137 replies to this topic

[Catamount]

Vulpesveritas, on 17 January 2012 - 09:39 AM, said:

or your OCD about cooling like myself and want a non-electrically conductive TIM which lasts 4-6 years min before reapplication is needed i.e. It will last easily until I build my next PC.

Like I said, ease of application. I like non-conductive stuff too, and I like it to go on and not have me worry about it.

Ceramic-based compounds seem to work pretty well in that regard. AS Ceramique doesn't sit on the best side of the 2-3C performance difference, but it's non-conductive and has always lasted me a very long time. In fact, it has outlasted the systems I've used it on, because I've never had to do a re-application, except when upgrading the CPU or heatsink.



Still, isn't it good to know that when the zombie apocalypse happens, and our lives depend on booting up a computer without a heatsink on the CPU, that we'll be able to Macgyver a solution with peanut butter?

[Vulpesveritas]

lol toothpaste does slightly better

[Ashrok]

Never had issues with ATi cards before. In fact, the family switched over to ATi back when our GeForce 4 card burned out. Got an X1050, then, a few years later (or, quite a few years later), an HD4850. Love that card, was awesome when it was fresh, and it can still pump out good graphics till now.

Current system with me is also ATi. HD6990M, paired with an i7-2630QM (AMD doesn't have much in terms of high-end mobile processors) and 12GB RAM.

And still, rendering at production quality is still a pain. Great work for a laptop, though.

[Catamount]

Ashrok, on 27 January 2012 - 01:04 PM, said:

Never had issues with ATi cards before. In fact, the family switched over to ATi back when our GeForce 4 card burned out. Got an X1050, then, a few years later (or, quite a few years later), an HD4850. Love that card, was awesome when it was fresh, and it can still pump out good graphics till now.

Current system with me is also ATi. HD6990M, paired with an i7-2630QM (AMD doesn't have much in terms of high-end mobile processors) and 12GB RAM.

And still, rendering at production quality is still a pain. Great work for a laptop, though.

That is a NICE rendering machine, again, for a laptop

It must play games nicely, too

[Ashrok]

Catamount, on 27 January 2012 - 01:07 PM, said:

That is a NICE rendering machine, again, for a laptop

It must play games nicely, too

Thanks, Cata. Yep, it does everything better than my old desktop back home! Although I feel kinda bad that I got this before the die shrink to 28nm for GPUs. Oh well, gonna wait until line 8 or 9 before swapping out the GPU.

Biggest problem would be CPU, not sure if a mobile SB can be swapped out with mobile IB (or any future Intel model, for that matter. Knowing Intel, that's probably a 'no')

[Ares]

Been using nothing but AMD/ATI cards for last few years now. Gave up on Nvidia as it seemed everytime I got one they had hardware issues of different sorts. Some would run a game perfect but not other games at all. I haven't had any issues with the last few AMD cards so I have stuck with them.

Currently using 2 HD6770's in new build as I picked them up dirt cheap and waiting to see where pricing goes with the newer 7000 series cards.

[Catamount]

Ares, on 28 January 2012 - 09:00 AM, said:

Been using nothing but AMD/ATI cards for last few years now. Gave up on Nvidia as it seemed everytime I got one they had hardware issues of different sorts. Some would run a game perfect but not other games at all. I haven't had any issues with the last few AMD cards so I have stuck with them.

Currently using 2 HD6770's in new build as I picked them up dirt cheap and waiting to see where pricing goes with the newer 7000 series cards.

If you have two 6770s, then you're set for the moment, unless you really have need for more performance. Even a 7970, while an improvement, would give you maybe 70% more performance. Is that pretty good? Sure, but if you wait a generation or two, you'll be able to get a much bigger improvement for the same price.

Besides, a pair of 6770s is still a good setup for single-monitor use. You'll be fine playing any game at 1920x1080/1200 for awhile yet.

[Chuckie]

PGI is supported by Nvidia, Crytek3 Engine is sponsored by Nvidia.. I am going to take a wild guess and say the game will be optimized for....

