Gaming news and reviews for the godless.
You probably don't see much better performance from two SSDs in RAID 0 than from one SSD. One larger SSD also means fewer things that can go wrong than two smaller SSDs in RAID 0. While I very much like SSDs, there isn't much sense in putting them in RAID.
Also note that there are some cheap junk SSDs on the market that you should avoid. Presumably you have the Crucial RealSSD C300, which is very good. The other realy good ones are the ones with a SandForce controller, but those aren't always labeled as such; they're most easily identified by using 60 GB and 120 GB capacities rather than 64 and 128. The Samsung 470 and Intel X25-M are decently good, as is everything on the market from G.Skill and Mushkin. None of OCZ's SSDs are bad, but the older Indilinx ones are kind of dated by now. But you don't want to buy an SSD from Corsair, Kingston, Patriot, A-Data, or a number of other brands.
HAF 932 Black Full tower NoPS
Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz
WD 640gb 64M 7200 SATA 3 Caviar Black
8GB(2x4GB) DDR3 PC10600 1333MHz Matched Pair Crucial
Asus P8P67 PRO Aud/GbLan/SATA6Gpbs/RAID/1394/USB3.0 ATx
LiteOn Ihos 104 4x Blu Ray
Antec True Power 650W
MS Windows 7 64bit
Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic 1gb
I think from what I've gathered this seems decent.
Looks good to me!
Unless you have specific needs for memory 4GB is good. Windows will only assign a 32-bit application up to 2GB of memory (99.5% of games are 32-bit still), leaving 2GB for Windows and all your background apps which is plenty.
At least on the site I'm at theres like 130 dollar difference between the 6950 and the 5850
and 99.9% of people dont, so it's a null argument.
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
If someone has 2 Crucial SSDs connected to a SATA III controller, then they shouldn't need RAID0. All they are doing is disabling Trim and that means those drives will dramatically slow down over time. Reminds me of some of the other conclusions that people so frequently jump to... In this case RAID is definitely not the way to go.
Make sure you install the latest BIOS. 1155 ASUS boards are really finicky with RAM.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/1
Will show you where the different ATI cards place performance wise.
I personally would go for a 69xx just cuz it's newer tech.
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
Is the power supply an Antec TruePower New? The original Antec TruePower would be very, very old by now, and probably not appropriate for a modern computer.
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You don't really need 8 GB of memory for gaming. Memory has gotten cheap enough that on a big enough budget, you can go ahead and get 8 GB just so that you won't have to upgrade later, and can stay with two modules rather than ending up with four when you upgrade.
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Ordinarily, a Radeon HD 6950 would be around $300. Prices on 5850s vary greatly, depending on how badly the site wants to get rid of them. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic is a factory overclocked 5850 with a premium vapor chamber cooler. The factory overclock is far less than 5870 stock speeds, so it's perfectly safe, too. If the site has a good deal on that (e.g., cheaper than a 6870), I'd say go ahead and get it.
Never get the 50 series cards unless you want to save the money. Most of the 50 series chips are really nothing more then cheap knock offs. If at all possible go with the 5870 and stay away from the 6850. Heck most of the 6k series cards are junk compared to the 5870 or duel 5870's. The 6k series was more about cutting power useage down. They where targeted at the mid range of Nvidia cards. The 58 series was targeted at the then high end range of nvidia cards. ATI hasn't released there new series targeted at the now high end nvidia cards.
It's also worth noteing the that 6k series does have improved DX11 Tessleation support compared to the 5k series. But seeing as how there are only a few games that actually make use of it. It's fairly safe to go with the 5k series. Just know that in the future its not going to preform as good with DX11 games compared to the 6k series. But with DX10 and under games the 5k takes the lead in most scores and benchmarks.
If you really want a good combo. Go with the 58 series and get two of them. Run them in Crossfire mode.
Also always get as much ram as you can afford. I run with 12 gigs of ram and even if you never use that extra ram. You can always toss it into a ram disk and toss games onto it. Your load times will drop down to nothing for the most part.
The 69xx is the replacement for the 58xx series.
