The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

for the price they arnt bad, but considering its a generation bump, im not happy with the results at all. Where the 1920 shader cayman? .

i think jeffs 2x6850s, that i was wery of before are looking better and better IMO.

 

There was never a reason to be wary of two HD6850s. They're the best value card of this era, and they also have the highest crossfire scaling of any card that has yet been produced. It is plain common sense that top-end GPUs aren't as good value as midrange cards, so they were never going to be beaten at that.

The HD6950/6970, or more realistically two of them, make sense at 30" resolution. At lower resolutions they are quite weak, but they are also cheaper than the geforce alternatives, as well as being more efficient.
Think of this as basically like the HD5870 vs GTX480 situation again.
The GTX480 was faster by 5-6% but used considerably more power, 295W versus 190W.
The GTX580 is faster than the HD6970 by 5-6% but uses a fair bit more power, 290W versus 210W.

The GTX470 was faster than the HD5850 by a negligible 3%, but used more power, 230-270W versus 150W.
The GTX570 is faster than the HD6950 by a very neglible 1-2%, but uses more power, 235-270W versus 170W.

It really is about the same. Both generations have experienced a 20% performance increase through refreshing. The difference is, the geforces have done it without a power increase, the Radeons haven't. This said, the power increase for the HD6900 series is nowhere near high enough to account for the inefficiency of the Fermi cards, even now.

The problem is, AMD are almost competing with themselves. The HD6870 and HD6950 are only £25 apart, only 20W apart, and only 12% performance apart, at most. The cards make the most sense if you forget that they're two separate product lines. Just imagine it as:
HD6970 -> HD6890
HD6950 -> HD6870
HD6870 -> HD6850
HD6850 -> HD6830

They follow in order of price, £140,£190,£220,£280.
They follow in order of performance, 150,170,190,215.
They follow in order of power consumption, 127W,151W,171W,212W

 

A little tidbit I thought I'd share on overclocking graphics cards:


HD6850 775/1000->950/1200 (22.5%/20% increase): 127W->171W (35% increase), 15% extra performance

GTX460 1GB 675/900->940/1175 (39%/30% increase): 175W->260W (49% increase), 25% extra performance

 

the 4xx series of cards can oc nicely. The gtx 470 easily equates to a 480, the 480 a 580, tthe 460 a 470.

 

However, how long they last at those overclocks doesn't even bear thinking about. I'd bet less than a year average.

 

Looking forward to seeing Warhead on two 6970s

This is of course Gamer Quality, by the way, not enthusiast.

 

Not much difference between the 580 and 6970. And a heap of wattage difference! The 580 is a furnace! Much like my phenom 940 LOL!

 

I'm not sure even your 940 used 290W of power!

 

LOL! I simply mean, when I turn that machine on, things heat up in here. I generally see an increase of 6°F or more! Suffice to say, I only run that machine when I need to take some load off the primary

 

PC off - room cold
PC on - room warm

Is about that simple for me. Moving from the 4870X2s to the HD6970s will be a real culture shock. A pair of HD4870X2s uses about 150W at idle (as much as a mildly overclocked X4 940 at full load, or a stock HD4870/HD5850/HD6870 at full load).
Two HD6970s will use a comparatively teeny 35W.

 

35W idle? That's impressive! Or do you mean 350W?

 

No I mean 35W. Lol, 350 would be ridiculous!

 

im thinking about jumping to dual 6950s myself. I dunno if i can wait till the GTX6 / 7000 series.

that or dual 570s because i wanna try nvidia again haha.

 

Dual 6950s are certainly far better value than Dual 6970s it must be said. Thinking from the viewpoint of relative performance, I'm still undecided on which of the two pairs to go with.

I'd be careful with dual 570s, if you're using the 850W BeQuiet I sold you, that's unlikely to cope with the power demand, it couldn't handle 572W of 4870X2s, so 540W of GTX570s is unlikely to be much different.
Meanwhile two 6950s at a very mild 340W is much more efficient. It's also faster, most of the time

 

arnt dual 6970s as bad as dual 580s? i would assume then that its the same for dual 6950s and 570s

 

Nowhere near.
The HD6950 is a 170W card. The GTX570 uses between 230 and 270W.
The HD6970 is a 210W card. The GTX580 uses 290W.

 

For the record my 940 was also a room heater. HW Monitor reports it as a 140W CPU(Which is likely given the temps) and reports my 955 as 113W.

I know this isnt an entirely dependable rating, but given the temps from both CPUs, doesn't seem too far from the truth.

 

According to bit-tech In Prime95, the X4 940 loads at around 155W including the chipset, and the X4 955 at around 180W. Lower than the 230W of the 9950BE, but still, the opposite way round to what is being implied.
Likewise in cinebench, the X4 940 loads around 130W including the chipset, versus the 140W of the X4 955, 145W of the Q9550, 160W of the i7 920, or 180W of the i7 965.


CPU power numbers are all over the place, we all know the Q9550 uses less power than the X4 940, but different tests show bizarre results.
The overwhelming message here though is in fact that the X4 955 is more power-hungry than the 940 that came before it.

 

Then why does my Phenom II 955 run so much cooler and report a lower wattage?

 

Indeed. My 965 runs cooler then the 940. Granted I have water cooling on it Voltages are lower though too...