Poll: ATI vs. Nvidia for a serious gaming machine.

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Sep 14, 2009
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ravenshrike said:
gmaverick019 said:
ravenshrike said:
LITE-ON 24X DVD Writer Black SATA Model iHAS424-98 LightScribe Support

$25.99




Rosewill THOR V2 Gaming ATX Full Tower Computer Case, support up to E-ATX/XL-ATX, come with Four Fans-1x Front Red LED 230mm Fan, 1x Top 230mm Fan, 1x Side 230mm Fan, 1x Rear 140mm Fan


$149.99


Asus VE248H Black 24" Full HD HDMI LED Backlight LCD Monitor w/Speakers

$249.99





MSI N560GTX-Ti Hawk GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card


$529.98
($264.99 each)

2



Vantec UGT-S100 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card


$22.99





PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II 750W High Performance 80PLUS Silver SLI CrossFire ready Power Supply

$129.99



RAZER DeathAdder Black 5 Buttons 1 x Wheel USB Wired Precision Optical Gaming Mouse - 3.5G Infrared Sensor

$49.99


ARCTIC COOLING Arctic Cooling MX-4 AC-MX4 4 gram (g) All-Around Thermal Compound


$12.99




Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model KHX1600C9D3K2/8GX

$54.99




MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

$239.99



Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I52500K

$219.99




COOLER MASTER R4-L4S-10AB-GP 140mm Blue LED Case Fan

$31.98
($15.99 each)



Noctua NF-P12-1300 120mm CPU Cooler and Case Fan

$49.98
($24.99 each)

Prolimatech Megahalems Rev.B CPU Cooler

$69.99


ASUS Black Blu-ray Drive SATA Model BC-12B1ST/BLK/B/AS

$68.99
There's your serious gaming rig. Or rather, there's my serious gaming rig. Which I will be buying sometime before christmas.
not bad but you could easily knock 150 bucks off that price just by simply using different brands on your monitor and sound card, your motherboard, especially a good high priced one, will be more than sufficient on sound quality, if anything get a slightly better power supply (800-850). also that extra cpu cooler will NOT be needed unless you are overclocking to super saiyan x3, your i5 will be more than good enough to handle anything for the next 5 years without overclocking.

now that's just IMO of course, but just saying you can save some bang in a few spots and spend a little more on the power supply for long term usage.
Eh, the monitor is sort of a placeholder. As for the MB, it will support ivy bridge as well as PCI 3.0. The reason for the soundcard, which I may not get initially, is that a lot of times MBs will have electronic noise if you use the MB sound ports.

As for OC, I'm going to bounce that thing of it's high end, which should be above 5GHz with that cooling setup, and then drop it by 0.5GHz. With the power supply, that's 750 continuous, with 880 max. Even with the proc OCed, two 560 TIs will have a damned hard time breaking 800 watts for any significant length of time.
fair enough, if you have the money for it then i see no problem (i'm used to gaming on a budget and out of the 7 pc's i've built so far those were also built on a budget.)
 

Ziame

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Mar 29, 2011
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nVidia all the way. Why? Because Radeon pissed me off too many times with its ridiculous driver issues. The newer the drivers, the more broken they seemed.
 

somonels

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Oct 12, 2010
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ATI has a lot more driver problems. That has been true since forever and most likely will continue to do so. I am not up to date with the current situation. I have been using both, prefer Nvidia but will always consider ATI's products.
 
Feb 9, 2011
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Nimbus said:
Wow. You are REALLY overthinking this. Seriously, just choose the most you want to spend, and choose the best card for your money based on that.
Going to have to give it to the first response and say go with that advice. I've run both setups multiple times. Both work just fine in every capacity.
 

octafish

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Apr 23, 2010
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The two sweet spots for value for money seem to be the GTX 560 from Nvidia and the HD 6970 from ATI/AMD. The ATI/AMD gets slightly more frames per second but the Nvidia consumes a lot less power for almost the same performance. Swings and round-a-bouts.

I avoid SLI and Xfire as I like to keep my setup as simple as possible. I have been driven to distraction by stuttering on dual card rigs. Even on a machine with a 5970.

I have two desktop computers one running XP 32bit, OSX and Linux with an HD 4890 from XFX and one running Windows 7 64bit with a GTX 580 from EVGA. Both my cards are strong and reliable and have worked well for me. I have had more issues with compatibility with the HD 4890 though and from memory it was only with GTA IV which didn't work at all with Radeon cards.
 

SquirePB

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Apr 5, 2011
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I've always used Nvidia but that's only cos that's what's come stock in whatever computer I've bought at the time and I've never had the money or time to build a proper rig. With that said I can report no problems with Nvidia so I guess I'd recommend it.
 

