GTS250 vs. GTX 9800+

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 4:22 pm

okay Krom, besides the additional Memory and slightly faster clocks speeds.

the GTS 250's im looking at have 1GB of DDR3 and the 9800+'s im looking at have 512 DDR3

would getting 2 GTS 250's running both 16x on a EVGA FTW200 P55 board be better than running 2 pure 9800+'s?

this is the board im getting:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813188057

this is one of the potentials

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130514

this is the other potential

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130339

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 7:50 pm

They are the same chip, the only difference is the amount of memory. Look if the target game you want has any advantage for going to 1 GB of memory over 512 MB at the resolution/settings you intend to use it at.

But seriously, don't do SLI. It is just a bad idea period. If you are trying to get rid of input lag and make your system more responsive then remember that SLI does absolutely nothing for input lag at all, it nearly doubles your framerate in some cases but it always doubles the input lag per frame.

If you want a real improvement in responsiveness, just bite it and get yourself a 465 instead (if you are really stuck on nvidia). Or better yet pick up a Radeon HD 5850, they are awesome and well worth the price. Less heat, less power, less noise, but so much faster its practically embarrassing to buy nvidia right now. In a lot of games a single 5850 will NOT lose in raw framerate to a SLI GTS 250 / 9800+ setup, even if you used TRIPLE SLI.

snoopy · Post by **snoopy** » Thu Jul 01, 2010 5:11 pm

Krom,

Know how ATI's linux support is these days? I know it used to be pretty bad.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jul 01, 2010 7:11 pm

Well a bit of looking says they have improved, but still have a long way to go. The good news is apparently they are planning on open sourcing the drivers, but hopefully they don't use that as an excuse to drop further in-house development of them. I'd say it is probably a safe bet to assume an ATI card will still give you issues in Linux.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 9:52 am

Nvidia just launched a new card that really makes the SLI 250/9800GTX+ debate moot. The GTX 460: pick up a 1 GB version and it comes pretty close to the Radeon 5850 in a lot of games but at a $230 price point. Cheaper and faster than SLI and only needs 160w, not to mention it is the quietest reference card at that performance period.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 5:26 pm

okay so this card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130557

given that the board i chose will play both cards at 16x the 460 will still out perform them both?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 5:31 pm

The 465 is a piece of crap and hogs way too much power (its a stripped down GF100 instead of a GF104 like the 460). In plenty of cases the 460 is faster than the 465 because the 460 has more texture power.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvid ... e-200-king

And yeah, it'll still outperform a 2 generation old SLI rig.

Just note that the 1 GB 460 is definitely faster than the 768 MB one, and it is totally worth the extra $30 and two week wait to get your hands on a 1 GB card.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 7:05 pm

well i dont think i need a full GB, unless BF-BC2 can use that much......

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 7:21 pm

Nah, you need the full GB because the 768 MB one only has 192 bit memory while the 1 GB one has the full 256 bit memory. The only way nvidia had to cut down the memory from 1 GB to 768 MB was to disable the ROPs and that kills the memory bandwidth.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 8:21 pm

now I wonder how their sub 200 range cards will look like.

too bad they are taking their time releasing them

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 8:29 pm

fliptw wrote:now I wonder how their sub 200 range cards will look like.

too bad they are taking their time releasing them

Money Money Money, they need to make a return on their investment and workstation cards come after the initial high end card release then the price point cards

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 6:18 pm

okay stubborn SLI question......

i can afford two 460's with the 768 how would that work

dammit yes i am stubborn

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:54 pm

If you want to spend that much, get a 400 dollar card.

You are pretty much buying more hassle than FPS.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 11:39 pm

SLI is retarded, and always will be.

Doesn't matter if you have two full x16 slots, or even if you had two full x32 PCIe 3.0 spec slots (4x the bandwidth of a 2.0 x16 slot), it's still retarded and it still won't scale beyond ~70% the vast majority of the time.

A big part of the reason why I dislike SLI is that most people don't realize that a system with SLI is actually MORE laggy than a system with just one of the cards in it because of the way SLI/crossfire works. Also some people tend to think that SLI with two 768 cards means they have a full 1536 MB of video memory which is wrong since almost everything has to be duplicated between the cards so you are still stuck with 768 MB available video memory.

Just give it up, I'll never recommend a SLI over a single card.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 7:47 pm

okay okay, no SLI. now the 470? with 1280mb and 320 bit DDR5?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 8:49 pm

It is a decent performer (comes in between the Radeon 5850 and 5870 often enough) but its also a fairly big card, hot, power hungry and noisy.

