6970, overkill?

Krissytoffy · 21 Sep 2011 at 15:29

Hi! Im thinking about buying a 6970 graphics card, would it be a overkill?

Im going to play World of Warcraft, MW2, Fallout: New Vegas, BF:BC2 and MW3 + BF3 when they come out.

I am going to use a single monitor, and ultra graphics

BriT · 21 Sep 2011 at 15:31

Whats the size/res of your screen?

Krissytoffy · 21 Sep 2011 at 15:40

Probably a 32" TV (1080p) but when I am going to LAN's im going to use a 24"

Jay794 · 21 Sep 2011 at 17:10

Might be overkill but its a decent card for future-proofing, I got the 6950 Twin Frozr III PE and with 2GB of GDDR I doubt that any of the games I run will even come close to challenging it.

If you want to test the capabilities of your graphics card, try running Crysis on Ultra High settings. It only stumbles sometimes on mine system, but I put that down to my outdated motherboard, processor and ram

Krissytoffy · 21 Sep 2011 at 20:14

I am thinking about buying the 6950 instead of the 6970.
I looked at some benchmarks on anandtech.com
And it is only 2 - 5 FPS difference between the 6950 and 6970. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/293?vs=292

Jony27 · 21 Sep 2011 at 20:29

could you list the rest of the specs of your PC.
how about a GTX570, middle ground between 6950 and 6970

Krissytoffy · 22 Sep 2011 at 09:39

I am buying a new computer with the graphics card
The parts I am going to buy:
i7 - 2600k
Asus Sabertooth P67
Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1600MHz
650 - 750 watt (I haven't decided yet

MooMoo444 · 22 Sep 2011 at 09:41

If you're going to be playing games like MW3 and BF3, at 1080p, then by no means is it overkill.

It's about right for the job.

Jony27 · 22 Sep 2011 at 15:44

Krissytoffy said:
I am buying a new computer with the graphics card
The parts I am going to buy:
i7 - 2600k
Asus Sabertooth P67
Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1600MHz
650 - 750 watt (I haven't decided yet

is this just purely for gaming or do use any software that make use of the i7s Hyperthreading?

honosuseri · 22 Sep 2011 at 18:56

Jony27 said:
is this just purely for gaming or do use any software that make use of the i7s Hyperthreading?

BF3 will support hyperthreading. Wether it makes a massive difference only time will tell

Krissytoffy · 23 Sep 2011 at 09:58

I will be editing videos and photos also

Marine-RX179 · 23 Sep 2011 at 10:33

Krissytoffy said:
I am thinking about buying the 6950 instead of the 6970.
I looked at some benchmarks on anandtech.com
And it is only 2 - 5 FPS difference between the 6950 and 6970. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/293?vs=292

Another thing you should bare in mind is that majority of 6970's performance over the 6950 is because its stock speed is at 880MHz comparing to 6950's 800MHz, and the extra performance that's actually from the extra 132 steam processor and higher memory clock is not a lot. When both cards are overclocked to the same clock speeds (both cards should hit around the same max clock speed), the performance difference will be quite little. So you gotta think about the if the very little extra performance of 6970 over 6950 is worth the £80~£100 extra.

Personally I'd just get the 6950, spend the money saved on a 60GB SSD, which will not only make the whole PC faster in Windows, but also will help quite a bit on WOW if you run that on it.