GPU Question: Attn. -nVidia 570- & -ATi HD 6970- owners

[Hikozaemon]

*sigh*

yea, we obviously need more fanboyism on these forums -_-

and i don't even know why you mention having a hard drive, as that's a required component in a system. Also, depend on a person's usage, a dual core may not be sufficient to run both FF14 and whatever else he's running, and the list goes on and on and on... Basically, you're looking at it from a singular "I iz AMD fanboy gamer" perspective, while I'm trying to offer him brand-loyalty-free advice that hopefully would give him what he's looking for. Also, nvidia isn't overpriced this generation, neither is Intel overpriced, AMD just haven't been able to put up much of a fight. AMD needs to step it up with their next CPU, they haven't been able to compete with Intel in anything other than the budget segment for awhile now.

Back on topic, both nvidia and amd offer competitive product across all price range this time around, and you're unlikely to go wrong with either one, which means go for the ones with the best deal you can find within your budget range.

i was being a smartass since you where going out of your way to be one. I'm giving the OP my opinion and telling him not to waste money when he can get better for less; unless he wants to pay more and get less thats his decision. And AMD has no problem competing. They dont worry about minuscule gains and charging there customers 100's of dollars for minute and sometimes unnoticable differences in technology; they offer a very good product for a fair price. Next you'll tell me alienware PCs/laptops arent 4000% overpriced and are the best thing next to sliced bread.

[Konachibi]

i was being a smartass since you where going out of your way to be one. I'm giving the OP my opinion and telling him not to waste money when he can get better for less; unless he wants to pay more and get less thats his decision. And AMD has no problem competing. They dont worry about minuscule gains and charging there customers 100's of dollars for minute and sometimes unnoticable differences in technology; they offer a very good product for a fair price. Next you'll tell me alienware PCs/laptops arent 4000% overpriced and are the best thing next to sliced bread.

Try Dell. my friend paid £2500 for a brand new 'up-to-date' PC, then I went out and spent £300 upgrading mine and it ended up better than his.

He was not best pleased.

[Aenarion]

i was being a smartass since you where going out of your way to be one. I'm giving the OP my opinion and telling him not to waste money when he can get better for less; unless he wants to pay more and get less thats his decision. And AMD has no problem competing. They dont worry about minuscule gains and charging there customers 100's of dollars for minute and sometimes unnoticable differences in technology; they offer a very good product for a fair price. Next you'll tell me alienware PCs/laptops arent 4000% overpriced and are the best thing next to sliced bread.

I wasn't, but you certainly are.

what's cost-effective depends entirely on what the intended usage is, and without knowing the whole picture, you can't make anything more than vague suggestions that aren't all that helpful to anyone.

and no, outside of a few exceptions, you don't pay more for less, you pay more for more, you just have diminished return on the extra money spent, unless you're utterly incompetent in choosing your components.

And please, it's hardly a secret that AMD has not been able to compete in the upper segment since Intel pushed out Conroe, and it has only gotten worse for AMD as time went on, which is why AMD has been concentrating their efforts in the oem/budget segments until Bulldozer is ready for debut.

Not saying the Phenoms are bad, they can certainly hold their own against comparable Intel offerings in the price range, it's just that the range doesn't go very high. Nor is the differences "minute". This isn't a matter of opinion here, go check the benchmarks on any tech site, AMD simply has no answer to Sandybridge atm.

and no, alienware sucks balls, but thanks for the fail strawman attempt.

[Darkshade]

Oh I guess that would help.

asus m4a79t deluxe

Phenom 955 OC @ 4.1GHz

8GB DDR3

Yeah I have quite a bit invested into Steam.

Used for video game playin', video editing and encoding, photoshop, dreamweaver, firefox with 20 open tabs and 20 memory bloated extensions.

[Fear]

I have an ATI ASUS Radeon 6950HD (slightly slower than the 6970) and I can run the game completely max. apart from Ambient Occlusion, full shadows, the lot and maintain a stable 40-60 FPS, sometimes it can drop to 35 but just take off the Physix and lower res to 9 and its a solid 50-60FPS.

My Settings and specs:

Intel i5 2500k

ASUS Radeon 6950HD 1GB

Windowed
1920x1080
16xQ CSAA
Draw Quality 9 (10 causes lag due to 1GB graphics card....knew i shoulda got the 2GB)
Background 5
Shadows: Highest
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Depth of Field: Off
Texture quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

[Konachibi]

Personally I would go with the nVidia. From previous experience nVidia did have a bit of a slip with the series 8xxx and series 9xxx geforces but they've improved a lot since then, but all 4 of the ATI cards I've had in the past have had one or two problems with them, usually in the areas of poor RAM handling or struggling with fast frame changing. Seriously the ATI 4650 HD I bought couldn't even run WoW Cata in 1024x768 without the frame-rate dieing horribly in Stormwind, but then I took that back and swapped it for a Geforce 210 which cost the same price, and that works fine for FFXIV with all settings on medium, apart from a bit of a drop in frame-rate in some overly graphical areas (Black Shroud).

