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gtx560 or 6950?

The link isnt working but their doing something to the website graphics card section.

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3693#ov

gigabyte6950oc.jpg
 
I'd love that 6950 if it had a black PCB!

Gigabyte have ditched the ugly blue on their motherboards and made nice black ones now, why cant they do the same on their Graphics cards?

Gigabyte build quality and black PCB = WIN!

Oh no, but its also too long, I just noticed lol.
 
From what I have seen from various reviews, I am more than happy with my flashed 6950! It's fended off the Gigabyte 1 Ghz SOC well in most games with stock 6970 settings. As that SOC card has next to no oc left in it and my card can still be oc'd then that's good enough for me.:)

On the matter of the 2gb frame buffer not really much of an issue, my 5870's fps could fair plummet at times where as I have seen massive improvements with the minimums, especially with GTA4, BC2 and Crysis.
 
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KiiYzOo said:
900 core
1800 shaders
2340 memory
Click to expand...

The performance on your GTX 460 OC'd to 900 mhz is not far off to both a GTX 560 & 6950 - with the 560 offering around 10-15% increase in performance and the 6950 offering around 15-20% increase or 25-30% if you can unlock the 6950.

To buy either of those two cards, you would have to sell your existing card first and with the GTX 460 768mb cards currently fetching for around £115, you'll be lucky to sell yours for £100. You then have to pay an extra £100 or £120 depending on whether its a 560 or 6950.

Or you could just buy another GTX 460 768mb for £115 and gain around 1.8x ~ 1.9x scaling which works out to being by far the cheaper option for the money in terms of performance increase.

If it was me, I'd personally get another GTX 460 and go SLI as Eyefinity doesn't interest me but theres a good chance I'll go 3D later.
 
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Mr Krugga said:
I wouldn't bother spending extra (£215 is £20-25 over RRP) on that Zotac card, MSI Twin Frozr II was available for £199 at OcUK today and I'm sure there'll be more offers like this soon enough.

Radeon 6950 1GB should retail at £199 and Radeon 6950 2GB can be had for some £215-219 right now, unlockable to a full Radeon 6970 makes the choice pretty obvious to me.

Gigabyte GTX 560 TI SOC is simply an awesome card to have but comparing a stock 6950 with a stock 560, I would take the former any time it was <10% more expensive. And I certainly would invest in a non-reference design when buying a 560.
Click to expand...

The HD6950 1GB is starting to reach UK retailers at around the £200 mark.

They all seem to use non-reference coolers. I can see only XFX and Sapphire ones ATM though.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The HD6950 1GB is starting to reach UK retailers at around the £200 mark.

They all seem to use non-reference coolers. I can see only XFX and Sapphire ones ATM though.
Click to expand...
But the question is...is the 1GB version still unlockable? If it isn't, then it wouldn't be great considering GTX560 overclock to 1000GHz would be faster than stock speed GTX570/6970 2GB for 1920 res:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/01/27/msi-geforce-gtx-560-ti-1gb-review/8

whereas 6950's performance gain is more dependent on unlocking than overclocking. Also not to forget 6950 in general is nearly 10C higher in temp than the GTX560.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
But the question is...is the 1GB version still unlockable? If it isn't, then it wouldn't be great considering GTX560 overclock to 1000GHz would be faster than stock speed GTX570/6970 2GB for 1920 res:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/01/27/msi-geforce-gtx-560-ti-1gb-review/8

whereas 6950's performance gain is more dependent on unlocking than overclocking. Also not to forget 6950 in general is nearly 10C higher in temp than the GTX560.
Click to expand...

I doubt unlocking will be enabled with the HD6950 1GB especially since there is no 1GB HD6970 1GB around too.

Also,since the HD6950 1GB seems to only have non-reference coolers like the HD6850 it will be interesting to see how well they overclock and how cool they are. The cards reviewed seem to be prototypes based on the reference design.

Having said that with 2GB GTX560TI cards being launched the GTX570 is in a bit of pickle TBH. At least the HD6900 series use only a slightly larger GPU than a GTX560 which means they can at least try to match GTX560TI pricing(or even slightly undercut it) and still make money. Perhaps there will be more GTX570 OC editions being released for the same price as the current GTX570 cards.
 
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Mr Krugga said:
I'm not going to correct you on that, it's obvious that some games can make a use of a higher memory buffer but that doesn't mean it's necessary or useful at all for an average user (gaming at 1080p or lower).

You probably misunderstood my post judging by the second paragraph. Radeon 6950s are brilliant cards, not all of them can unlock the shaders though and 1GB ones certainly can't (and that's what I mentioned earlier). There's some memory issues that won't allow some cards reach stock 6970's clocks but it doesn't affect performance by much (5% at most) and the cores overclock generally the same as 6970s (which is some 10% over stock 6970s but you have to take noise of the cooler and temps into account).

GeForce GTX 560 TI would be my choice simply because:

a) it's cheaper
b) it overclocks bloody well
c) I'd fancy a change

I'm not moving to Nvidia camp any time soon though.



That's not my point of view, it is what reviews confirm and what many users report. I appreciate you take a different stand on that matter though.
Click to expand...


Reviews do not show the reality. 1GB VRAM buffer is not enough, whatever the framerates say, if you play at 1920x1200 or above.

Of course another matter is if you play at lower resolutions then its probably best to get the 560.
 
I'm thinking of upgrading my 5770's for a similar £200ish card as well. Would one of these the OP mentioned offer much of an increased performance? The game I am playing most at the moment is Civ V on Direct X 11 at 1980x1080 max graphics.

I did look at this link which favours the NVIDIAs but it didn't have 5770 CF.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU11/203
 
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the thing is that the 6950 can go quad cf, needs a less powerful psu to work and it has the opportunity to unlock to a 6970, which I don't care too much about but I may try it :)
 
KiiYzOo said:
thanks, that helps in the decisions, as that means that even though it's pretty good with one monitor, for 3d surround it's not very good and I would quite like to get 3d surround/eyefinity :)
Click to expand...

The HD6950 2GB is better suited for surround gaming as a single card as it has more RAM than an HD6870. It can also run three displays off one card. For some reason with Nvidia you will need two cards in SLI to do this.

AMD 3D support is not as good ATM when compared to Nvidia though.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The HD6950 2GB is better suited for surround gaming as a single card as it has more RAM than an HD6870. It can also run three displays off one card. For some reason with Nvidia you will need two cards in SLI to do this.

AMD 3D support is not as good ATM when compared to Nvidia though.
Click to expand...

Yeah that was one of the reasons towards the 6950.

Even though I'd love to go 3d, I just don't think its worth saving up for that long or selling loads of things to get it as i'm only 15 and earn £20 a week :(
 
KiiYzOo said:
Yeah that was one of the reasons towards the 6950.

Even though I'd love to go 3d, I just don't think its worth saving up for that long or selling loads of things to get it as i'm only 15 and earn £20 a week :(
Click to expand...

I am older than you and have a worse computer for gaming!

Think how much you will need to spend after selling your old card. Is it worth the extra cost of the upgrade??

A GTX460 768MB is still a decent card at 1680X1050.

At the end of the year there will be better £200 cards for sale IMHO.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
I am older than you and have a worse computer for gaming!

Think how much you will need to spend after selling your old card. Is it worth the extra cost of the upgrade??

A GTX460 768MB is still a decent card at 1680X1050.

At the end of the year there will be better £200 cards for sale IMHO.
Click to expand...
Leave him alone, he's 15, has peer pressure from his "mates" to have cool things and has to learn on his own. ;)
 
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