The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I've noticed for some time now, that AMD graphics cards seem to have more memory than the Nvidia counterpart. I've always wondered why that is. Why doesn't Nvidia step it up several notches? It only benefits after all LOL!

 

Actually it's been the opposite way round for a long time until recently when AMD decided to step up their game.

06/07: HD2900XT 512MB (1GB optional extra) 8800GTX: 768MB
07/08: HD3870 512MB 9800GTX: 512MB
2008: HD4870 512MB (1GB optional extra, later made standard) GTX260: 896MB, GTX280: 1GB
09/10: HD5870 1GB GTX480: 1.5GB
10/11: HD6970 2GB GTX580: 1.5GB (3GB optional extra)
2012: HD7970 3GB GTX680: 2GB

 

Clearly I've been looking at the wrong cards :S Well, what I more or less meant, was that my card should be 2 or 3Gb. NOT the odd size that it is LOL!

 

Is the nvidia way of doing things. They take a 'minus one fraction' approach to their next card down, whereas AMD usually don't change the memory quantity until lower down the ranks. Example:

8800GTX 768MB 8800GTS Mk I: 640MB (HD2900XT and HD2900 Pro both 512MB, but 1GB only offered on XT)
GTX280/285 1024MB, GTX260 Mk I/II: 896MB (HD4850 and HD4870 both 512MB, but 1GB only offered natively on 4870)
GTX480 1.5GB GTX470 1.25GB (HD5870 and HD5850 both 1GB, 2GB only offered on 5870 Eyefinity6)
GTX580 1.5GB GTX570 1.25GB (HD6970 and HD6950 both 2GB)

It's not inconceivable that the GTX670 might end up being 1.5GB, but who knows, they might not now that they're on the underside.

It's worth noting that for the 8800s, it's 12 chips vs 10 (12x64=768), for the GTX200s it's 16 chips vs 14, and for the GTX400s it's 12 chips vs 10.

 

OK. I think I understand. Silly me LOL!

 

Likewise at the time my video cards were faster combined(and cheaper) than a single high end card and they came at a good price. Anyone here knows I have a habit of side-grading though(Q6600->PHII 940, 5850->6850, etc)

Crossfire has been more or less reliable for me. Certainly worth having the second card for when it does work. Most games(roughly 90%) scale very well with Crossfire. The only complaint I can level is that Crossfire scaling is heavily dependent on drivers, which AMD are sometimes way too slow to release. They do pay attention when big-name titles come out though.

I'm at an interesting spot right now. Seems my processor is much less of a bottleneck than I thought. In fact, my video cards have been a bigger bottleneck all along. So my next upgrade is definitely going to be a video card(s). Preferably something with 2GB as I'm now meeting my limit in BF3. Ofc if with new video cards, my processor finally becomes a bottleneck, I'll be looking at replacing that as well. Hopefully with SandyBridge or similar but I'd take an X6 guaranteed at 4GHz+ quite happily.

 

What a shame the new AMD offerings weren't more impressive. It probably would've allowed the prices of 1090t/1100t to drop a bit more. One of those would make me happy for a long time...

 

Well, never mind the prices, the X6s were fine as they were, but AMD pulled the plug and discontinued them. That's their biggest mistake.

 

Yeah it's a damn shame. AMD really kicked themselves there.

 

Sam,

I have the XFX HD-4670 with 1GB DDR3 memory. A lot of the other 4670s came with DDR2 memory. I'll be keeping the old XFX card as a backup, since it's a pretty good card to begin with.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

They're gonna become increasingly difficult to find. Wonderful And ebay sellers are getting/asking ridiculous amounts.

 

To be honest, 1GB is completely lost on cards that low end. A nice advertising feature perhaps but it served no real purpose in the real world.

 

Yep am running into a few people stressing on video memory in the low end lately. Reminds me of the shared memory cards in the low-end starting at about the X300/6200 series. They would commonly be advertised as up to 512MB or 1GB while the card itself was really 128MB or 256MB. Then it would steal from your system RAM, and at the time 300-700MB gone to your video card could be most of your RAM. It sold a LOT of crappy video cards to would-be gamers. I don't know if those are so popular anymore but I used to see them quite often.

So far BF3 has been the only thing to even show a mild limit on my cards in video memory. Plus I'm playing at settings a 4670 would likely never touch, and thus not even touch the memory usage. 512MB would more than likely be ample for that card. Was for my Crossfired 4870s. Never met a memory limit in the time I used those cards. Funny enough I would still compare Battlefield 3 quite closely to most of Crysis and Warhead. Crytek were truly ahead of their time by miles(or years lol). The games certainly run similarly as well.

 

Sam,

Maybe not, but the DDR3 sure makes a big difference, over the DDR2. It's also one of the least expensive 320 Stream Processing Unit video cards you can buy. The GTX550 only has 192 Processor cores, but the memory is over 5 times faster. This card was on the recommended list from the Custom Software manufacturer for my AutoCad software. I'm going to install it tonight and we'll see how it all works.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I have a quick question about my SSD. Is there anything special I need to know if I want to wipe the drive. I may be putting XP on it for a while. I haven't decided on 32 bit or 64 bit yet.

TIA,
Russ

 

You should be able to just delete your partition and re-partition it with normal formatting as you did when you installed the first time.

If you defrag then it does get to be a problem as you don't want to run a normal defrag tool on an SSD. Which also means you should turn off the Windows scheduled defrag tool when doing a new install.

Sad to hear you are still thinking of going back to XP,
Stevo

 

Indeed. Windows 7 is fully ready for SSD. But hey. I have a very old stereo system. I don't see the need in upgrading it. It has 5.1 which is good enough for me. And the towers sound very good. Do I really need HD audio? I don't think so. It's a selling gimmick.
If Russ likes XP, I say go for it. I'm toying with windows 8 on the side It's interesting... but I don't know if I'll be buying it. Perhaps if I had a touch screen, I'd see it differently

 

There have been many problems with XP 64 and drivers, so investigate whatever drivers you will need. Also, XP doesn not have auto Trim, which Win 7 does, so Defrag could be cumbersome.

I think you are fool to leave Win 7, unless you have a specific problem(s) with it.

Best of luck, whichever route you go.

 

Well...i'd hardly call it foolish. If there are workarounds, then I can understand a wish to stay with XP at the moment. SOME softwares/devices are not supported. My sister in law for instance has a particular device that isn't supported. Plus windows 7 is more resource intensive. The user interface is slightly different too. My mother still prefers her XP machine over her windows 7 badboy. I pretty much gave up. I told her when the machine dies though, and XP isn't supported, she's really gonna need to let it go.

 

sytyguy,

The last time I installed XP-Pro 64 bit, I had fewer problems with programs than I'm having with Win7! I think I had one main program that would not work, and that was 1 Click Fixer, which is a great program. There were other programs that I could install and work around, like Win RAR. I know you can use 7 Zip, but it will not open every Win RAR file, nor will Win RAR open every 7 Zip file. It doesn't work on Win7 64 bit. GIFs are another big pain with Win7. It doesn't support them except in Preview, which is totally stupid. They did a lot of strange things when it came to Win7. Oh well! I just want to experiment a bit with a couple of different Operation Systems, using the SSD.

The GigaByte GTX550/1GB GDDR5 Video card turned out to be a much better card than the XFX HD-4670/1GB DDR3. It raised my Windows Experience Index from 5.3 to 7.1. Once I get Win7 to accept the AHCI drivers during installation, it will be even higher. I'm happy. The two fans make a lot less noise than the single fan of the HD-4670, as well.

Best Regards,
Russ