The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I would say that you're buying XFX's name, if you buy their card The cards merely have different names on them.

As well as buying their warranty

 

Rob: Not really. It might be slightly quieter due to having a better cooler, but apart from that, the $25 doesn't really get you much. HIS are a reasonable brand, but if you want guaranteed reliability, the XFX is probably a safer bet.
Omega: Not all cards are alike. The HIS is non-reference which means HIS have built it. The XFX is reference, which means ATI have built it. This usually ensures a higher quality standard, but HIS are usually pretty solid.

 

how are they in the temp ranges? do they tend to run hot.

 

Not especially, typical temps for reference 5770s are in the 70s or so, a good 30C below the danger zone.

 

Just for the record both of my 5850s are Sapphire reference. Never had an issue with Sapphire as long as it's reference...

I dunno anymore about Nvidia vs ATi. Value vs performance whatever it doesn't matter. Nvidia cards basically have a deathclock on them these days so you're essentially buying a product guaranteed to fail just because of how they made it.

 

Death clock seems a little harsh, as that implies they are designed to fail at a specific time, i.e. just after the warranty expires. I've not seen any evidence of that, but I have seen that typically nvidia cards last up to about 3 years, rarely much longer. Of course, to the major enthusiast, that's considered upgrade-o-clock anyway, but I have seen their GPUs fail earlier than that.
Though I imagine the incendiary high-end fermi cards are even worse, hardware reliability isn't the reason why I wouldn't buy nvidia cards. For me, it's just how corrupt the company is.

 

how do you tell if its reference or not? is it in the description?
how about this HIS here. it is a little more in price but more clock speed.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161333

im looking at these mostly for the hdmi on the card. wanting to hook it up to my tv for videos and such. can you get a dvi to hdmi adaptor? if so is there a quality loss from doing so?

 

All reference cards look identical, save for a sticker. If any card looks different to the reference design, it will look noticeably different.

Pre-overclocked cards are always a waste of money. They're less reliable, and it's easy to overclock the miniscule amounts they come pre-applied with yourself.

All reference HD5700 and HD5800 series cards come with HDMI ports included as standard, the use of a dongle is not required.

 

I'll be honest though that XFX's XXX and Black Edition cards seem pretty reliable to me. Though they usually have a custom PCB to begin with. Nice quality cards

On another note I've seen countless BFG OC Edition cards fail. 6800s, 7800s, 8800s, need I say more?

I'd rather just get a stock card to match my performance needs than rely on the quality and performance of a factory OCd card. And home OCing is just as bad. Stupid way to lose a piece of hardware for such a small performance gain overall...

 

Eeek! I hope my BFG 260 doesn't fail :S It's an OC'd edition...

 

To be fair to BFG, pre-overclocked nvidia cards don't last that long anyway, from any brand. I've seen huge numbers of EVGA cards fail even when most of them weren't pre-overclocked. Best thing you can really do with nvidia cards is to get one with a good warranty, and as far as I've heard, BFG are second to none for that. Well, sorry, were. BFG are no more sadly..

 

Well then again I've never been a great fan of Nvidia cards of any kind so you could call me biased to a degree. I feel that non-OCd cards are more bearable to use though. Nvidia's own issues aside, if a company has a decent enough warranty you can still be pretty well covered. My MSI 8800GTS has a 3 year warranty that I'm about 2 years into and still going strong. IMO OCd cards only force you to use that warranty sooner.

Such a shame that XFX doesn't really make Nvidia cards anymore. Because of the custom PCBs on most of their cards they tend to be a lot more reliable. I almost got a pair of the XFX Black Edition 5850s but they were quite a bit more expensive and I had limited my budget for a graphics upgrade...

 

Well, they didn't say it was permanent. Perhaps with the not-terrible-ness of the GTX460, they'll be convinced to move back. Dunno though, they seem pretty disillusioned with nvidia by comparison. The quality they've brought to the ATI arena coupled with being among the cheapest has made them a massive success over there.

 

Agreed XFX is one of the best GPU mfgs I've ever seen.

 

wonder if they will try mobos next? their PSUs seem fantastic esp for the price.


