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470 sli or 6870 CF

As I said... I don't pretend to be impartial but I do attempt to be objective. I never claimed to be objective and I certainly never claimed to be impartial, but I certainly do not go out of my way to ridicule ATI out of hand... the same can not be said for a good number of people posting here.
 
Since 2000.

Desktop cards I have bought and used.
Voodoo 5 5500
PowerVR3 KyroII
Radeon 9800
GeForce Nvidia 6800GT
GeForce 7800 GTX
GeForce 8800 GTX
Radeon HD 3870 X2
GeForce 8800 GT
Radeon HD 4870
Radeon HD 5870
GeForce 580 GTX

And OP starter I can tell you now right here, 6870 Crossfire is a MUCH better product than 470GTX SLI
 
Let me break it down for you. Yoyoyo.
WATTS==================================================
Two(2) 6870 LOAD Watts = 421
One(1) 470GTX LOAD Watts = 419
Two(2) 470GTX LOAD Watts = 567
Thats 145W over the crossfire load. Just think about that for a second!:eek::eek:

Take two 60W lamps and stick them in your case when you game and thats the extra W and heat were talking about.

NOISE===================================================
6870 crossfire = 42db
SINGLE 470 gtx = 45db!

PERFORMANCE=============================================
1920x1200

Battlefield Bad company 2 DX11
470 SLI = 80
6870 Xfire = 87

Modern Warfare 2
470 SLI = 189
6870 Xfire = 140

Dirt2
470 SLI = 113
6870 Xfire = 124

Farcry2
470 SLI = 124
6870 Xfire = 133

Anno 1404
470 SLI = 108
6870 Xfire = 92

Crysis
470 SLI = 68
6870 Xfire =79

Metro 2033
470 SLI = 41
6870 Xfire = 44

2vs5 6870 Xfire win

PRICE===================================================
Going by OCUK only
6870 = £189
470 = £185

470 wins this one by 5 quid. The cards are being cleared out as they are becoming EOL. 6870 SHOULD be no more than £170 as their RRRP and is the only gripe I can see.

EXTRAS==========================================================
470GTX =
CUDA? Hey look my card can do C++ unless you program this aint worth squat
Physx? Havent seen a game yet that makes proper use out of this feature yet....
16 FSAA 32 FSAA? Lets just chuck some more FSAA which YOU CANT TELL the difference from a bog standard 8xAA.
6870=
MLAA? Enables nice AA across the whole screen in games that do not have AA. Usefull indeed. Looks very nice on some games!
Much better multi-monitor support.

===============================================================
End result?
hmmmmmmmmmm its a close one lol

details taken from
http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-6850-6870-crossfirex-review/15
 
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Your taking one set of benchmarks from one source, showing avg fps and the odd min fps. What you can't see is whats making up those fps and how big an impact the min fps had on the game - i.e. one set of cards could hit a min of 7fps but only hit that once in the whole time for whereas another might have a minimum of 15fps but stay there for longer periods.

From my experience the crossfire setups tend to have their average framerates pulled up by higher framerates in lower complexity scenes while not doing so well in more intensive scenes - tho this differs from game to game and scenario to scenario. The SLI setups also have a tendancy over a range of games to spend less time near the min fps even tho they don't always put up as high max fps - resulting in overall more consistant performance. Not something min/max/avg fps can show you and not something that really comes to light in canned benchmarks due to the opptimisations each vendor does.

Sure the GTX470 pulls quite a lot of power, personally doesn't bother me but I'm sure it does some. The noise and heat tend to be vastly, tho not entirely, exagerated if you steer clear of furmarks its rarely if ever an issue. Software wise SLI is the better supported of the 2, with usually more timely profile updates and while not perfect tends to be less problematic.

Sure the 6870s are big improvement over the 5 series in many regards, have some useful features like proper Audio over HDMI, MLAA, lower power useage and all that, mildly better performance out the box tho they generally don't do too well against an OC'd GTX470 setup.
 