One cant really complain too much about the performance of the 470 and 480, but the temperature and noise really kill them for a lot of users. They are quite obnoxious during a game or any other time they are loaded and if you have a quiet computer it really sours the deal. Also since they do run so hot there is some lingering suspicion in the industry that it will have a significant negative impact on their lifespan. Remember the old jokes from Nvidia about the GF 5800 series involving hair dryers and leaf blowers and motorcycles? Well the 470 and 480 are actually louder...

I still have just a single 8800 GT in my system and it does well enough at every game I throw at it with only a little tweaking (even fairly recent ones), in the long run I just think quieter and cooler cards like the 460 1 GB make more sense. High end cards are pretty much always terrible investments.

If you have the extra cash then snoop around at other parts you could spend it on that would pay off better in the long term. Like grabbing yourself a smaller SSD to speed up your OS, there are some impressively fast SSDs out there for about $200. A new smaller flash node is due out in another quarter or so which should drop prices and speed it up even more. A quality SSD is a hundred times a better investment instead of blowing another $200 on more video that is just going to be slow and outdated in another few months anyway.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 1:43 pm

how much for these 460's ?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 2:57 pm

$230 for the 1 GB ones mostly (only size worth looking at since the 768 has disabled ROPs == slower). Perhaps a little more for the factory overclocked ones.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 6:30 pm

that aint bad at all, release date?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 6:34 pm

Within the next 10 days (you can already get the 768 MB ones, but most of the 1 GB ones won't be in stock yet).

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Sun Jul 18, 2010 6:45 pm

i can wait for the few days

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon Jul 19, 2010 7:03 am

I saw some in stock on newegg already a couple days ago... Check around and there may be some randomly available online.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Mon Jul 19, 2010 2:29 pm

waiting for eVGA

wow!

first day and they sold out in 3 hours

which is better EE or non EE

TOR_LordRaven · Post by **TOR_LordRaven** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 9:40 pm

Krom wrote:SLI is retarded, and always will be.

...

A big part of the reason why I dislike SLI is that most people don't realize that a system with SLI is actually MORE laggy than a system with just one of the cards in it because of the way SLI/crossfire works.

...

Just give it up, I'll never recommend a SLI over a single card.

I will have to disagree here.

I was running with One 9800 GTX+, and installed a second one using SLI.

I got nothing but improvements to the games i play. Granted, its not exactly Double, but its close..

I don't have the exact specs, but if I got 100 FPS in Portal before, i am getting about 160FPS now. And have not seen any lag or drop in performance over my input devices (USB KB and Mouse, not Wireless).

The 9800 GTX+ chips run at a pretty fast clock rate, and fast memory too, but if you can go with the other card to get more RAM, go for that and go SLI. I love it.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 10:04 am

now that im looking at the 460 with a gig on it, im probably going to get that, or i may go back to dual 9800GTX+ Superclocks

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 5:28 pm

TOR_LordRaven wrote:I will have to disagree here.

I was running with One 9800 GTX+, and installed a second one using SLI.

I got nothing but improvements to the games i play. Granted, its not exactly Double, but its close..

I don't have the exact specs, but if I got 100 FPS in Portal before, i am getting about 160FPS now. And have not seen any lag or drop in performance over my input devices (USB KB and Mouse, not Wireless).

The 9800 GTX+ chips run at a pretty fast clock rate, and fast memory too, but if you can go with the other card to get more RAM, go for that and go SLI. I love it.

It is one thing to have a single card and later on upgrade to SLI, it is something else entirely to buy a SLI right out of the gate when there are single cards around that are faster than the target SLI system would be.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Sun Jul 25, 2010 5:33 pm

new question....

okay im going with the 460 EE super clocked and its the AR version with lifetime warranty.

im reading that it needs a 450 minimum. so would a 650 PSU be sufficient? right now i have a 850 modular from corsair w/ silver efficiency. im guessing that 650 is not enough for the entire system?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun Jul 25, 2010 5:54 pm

The GPU draws 160 watts at load (over two PCIe plugs since the limit is 150 watts each) and less than 30 watts at idle, 650 should be plenty as long as you aren't overclocking.

So basically if you have two 6 pin PCIe power plugs, you automatically have enough power to handle it.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Sun Jul 25, 2010 6:56 pm

im happy with my gtx 460.