Spoiler

Nvidia

[Vernius Ix]

Waiting on the MSI 7970 to see release. Currently have a 6970. Have used cards from both companies and always had more trouble with Nvidia. Maybe Kepler will blow my mind and that will be my next card instead of the MSI, who knows?

[Catamount]

Chuckie, on 17 March 2012 - 10:15 AM, said:

PGI is supported by Nvidia, Crytek3 Engine is sponsored by Nvidia.. I am going to take a wild guess and say the game will be optimized for....

Spoiler

Nvidia

Crysis 2 certainly doesn't work that way

The 7870 is as fast as the 580 in that game (it's a 4% difference). It's as fast relative to Nvidia cards as in almost every other engine (save the Anno1404/2070 engine, which seems to absolutely ridiculously favor AMD).

Some games will favor one or the other. Far Cry 2 absurdly favors Nvidia. Most games, however, show a similar same relative speed for both, often within a few percentage points either way, regardless of who designs it. Dishonest debacles aside (Assassin's Creed?), it's my experience that engines usually favor one brand of card over the other by coincidence, not design, and even then, this doesn't happen often. Again, most games show very similar relative performance, more reflective of the performance of the cards themselves than intrinsic optimization for one architecture or another.


Nvidia's likely going to have to win this the old fashioned way, by making good cards, and maybe Kepler will win, handily... maybe it won't. Time will tell, I guess

Edited by Catamount, 17 March 2012 - 12:31 PM.

[Beaker]

I've kept giving nVidia a chance, but the last 3 Graphics cards I had with their chipsets, and my last lappy caused me nothing but problems...

6600GT - Crashed, for fun, with driver issues.
8800GS - Dirver issues, and the reference fan sounded like someone trying to vibrate my machine to pieces. Got returned to the shop, and swapped in for a 2900, that ran flawlessly.
GTX 260 - Don't even get me started. I suffered with that card for 2 years, and only cheer bloody-mindedness made me keep it.

The Lappy GPU died at 10 months, and got "repaired" under warranty, then failed again 6 months later. I'll stick to ATi/AMD GPUs from now on unless they really let me down. I've never had one fail yet.

Edited by Beaker, 20 March 2012 - 02:17 PM.

[FallguySoldier]

As a graphics *****, I'm able to appreciate both nVidia and ATI GPUs. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. For example, nVidia has excellent PhysiX and 3D capabilities, whereas ATI has great video-rendering and Eyefinity. The lists to compare both can go on and on. As for gaming, just remember that some developers use certain game engines that are optimized for either GPU. For sheer graphics power, nVidia is the best, but for price/performance ATI has the edge.

Personally, I've been leaning towards ATI lately for the reasons that it's cheaper yet still achieves close benchmark results compared to nVidia, especially in Crossfire mode; and that it has better support for force AA games with HDR enabled. (As far as I know, nVidia still doesn't let you force AA with HDR unless it's set to Bloom.) But if I had money and if I didn't care about force AA + HDR so much, then I would definitely go back to nVidia. (Yeah, I said "back" because in the past I used to buy only nVidia cards.)

[Sn1per5566]

I prefer nvidia because of the driver support. Two of my roomates have ATI cards and neither of them can update the catalist control center, so their drives are outdated. When trying to update the software it crashes no more than 10 seconds in on both of their machines. One roomate even reformatted their computer and still had problems. The only drivers they can get are the ones windows automatically installs when the card is detected.

I have never had any problems with my nvidia card. Drivers update easily, the card is quiet and it doesnt get hot at all. My gtx 460 never gets above 50 and i have a 200 mhz overclock on it.

So both of my roomates never will buy ATI again and it has made me weary of upgrading my graphics card to an ATI in the future

[Vincent Vascaul]

Just so we are clear, ATI no longer exists and hasn't for a while now. AMD's driver support has gotten markedly better but still has some issues to be sure.

