Video Card Recommendations

[flip]

What is the best 6000 or 5000 series video card for under 200 bucks? I mainly want to play Descent and MW2 but maybe some other games. I've looked at Newegg off and on but there's so damn many it gives me a headache.

[snoopy]

I recently bought this:

ASUS GTX460 1 GB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card ENGTX460 DirectCU/2DI/1GD5

and am happy with it.

[Heretic]

I think he wants an ATI.

[Foil]

Best PCIe Card under $200 (May 2011)

Check out the Heirarchy Chart on the last page of the article, it's a decent quick-reference for performance comparison.

[Krom]

That THG article is already out of date and is just picking favorites. Use the Anandtech GPU bench, they post up the numbers for you in a bunch of easy to understand graphs and you can pick which card you want from there: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU11/188

A 6870 runs for around $175-$200 and its performance is most often right in the middle between a GTX 460/1 GB ($160) and a GTX 560 Ti ($235).

[flip]

It looks like the 6870 chip is gonna be the best bang for buck. What's the CF suffix mean? I notice those score higher than the other 6870's.

EDIT: Heh as soon as I posted I realized it must mean Crossfire . They damn sure don't make it easy to choose do they?

[Sirius]

Then that means they're using two of them... you would want to look for the non-"CF" numbers.

[flip]

Any opinions on this card?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102935

I mainly want to play the COD series on high settings and at this price getting 2 is not out of the question. Would 2 of these cards crossfired outperform say a single 6970?

[Krom]

In a word: No.

In more than one word, First: 480 stream processors x2 = 960 stream processors which is fewer than the 6870's 1120 stream processors, so its already at a disadvantage just in raw power. Take the Anandtech bench for example, the fastest configuration on the chart is a pair of GTX 580 cards in SLI which scores 93.6 FPS, compare them to the single card GTX 580 which scores 56.9 FPS. Even though the SLI configuration has straight up double the power behind it (100% increase), it only manages to be 64% faster than the single card and that is in one of the oldest games that has been subject to the most optimization.

Second; a similar design single GPU card with 1 GB of RAM at the same speed/bandwidth and a total of 960 stream processors at the same clocks would always outperform those two cards by a comfortable margin, it is physically impossible for Crossfire/SLI to scale as well as a single card.

Third the 6870 will have considerably more memory bandwidth which matters a lot as the resolution goes up. In two cards the memory isn't doubled, its duplicated so each card will have exactly the same thing in its memory when in use so there are no memory bandwidth/capacity advantages from using two cards.

And that isn't even taking in to consideration the power consumption problems associated with SLI/Crossfire.

[flip]

So your saying to go with whatever deal I can get on a 6870, but go with the 6870?

I know that sounds like a jackass question but I don't really know enough about the tech to make a decision here.

[Krom]

Yeah, for $175-$200 range the 6870 is the clear winner for the AMD camp (even if you counted Nvidia cards the 6870 is probably still the best option for that price range).

[ReadyMan]

What's on the horizon for nvidia cards?
I'd like to get more umph than I get from my 460, but paying $500 for a 580 seems like a bad idea...especially if there's a new line of graphics cards on the horizon.

[Krom]

Things are pretty quiet lately and I haven't heard any news about the next generation parts from either brand, there probably won't be much movement till TSMC gets their 32nm node matured. I would imagine neither AMD or Nvidia are going to mass produce a GPU on 32mn for a while because both of them got burned by TSMC at 40nm.

So in effect both AMD and Nvidia are currently being held back by TSMC and this is unlikely to change in the near term unless Intel starts selling some 32nm fab capacity.

[flip]

How much performance do you lose running a 2.1 card on and pci-e 2.0 bus. I don't see a great need to upgrade in the near future after this purchase, so is it a waste of money for me to buy a 2.1 card?

[fliptw]

2.1 only added some power management features, its the same speed as 2.0.

[Tunnelcat]

Unless you want to go the water cooling route, try to find a card with large cooling fans, preferably 2 of them side by side. I've got a EVGA GTX 480 and although it performs very well, it gets hot as all dickens and sounds like a vacuum cleaner on steroids when fully ramped up. It's only got one measly undersized fan. I'm trying to get more fans mounted on my case to get the thing to run less than the 89 degrees C it climbs up to when it's working hard. I've seen a few in the Nvidia 500 series and a couple of the 400 series that have better cooling solutions. Not sure about ATI.

[Krom]

Top of the line cards are generally loud and the GTX 480 is notoriously loud and notoriously hot. My 460 / 1 GB on the other hand is virtually silent and doesn't even reach 80C at load (idle is ~45C), I've never been able to pick out the sound it makes over my 120MM case fans which are also pretty hard to pick out at only 21 dB.

[Tunnelcat]

Are you happy with the performance of your 460? I might consider downgrading to that series just because of the noise, but I'd hate to lose some of my video memory going from 1.5 G to 1 G. There was also this option, but it would void the warranty on the card since you have to take it apart to install the new fans and heat-sink. I don't know if I'm that adventuresome, yet.

Another guy did this, which seems like a simpler idea. I've also purchased a Coolermaster 4 in 3 device module, that has it's own fan, which will allow me to mount my hard drives up inside my 3 empty 5.25 drive bay spaces and allow all of the lower chassis fan air to blow into the videocard inlet.

[Krom]

Performance is quite acceptable on pretty much everything (that isn't Crysis anyway, and even Crysis holds 30 FPS most of the time). Granted that is at 1600x1200 resolution, higher resolutions won't hold up as well in some games. It really depends on what you play, games older than a couple years will generally perform well on a 460 no matter what you do.

I can't really give the full picture on the performance of this card anyway because I'm CPU limited by my Core 2 Duo @ 3 GHz in most games and I don't plan on upgrading the CPU for at least the next few months.

I'd say skip the 460 and do a slide to a 560 Ti or a 570 instead, both cards are much quieter than a 480 and the 570 will actually come in a bit faster often enough. Granted neither is quite as inexpensive as a decent 460/1 GB card, but the 460s are also a bit crowded with the 768 MB variant and the SE variant (both of which are slower than the vanilla 460 / 1 GB part). Going from 1.5 GB to 1 GB of video memory is pretty much irrelevant unless you have a big 2560x1600 display, at any lower resolution most games aren't going to care beyond about 512 MB anyway.

[Tunnelcat]

Thanks Krom. I'm running a resolution of 1920 X 1200, so the 480 does help a bit. I might look into the 570 as prices drop. My 480 isn't that old either.