MrTub

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Mar 12, 2009
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fix-the-spade said:
Delta-1138 said:
Feel free to cite specific cards, and their abilities when combined with specific processors or in SLI.
First things first, both SLI and Crossfire don't work. They consistantly deliver more bugs and lower frames rates than single cards whilst also using masses of power (high end Nvidia cards in SLI eat close to 1000W/hr!). So don't bother with it.

At the high end of single cards it's really a wash. Nvidias seem to use memory more efficiently whilst ATIs have more processing power, but both deliver comparable frame rates.
I would buy a HD6970 2GB as they're a good price and can be hugely overclocked (10-15% on the bas clock, more on some really high end ones like the MSI lightning). With more than one monitor they also perform a lot better than a HD6990 despite having half as many cores (go figure).

But really any of the 6970, Nvidia 570 or 580 ranges will work extremely well.

Below £150-ish, ATI 6850 utterly cards destroy everything else.
SLI/CF works very well. They have around 80-90% increase of performance compared to using only one card. And I had very few bugs with sli, and when I have they are often fixed within a couple of days.


And there isnt anything odd that 2x 6970 outperforms a 6990 since 6990 have two downclocked 6970 gpus

And the only card that is close to using 1kwh is (2x)590 in sli (used 935w, measured before the power supply unit)
So please do your research before saying stuff.
 

fix-the-spade

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Feb 25, 2008
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Tubez said:
SLI/CF works very well. They have around 80-90% increase of performance compared to using only one card. And I had very few bugs with sli, and when I have they are often fixed within a couple of days.
More details on your set up please, you are a rarity.

On a single monitor I haven't seen any gains from SLI/CF that couldn't be made by buying the next card up the range. Any single GPU over £200 now can push 1080p and a fairly high level of AA through it without a problem.

On multi monitors both systems are crap. They deliver good average frame rates but the actual fps swings massively. It's common to see CF set ups delivering average rates close to 100fps but a minium of 0, stuttering is the most common complaint and whilst new profiles come out regularly they never seem to fix it.

It's a complete compatability lottery too, especially in DX11 games like BC2 (and one would assume BF3 as well).

My experience of the 6970 is that with some clocking you can make one of those cards produce a more stable frame rate than one 6990 or even two 6970 cards running multiple monitors.
 

MrTub

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Mar 12, 2009
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fix-the-spade said:
Tubez said:
SLI/CF works very well. They have around 80-90% increase of performance compared to using only one card. And I had very few bugs with sli, and when I have they are often fixed within a couple of days.
More details on your set up please, you are a rarity.

On a single monitor I haven't seen any gains from SLI/CF that couldn't be made by buying the next card up the range. Any single GPU over £200 now can push 1080p and a fairly high level of AA through it without a problem.

On multi monitors both systems are crap. They deliver good average frame rates but the actual fps swings massively. It's common to see CF set ups delivering average rates close to 100fps but a minium of 0, stuttering is the most common complaint and whilst new profiles come out regularly they never seem to fix it.

It's a complete compatability lottery too, especially in DX11 games like BC2 (and one would assume BF3 as well).

My experience of the 6970 is that with some clocking you can make one of those cards produce a more stable frame rate than one 6990 or even two 6970 cards running multiple monitors.
Im in no way a rarity. Just cheak pretty much every benchmark test that have been done during the latest 2-3 years.

Here is a test on Bad company 2 (with highest settings)
http://www.sweclockers.com/recension/13175-amd-radeon-hd-6970-och-hd-6950/13#pagehead

It was done a few days after 6970&6950 was released.

1x 6970 = 72 highest fps, 52 fps lowest
2x 6970 = 142 highest fps, 101 fps lowest

Here is a test on Bad company 2 with 6990.
http://www.sweclockers.com/recension/13610-amd-radeon-hd-6990/13#pagehead

It was done a few days after 6990 was released

1x 6990 = 136 highest fps, 99 lowest fps

So can you please show a link that a 6970 is beating a 6990.



And btw my setup is

2x gtx 480 (wc)
i7 2600k (wc)

5760x1080 resolution.

And as you can see Im using multi monitor and its not crap at all. Unless you think highest settings possible in bc2 with 5760x1080 and stable 60fps (since Im using vsync). And I have never had stuttering
 

JochemDude

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Nov 23, 2010
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If you're a casual user that has no interest in overclocking and all that tech stuff then a ATI is your thing. If you're gonna be doing some hardcore tweaking then you should get a Nvidia.