BTW guys i was wondering but if you buy a game from steam how do you find out its CDkey?

 

Email

 

The game presents a popup when it is launched in the same manner as a steam friends message which displays what the CD Key is the first time it is run. This notification is only disabled if you choose to turn it off, if I remember rightly.

Also, XFX have made motherboards, they did it back when the nforce chipsets were still around, along with the likes of EVGA.

 

This is true. XFX only made Nvidia chipset boards though. I would be interested to see what they could do with an AMD chipset. Their component quality is never an issue, it was always the dying Nvidia chipsets. I can't remember an Nvidia board with a good reputation since NForce 5. My ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe was a 590 SLI MCP and it was great. So I'd be willing to believe that XFX could make a good AMD board.

 

That's because there hasn't been one!

I'd be kind of interested to see XFX make some proper boards, as there is no company that doesn't frankly suck at it, one way or another, at the moment. No brand can you buy from without their being some reasonably annoying flaws, be it poor build quality, dodgy BIOSes, needless bad design or whatever else. At the moment I'd say the least reliable component in the PC of all is the motherboard. Why should that be? On a per-system basis, it's about the simplest component of the entire system, especially with chipset-less boards like the P55, which still seem to suffer. Next one up is probably joint between the optical drive, hard disk drive and graphics card, the latter due to bad partner companies, weak drivers, and nvidia, as a whole. PSUs, provided you buy from a reputable company, are actually quite high on the list. The CPU is definitely at the top.

 

Speaking of cpu, Sam, how are you, all in all, liking that i5 of yours? Do you keep it at 4.2ghz, or was that just to get your 27000 3dmark6 score? If you have ratcheted it down since then, what do you usually run it at?

Here's Jeff from a few days ago, on his Habu:

YIKES!!! That 2000 dpi resolution is twice what I'm getting with my Logitech v220 wireless. (I have bought four of them for me and two other laptop users - I like it so much I got an extra for the gaming machine.)

I remember that one of the Steel Series had a quick-change dpi setting so that when you got somebody in your counterstrike sights on the other side of the map, you could slip from 600 to 1600 for lining up the head shot.

Jeff, when you are running consistently at 2000 dpi, in addition to lining up the shots when you have a little time to go for accuracy, does that work fine also for running around the map and shooting quickly when you are caught by surprise, or when shaff comes hopping along? - is it just a matter of fine-tuning the mouse sensitivity?

Hey Rob, you can probably get an adapter, but the hdmi should send out digital sound from your on-board sound card, if you have on-board sound, and I believe the dvi is video only. So that will leave you with having to mess around with getting the sound over to the tv set.

My brother has an 8 gig HP phenom Vista computer that he does some cad/cam on, but basically we're using it now as an HTPC for the new 47" HD Toshiba, and the ati card is an Ati 512mb 3830, about half the power of my 512mb 3850, but plenty of power for DXGA (direct x graphic accelaration) according to articles on the net, for blue-ray quality hd video. I was very surprised to spot an HDMI port on the 3830, and to my huge surprise and some control panel tweaking of the digital sound settings, the HDMI cable beautifully handles both video and audio to the TV.

Hmmmm - I don't know if I could agree with that, Jeff, but of course compared to your 5850s, I've got a cheap card - my 3850 was only $110 on ebay, and is probably only about $60 right now. If I didn't have it overclocked like crazy (with that aftermarket zalman 1000 you told me to cool it with) there is no way that I'd be able to get any kind of decent frames on Left 4 Dead 2 - I push the overclocking wayyy above stock on gpu and memory, and I know I'm picking up at least +5 fps which puts me in the high 20's or low 30's most of the time.

Yep, you're outa luck, Kevin! - just kidding

By the way Kevin, now that you've re-installed Left 4 Dead, after Steam mercilessly made you wait an hour while it loaded that new map - hahahaha - DID YOU EVER GO ONLINE??? No I'm not kidding - Did you ever do it?

I'm asking because I know you love playing offline with the bots - and you're not a regular player, just once in a while - but online with the mic - chatting with buddies - when ya gonna do it? LOL

Rich