Might wanna muffle that ass of yours before it starts to talk again.
Oops, you're right, I read the wrong line when pricing the 6950 from enu. In that case the only step up is the 6870 and it's a little hard to justify the 6870 over the 5850 Toxic. They're probably about the same speed due to the 5850 being overclocked and the 6870 being slightly slower than the 5870. The 6xxx series has improved anisotropic filtering over the 5xxx series, DisplayPort 1.2, and MLAA (which you can enable on 5xxx by setting a few flags in the registry), none of which really make it worth $30 more than the 5850 Toxic.
However they do have the 460GTX 1GB Superclocked for the same price as the 5850 Toxic (before rebate), and I think the 460GTX wins that fight.
Err, yikes.
"Never get the 50 series cards unless you want to save the money."
Well yes, the reason why people don't buy $500 cards is that they want to save money.
A **50 card from AMD is usually a lower bin of a **70 card. Depending on yields, it will sometimes offer better performance per dollar, and usually comparable performance per watt. They'll use the same GPU chip, but the **50 is clocked lower, which often means more overclocking headroom. Even at stock speeds, not being clocked as near to the chip's limits means it is more likely to last longer.
"Heck most of the 6k series cards are junk compared to the 5870 or duel 5870's."
Err, what? A newer series is junk? The newer series is better than the older series, or at least will be once the rest of the cards are out.
Also, your 5870s are dueling with each other? Better stop them before one ends up dead.
"They where targeted at the mid range of Nvidia cards. The 58 series was targeted at the then high end range of nvidia cards."
They're not targeted at Nvidia cards at all. They're both efforts at making a full lineup of cards with what at the time are the latest and greatest features at every price point and level of performance.
"ATI hasn't released there new series targeted at the now high end nvidia cards. "
The 6950 and 6970 are out, and have been for more than a month. The 6990 is a dual GPU card and a dumb gimmick. The 7000 series isn't coming until late this year.
"It's also worth noteing the that 6k series does have improved DX11 Tessleation support compared to the 5k series."
Barts and Cayman both go with two hardware tessellators rather than one like Cypress. I don't expect Turks to do this, and am pretty sure that Caicos won't. Regardless, one hardware tessellator is plenty for any real game. You only need more tessellation power than that for synthetic benchmarks. There might be a latency or scheduling argument for having more than one tessellator; I'm not aware of the precise engineering details.
"Just know that in the future its not going to preform as good with DX11 games compared to the 6k series."
Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series cards both fully support DirectX 11. In the games already on the market, the 6000 series cards don't fare notably better than 5000 series cards at DirectX 11 games than one would expect from DirectX 9 and 10 performance.
"Go with the 58 series and get two of them. Run them in Crossfire mode."
Err, why? One card is plenty of performance. CrossFire would mean having to pay more for a stronger power supply and higher end motherboard.
"Also always get as much ram as you can afford."
No. Always get as much memory as you need. But having massively more than that isn't helpful. If your system is only going to use 3 GB of memory, then it doesn't matter if you have 4 GB or 8 GB, provided that they have the same clock speed and same number of modules. The extra memory would just sit there idle. And if you have to buy more modules to get more memory, then that needlessly puts more stress on the memory controller and wastes electricity.
"You can always toss it into a ram disk and toss games onto it."
Even for enthusiasts who understand exactly how that works and when it is beneficial, it is only infrequently a good idea. Someone who isn't that tech savvy would end up doing more harm than good.
"Your load times will drop down to nothing for the most part."
That's what a solid state drive is for. A good SSD will save you more time than a ramdrive (because you have far more capacity and don't have to refill it after every reboot), will likely cost less than buying an exorbitant amount of memory, and will more reliably just work the way it is supposed to.
Well i knew this was gonna be relative but 25 fps is decent O.o?
Ya u have easly 35-42 now next beta try with only 4x AA and you'll see ur fps droping to 15-25.
But for me decent is having 45+, and my wish is to play at a constant 60 fps with 4x AA 1920x1080 which it will require me a second HD5850 to do CF.