I've found nVidia to be much more game friendly and their nview program just seems to operate better than ATI Catalyst does.

[Aenarion]

Personally I would go with the nVidia. From previous experience nVidia did have a bit of a slip with the series 8xxx and series 9xxx geforces but they've improved a lot since then, but all 4 of the ATI cards I've had in the past have had one or two problems with them, usually in the areas of poor RAM handling or struggling with fast frame changing. Seriously the ATI 4650 HD I bought couldn't even run WoW Cata in 1024x768 without the frame-rate dieing horribly in Stormwind, but then I took that back and swapped it for a Geforce 210 which cost the same price, and that works fine for FFXIV with all settings on medium, apart from a bit of a drop in frame-rate in some overly graphical areas (Black Shroud).

I've found nVidia to be much more game friendly and their nview program just seems to operate better than ATI Catalyst does.

the 8000 series were great when it first came out, it only became an issue when nvidia kept rebadging the same thing and call it the 9000 series, and then even tried to do it again when they were switching to the 200 series.

Frankly, I've never had much issues with any of my video cards, nvidia or ati/amd, the 8800 was great, the HD5850 kicked ass, and now the GTX580 is doing just fine.

[Konachibi]

the 8000 series were great when it first came out, it only became an issue when nvidia kept rebadging the same thing and call it the 9000 series, and then even tried to do it again when they were switching to the 200 series.

Frankly, I've never had much issues with any of my video cards, nvidia or ati/amd, the 8800 was great, the HD5850 kicked ass, and now the GTX580 is doing just fine.

The problem with the 8 and 9 series were their poor quality fans. The cards were prone to overheating and shutting off the computer (known on the nvidia forums as 'the black screen of death') which was a problem nVidia never addressed, mostly 'cos they knew they screwed up. I found the problem I had with my Geforce 9500GT was sometimes the fan wouldn't switch on when I booted up the computer, so I had to prod the fan with a pen whilst the computer was running to get it spinning and stop my computer from melting at 120 degrees. Since then though the quality of their cards has improved back up to the standards they were before the series 8's so they're much more reliable now.

*Please Note: Do not prod the insides of your computer with anything whilst it is operating, only fully trained experts or stupid people like me should do things like that*

[Darkshade]

Thanks for the information. Keep it coming, I do appreciate it greatly.

Also note that I have a 128GB SATA2 SSD which my OS and XIV are installed on.

Also please note if the graphics ever stutter/choke even if you get 60FPS most of the time and whether or not you have an SSD.

[Elkwood]

Thanks for the information. Keep it coming, I do appreciate it greatly.

Also note that I have a 128GB SATA2 SSD which my OS and XIV are installed on.

Also please note if the graphics ever stutter/choke even if you get 60FPS most of the time and whether or not you have an SSD.

SSD fixed my stuttering issue, for some odd reason SE makes the game timestamp like thousands of files a minute while play idk why but they do.

and your main question all depends how much you want to spend and what you want to do. In your case for the price of 1x GTX 570 I would consider getting 2x 6xxx series cards and tossing them into a crossfire setup provided you have the sufficient PSU to handle the multiple cards.

AMD designs there chipsets that run there chips to work best with Raedon cards they have done so ever since AMD bought out ATI.

Nvidia cards have a few extra driver options last I looked most notably the ability to have the physX settings handled by another cheaper video card or the CPU. I am not sure if Raedon cards have matched this setting or not. In any case the Crossfire setup would definitely outperform the single card nvidia setup in any regard.

Me Personally I will be tossing 2x GTX 570 into my setup when I build my new PC next year when Intels new Ivybridge Chips and the 2012 Chipset is out just because of how the Intel system performs with a SSD much less what the new motherboards will have on them. PCIE 3.0, USB 3.0, SATA 6, and Thunderbolt, but that's just me. If you have the money there is a lot of hardware changes due out by March and it may benefit you to wait until the early part of next year to make any upgrades.

Just so your aware im running

AMD Phenom 1090t
ASUS M4A7 + Motherboard
8GB DDR2 (Yes I know its DDR2 it sucks)
OCZ Vertex II 160GB SSD
EVGA GTX 470 with a custom Cooler as the fan setup on these sucked

I run XIV in

1920x1080 - 60FPS out of town 45 FPS in town
0x AA
All Standard Settings

There really was not that much of a difference between standard and high so I elected to drop settings to keep video card running cooler.

My new setup is going to be

Ivybridge Chip not sure which one yet there all 6 or 8 cores with hyperthreading
24GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM OC to 2200- for 250 dollars cant go wrong here
EVGA SR3 Motherboard
2x GTX 570 SLI
1000w PSU Either Corsair or Silverstone