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Rroff said:
Sure the 6870s are big improvement over the 5 series in many regards, have some useful features like proper Audio over HDMI, MLAA, lower power useage and all that, mildly better performance out the box tho they generally don't do too well against an OC'd GTX470 setup.
Click to expand...

Why do you keep saying this? Benchmarks done by reputable websites prove you wrong, yet you still keep going on about it. It's not true at all, stop it. It's like the people raving about how much better the 580 is than the 480, talking about some magical significant speed increase that's not there. "It's 20% faster at the same clockspeed" I've heard, rubbish and I don't get how they're saying it with a straight face when there are various websites showing a few percent increase at the same clockspeed. When you consider the extra shaders add a few percent to the raw power, I don't get where these large numbers are coming from.
 
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Having played on my mates last four systems i can't say i agree with this Rroff. first system was 7800gtx sli, second 8800gtx, third 4890 crossfire and fourth 5970. I play on his machines often so i have a pretty good idea of the performance and gameplay of each of these systems. Bear in mind these systems were top of the range and the games that were played at the time flew along on these systems. I can honestly say sli never seemed any better than crossfire. He also plays more games than anyone i know and has not had any real problems with any of the setups that were big headaches.
 
kylew said:
Check the quote, it's highlighted.
Click to expand...

GTX470 will comfortably overclock to stock GTX480 performance (around 22% overall realworld performance increase), a 6870 only gains around 7% overall real world increase from a good overclock. The 6870 is only a few single digit % faster than the 470 stock for stock out the box overall.
 
TheRealDeal said:
Having played on my mates last four systems i can't say i agree with this Rroff. first system was 7800gtx sli, second 8800gtx, third 4890 crossfire and fourth 5970. I play on his machines often so i have a pretty good idea of the performance and gameplay of each of these systems. Bear in mind these systems were top of the range and the games that were played at the time flew along on these systems. I can honestly say sli never seemed any better than crossfire. He also plays more games than anyone i know and has not had any real problems with any of the setups that were big headaches.
Click to expand...

Can't really compare 7800GTX SLI against 4890CF/5970 tho, and I never said crossfire is hugely problematic, just tends to be a little less robust than SLI - which I also noted isn't perfect.
 
Rroff said:
As I said... I don't pretend to be impartial but I do attempt to be objective. I never claimed to be objective and I certainly never claimed to be impartial, but I certainly do not go out of my way to ridicule ATI out of hand... the same can not be said for a good number of people posting here.
Click to expand...
When nVidia is ridiculed, it's quite deserved really, they haven't got the best track record for honesty for example, and get ridiculed quite a bit about it. Common sense, no?

When AMD is ridiculed, it's pretty much untrue and misinformation being spread about them. The ridiculing doesn't bother me, providing it's true, but 99% of the time it's just idiots repeating the same nonsense again and again with no basis of truth. See that Techspot article about something nVidia fanboys commonly say? "nVidia has better minimums", proven to be false and just a myth.

To be completely honest, you don't seem to get many AMD fanboys, it seems to be nVidia fanboys, and people who really dislike nVidia because of nVidia's own actions not out of love for AMD.
 
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Rroff said:
GTX470 will comfortably overclock to stock GTX480 performance (around 22% overall realworld performance increase), a 6870 only gains around 7% overall real world increase from a good overclock. The 6870 is only a few single digit % faster than the 470 stock for stock out the box overall.
Click to expand...

No one said anything about overclocking, especially not you.
 
Rroff said:
Then why did you highlight:

"they generally don't do too well against an OC'd GTX470 setup"?
Click to expand...

Because it wasn't about overclocking them, it was stock performance, and saying that the crossfired 6870s often get pretty close to 480 SLI anyway. You also say it as if you can't overclock 6870s.
 
kylew said:
Because it wasn't about overclocking them, it was stock performance, and saying that the crossfired 6870s often get pretty close to 480 SLI anyway. You also say it as if you can't overclock 6870s.
Click to expand...

I said, and you can check some reviews if you want :rolleyes:, that the 6870 manages about 7% real world gains on average from overclocking.

EDIT: And no I haven't tried overclocking one for myself.
 
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