Heretic · Post by **Heretic** » Sun Jul 25, 2010 7:12 pm

One note about power supplies you only use what the system draws. Say you have a 800 watt power supply and your system uses 500 watts max you will only use 500 watts of the 800 leaving you power to spare for upgrades.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Sun Jul 25, 2010 9:34 pm

i know about supply and demand...... i just want enough room for 2x Cavair Black HDD's, 2x 24x DVD Burners, the GTX 460 1gb EE, eVGA FTW200 mobo and the i5 760 CPU. plus a ton of fans in the CM HAF 932 Blue case

dwlpunk · Post by **dwlpunk** » Mon Jul 26, 2010 2:19 am

i have a radeon hd 5750. i am very pleased with the speed in all current games, and im glad i shopped around for my pc. phenom II x6 cpu, 8.1GB ram, 1.5TB for under $1000.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon Jul 26, 2010 7:57 am

AceCombat wrote:i know about supply and demand...... i just want enough room for 2x Cavair Black HDD's, 2x 24x DVD Burners, the GTX 460 1gb EE, eVGA FTW200 mobo and the i5 760 CPU. plus a ton of fans in the CM HAF 932 Blue case

A normal desktop hard drive uses about 10 watts, a DVD burner uses about 25 watts (only while its burning). A standard 120x20MM yate-loon fan that came with my case uses 3.6 watts.

If you want a quick reference the Anandtech test system with a GTX 460 in it pulled 291 watts at the outlet while loaded running Crysis Warhead. The system included an overclocked i7 920 (3.33 GHz), 6 GB of DDR3 in an intel x58 motherboard and used a OCZ SSD. So add 20 watts for the hard drives, 50 watts for the dvd burners and we will be generous and say you have about 6 average 120MM fans in your case each pulling around 5 watts for a total of 30 watts. So with your two hard drives, and two dvd drives, and 6 case fans you have added 100 watts to the mix.

Keep in mind anandtechs figure is 291 watts at the outlet which includes the inefficiency of the PSU, so the actual load is probably going to be about ~85% of that or around 250 watts. So add 100 watts to that, multiply by around 1.17 taking into account the PSU efficiency and you come up with a total load power of 409 watts. Granted this scenario is assuming you are actually playing Crysis Warhead while burning two DVDs and powering up / defragmenting your hard drives at the same time... Otherwise normally when the HDD and DVD burners are working you are going to see the GPU and CPU at closer to their idle power numbers which came out at 160 watts at the outlet.

So yeah, 850 watts is plenty.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Aug 05, 2010 8:06 pm

Double posting here...

So I got myself a GTX 460 1 GB card (This one), actually I think it is a bit shorter than the 8800 GT I pulled out of my system.

A quick round of testing shows that I'm hitting the CPU limit on practically everything with my old Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3 GHz. Fire up good old Crysis, turn all the details to their highest, play at the 1280x960 desktop resolution with 4x AA...and it is still faster than the 8800 GT at 640x480 with no AA. Very impressive. Far Cry 2 in DX 10 mode with everything on ultra high, crashes right into the CPU limit that the 8800 GT could just barely touch at lower resolutions. Unigine DX11 Heaven benchmark...wouldn't even run on the 8800 GT, plays back perfectly smooth around 30 FPS on this card.

Heat and noise: the 8800 GT was pretty quiet at default fan speed which it almost never came out of but at full fan was an obnoxious hair drier. Haven't heard a peep out of this one yet, was a little different turning on my PC and not hearing the GPU fan rev up to full speed for a few seconds before BIOS loaded. Speedfan says around 45-47C idle, gets up to 70C pretty quickly loaded, the 8800 GT hit upwards of 90C load, idled in the high 40C to low 50C range so this is a good bit cooler.

OCZ 700w PSU seems to be handling it fine, the card uses both PCIe plugs available from this PSU. Also driving 3 (sometimes 4) hard drives, a DVD burner, 8 or 9 fans and a bunch of USB peripherals.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Fri Aug 06, 2010 5:48 pm

yeah im waiting for my GF to get the funds on her Card. and then ill most likely be getting this system.

Krom wanna see the latest wishlist?

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Wed Aug 18, 2010 5:42 pm

hey krom, stubborn SLI question........

what do you think two 1gb 460's from evga would do?

i just picked up a FREE VA8000B Armor case from my electronics recycling job, and i now dont have to buy a case which is popping me an extra 150$ available

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Wed Aug 18, 2010 6:19 pm

Other than get considerably hotter than a single card?

Plenty of benchmarks (including the 460 in both single and SLI configuration) here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvid ... e-200-king

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Wed Aug 18, 2010 6:39 pm

Krom wrote:Other than get considerably hotter than a single card?

heh, all im trying to do here is be future proof for the next 2-3 years

here is the case if anyone is wondering what i got for FREE! and its worth about 100-110 still!!

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Wed Aug 18, 2010 7:24 pm

SLI isn't really future proofing.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Wed Aug 18, 2010 8:02 pm

AceCombat wrote:heh, all im trying to do here is be future proof for the next 2-3 years

Heh, there is no such thing as future proofing your video card. Throw a ton of memory and a fast multi-core CPU at the system and you can keep that much running for 2-3+ years easily, but it'll need a new video card in 12-18 months or even if you grab a quad SLI GTX 480 overclocked.

GTS250 vs. GTX 9800+

GTS250 vs. GTX 9800+

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