Judging from the clock speeds, an EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1 GB Superclocked will probably only infrequently beat even a 5850 at stock speeds, let alone the factory overclocked 5850. As the GTX 460 is already a factory overclocked top bin of the chip, it's unlikely to have much more overclocking headroom, either, and pushing a card near its limits may well decrease the expected lifespan. You might be thinking of the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW that Nvidia passed around a lot last October, which was basically a press edition card with an enormous (and when commercially available, sometimes unstable) factory overclock that Nvidia tried to give the impression was typical of GTX 460s. Some disreputable review sites included it in the Radeon HD 6850/6870 reviews, which is what Nvidia tried to convince them to do.
I run tests on ATI and Nvidia cards but I tend to be a Nvidia user.
If you plan on playing a lot of games that run on heavy physics engines, the Nvidia Route has full physics support. However, Nvidia loses any form of advantage if it can not make use of its integrated technologies. ATI loses if an integrated technology is required for a game, but its not available.
Today, Video Card development is more about limiting the performance associated with running specific games when they require certain things to run under them than actually proving a raw, high-end framerate.
The two companies are opposite in philosophies.
ATI cards themselves are designed for raw gaming framerate and only that. Its follows "Specialist" properties where an object is great at one or two things, but average to below average in every other area. Of course they consume less power as well. ATI's latest series have MLAA which is something that I am looking forward to its evolution.
Nvidia cards themselves are designed for their well roundedness. They follow the "General" properties where an object has no clear master-specialization, but performs average to above average in every category. They consume more power due to their integrated technologies and the fact their processors are hybrids between a pure GPU core and a Physics Processor. Nvidia cards have full support for HDR and they also support the latest OpenGL (which is has surpassed and defeated practically every element of Direct X 11). By "Well-Roundedness" if you are a gamer who likes to make Mods and Program graphics and accelerate the desktop and run physics..Nvidia cards do it.
This creates Advantages and Disadvantages in Crossfire and SLI.
SLI advantage is the fact you can set one card to completely run itself as a physics processor and actually have a physics processor on the card to use. Crossfire is there for gaming itself, Just a second card that works and delivers..and there is nothing wrong with that.
Oh yes.
The last point:
The major difference between an Nvidia card and an ATI when looking at the big picture is that
an ATI card can play games on Windows and Mac OS X (which most of them are games that exist on Windows)
an Nvidia card can play games on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Of my top five current favorite games. Three of them are natively on Windows. One of them is on a Console and the last one is on Linux. If I owned an ATI card, I would be able to play my windows games, but my Linux game would crash (yes, it crashes the 6XXX series cards still)
If you read the thread, he says he's getting Windows 7, not Linux.
GPU PhysX is a stupid idea. Even if I had an Nvidia card and a game that did GPU PhysX, I'd probably still turn it off in favor of better, smoother frame rates in the game. There are what, three meaningful games now that use GPU PhysX? And to support it properly, you need a second video card that would only be used in those few games.
And no, the reason Nvidia loses so badly in performance per watt isn't that they're trying to be too general purpose. It's that they've got a bad architecture and/or haven't yet figured out what to do with TSMC's 40 nm process node. Going from GT200 to Fermi only brought maybe a 20% improvement in performance per watt, in spite of being a full node die shrink. That's awful.
I did totally disagree with review sites using that FTW in the 6850/6870 reviews.. FTW shoulda been a special review on its own, not part of a review of stock release cards.
The GTX 460 FTW was 850 MHz. The next highest factory overclock of a GTX 460 that anyone else released was either 815 or 820 MHz. If Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, Galaxy, and so forth all wanted to release as big of a factory overclock as they possibly could, and couldn't even come close to 850 MHz, then Nvidia probably had to do the binning, not EVGA.
As I said, it was basically a press edition card. New Egg only intermittently had them in stock, and they've long since been gone from New Egg by now. A few other sites had them at inflated prices. Tiger Direct was the only other site that sold them in the US. I'm not sure if they were sold at all abroad. A lot of the New Egg reviews complained that the factory overclock was unstable, too, so it wasn't a sensible card to get over a stock 6870.