[Catamount]

Sn1per5566, on 20 March 2012 - 06:49 PM, said:

I prefer nvidia because of the driver support. Two of my roomates have ATI cards and neither of them can update the catalist control center, so their drives are outdated. When trying to update the software it crashes no more than 10 seconds in on both of their machines. One roomate even reformatted their computer and still had problems. The only drivers they can get are the ones windows automatically installs when the card is detected.

I have never had any problems with my nvidia card. Drivers update easily, the card is quiet and it doesnt get hot at all. My gtx 460 never gets above 50 and i have a 200 mhz overclock on it.

So both of my roomates never will buy ATI again and it has made me weary of upgrading my graphics card to an ATI in the future

That problem is one that cropped into the Catalyst drivers awhile back and lasted for a few releases. It was fixed fairly quickly.

The problem is the HDMI audio driver; if you update your drivers incorrectly, it crashes the machine, and causes it to no longer register that you have a graphics card (it's easy enough to fix iirc, but I was usually lazy and just corrected it with a system restore, going back to the old drivers). Just have them remove the old drivers first. Once that's done, the new drivers can be installed without issue.
If it's a new install, the Catalyst driver package hasn't had that problem in awhile. Of course, the drivers Windows installs should be the latest anyways, since it does so via Windows Update, which usually had up to date drivers (at most they're a single release behind, but usually not).

[Integrale069]

I'm in progress of building a new gaming rig hopefully in time for the game release: -
ASUS Crosshair V mobo
AMD 8 core CPU (not decided on which one yet)

XFX ATI Radeon HD 6870 (maybe better depending on budget)

I'll be using multiple solid state HDD's

12GB ram 1600MHz (from my last build)

Water cooling

I'm sticking with AMD as I prefer the underdog compared to intel who advertise more in the UK. I like the AMD processor range and hardware is priced much better in comparison.

I'm also going with an ATI card because from experience Nvidia get the high benchmarks by skimping on quality and seeing as though ATI are owned by AMD it will be a better match with the other hardware.

[Vulpesveritas]

Integrale069, on 21 March 2012 - 01:30 AM, said:

I'm in progress of building a new gaming rig hopefully in time for the game release: -
ASUS Crosshair V mobo
AMD 8 core CPU (not decided on which one yet)

XFX ATI Radeon HD 6870 (maybe better depending on budget)

I'll be using multiple solid state HDD's

12GB ram 1600MHz (from my last build)

Water cooling

I'm sticking with AMD as I prefer the underdog compared to intel who advertise more in the UK. I like the AMD processor range and hardware is priced much better in comparison.

I'm also going with an ATI card because from experience Nvidia get the high benchmarks by skimping on quality and seeing as though ATI are owned by AMD it will be a better match with the other hardware.

ATI as a brand no longer exists- they're completely made by AMD. Also if you can afford it, I recommend getting a 7850 over a 6870 as it is substantially faster for both gaming (especially with tesselation) and GPGPU.
Just my input.

[HeroicTofu]

Wanted to chip in and state that next month, barring unforeseen circumstances, I will be the proud and happy owner of a Radeon 7870. It'll be the most powerful card I've had in my computer since when the Radeon X800 was brand new. Currently using a 5670, which is no slouch but it's not a speed king either.

[Barbaric Soul]

I'm currently running a pair of 5870 cards in crossfireX. I've been pretty happy with thier performance, but by looking at GK104(GTX680) performance, which was suppose to be a mid-level card, I can see me replacing them with a single GK110 next August.

[Catamount]

Your two 5870s should already outperform a GK104 handily (as it's not even faster than the 5970, which is clocked lower), so the GK110 wouldn't gain you much. You'd be paying like $600-$700 for maybe a 25-30% performance increase, at absolute best, based on the suggested specifications.

On the other hand, there's basically nothing that exceeds the capabilities of your cards, at least at single-monitor resolutions.

Edited by Catamount, 26 March 2012 - 02:21 AM.