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5870 a good choice?

Emphacy

Emphacy

Emphacy

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24 Nov 2010
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Afternoon!

It's that time of year when, all day, I look at computer parts I want, but can't really afford, but I'll have them anyway.

I'm upgrading very soon, hopefully i'll fill my basket tonight, with some nice new gish. Since i'll be buying a nice new 24" monitor, I'm gonna upgrade my HD 4890 as well.
I'm not too keen on nVIDIA, so i'm sticking with ATI only, I'm wanting a card around the £150 mark and have specified the XFX HD 5870 as a good choice so far.

Is this card at the current moment in time the best price/performance choice? I've noticed the 6870 is actually worse, is it a replacement for the 5770 or something?
I usually do my research for about a week, but I can't be bothered today and I want it ASAP.

Thanks, forumers.
 
Well....

The 5870 would be better than the 4890.... not by a massive margin, but a decent amount.

The 6870 is really the successor to the 5850.

The 6950 is approximately evens with the 5870 and the 6970 is the true single gpu king of the ATI Realm.

Rather than getting the 5870 at £150 (£160 today), can you not pick up a 6950?

As you can see the current price on the 5870 is £160 for £20 more you can get a 6950 so thats what I'd do.

Newer tech, better tessellation and more optimization with drivers.
 
Hmm, I see...
Now then, I have a choice between this 5870 and this 6950

The Anandtech bench shows the 6950 as being slightly better than the 5870, and I know the XFX 5870 will not overclock (Zero voltage regulation).
Does anyone know how well they overclock? I'm leaning towards the 6950 at the moment.
 
The 6950 is better slightly...... more in areas of tesselation etc...

But the big difference between the 6950 and the 5870 will be in drivers.

Ok I can see whats going on here...... its a marketing ploy.

The card your looking at is £180 and is 1Gb, at £200 you can get the 2Gb version.

If you can stretch to £200 for a 2Gb version, thats what I'd get. Some may argue you don't need 2Gb yet, but I have played games already this year that have benefited form the 2Gb on my 5870.

Preferably this is what you want.

nice cooler, 2gb of ram, and should overclock?

another thing to consider is the shader unlocking versions however. but i think those are extremely hard to come by now.

Here you can see what I mean by the difference in the driver optimizations between the 6950 vs the 5870.
 
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Buy a XFX5870, The difference between a 6950 is almost identical, except in DX11 games where the 6950 pulls ahead slightly.

This does not justify the £20 extra. note that the drivers for both cards are rock solid.
 
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