Benchmarking the 4GB 6500XT?

[Splurgeworthy]

Hey folks,
I'm in the process of getting ready to upgrade my creaking Nvidia 970GTX, as I suspect it's either starting to fail, or there's a clash between my AMD motherboard and it's drivers that neither company wants to fix (Random hard system locks in specific games, that point to a driver failure the few times I can generate an Event Log error), and after much poking about, the Overclockers 6500XT seems to be the best bang per the buck under £200. However, I noticed that all the Benchmarking sites are listing an 8gb version, but the one here and at the low end of pricing everywhere seems to carry only 4gb. I'm not seeing an obvious comparison as to what else has been cut (number of ports at the back, down to 2 is at least visible... I might be able to get away with that, one for the main monitor, one for a VR kit) so does anyone have any experience in how close to the 8gb performance this is?

Also any other recommendations would be appreciated. I love Nvidia cards, and if I could be sure it wouldn't generate the same problem as above, I'd happily go for one of them around the same price. Buying former mining rigs is not a risk I want to take. Needs to be able to do 1920x1080 at 144hz to match my monitor. My hardware is;

Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
AMD Ryzen 5 2400G
Raven Ridge 14nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1197MHz (17-17-17-39)
Motherboard
Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. A320M-H-CF (AM4) 30 °C
Graphics
VG248 (1920x1080@144Hz)
4095MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (ZOTAC International)

Thanks all!

 

[Bill Turnip]

One question I'd ask is whether you would be able to increase your budget at all? You may not need to, but a 6500 will likely not be too large a step up from your 970, and it would be a shame to spend a chunk and not see a decent improvement.

 

[varkanoid]

Offer them £200 for one of these.
Worth a punt

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/-b-g...ddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-bg-15w-sp.html

 

[Bill Turnip]

Offer them £200 for one of these.
Worth a punt

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/-b-g...ddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-bg-5cq-ms.html

Link isn't working there

 

[varkanoid]

Try now

 

[CuriousTomCat]

I don't think there is an 8Gb version of the 6500XT. Are you sure it isn't the 8Gb 5500XT that you've seen?

 

[Tetras]

There's no 8GB 6500 XT. As said above, try to up your budget if you can, because the 6500 XT isn't really an upgrade to what you have (especially on PCI-E 3.0).

The 6600 is a much stronger card, doesn't have the tiny 4x bus, has the full rdna2 media engine and comes with 8GB of memory.

You might like to watch this:

Best Value GPUs Right Now: Radeon vs GeForce (June 2022 Update)

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hardwareunboxedJoin us on Floatplane: https://www.floatplane.com/channel/HardwareUnboxedBuy relevant products ...

www.youtube.com

 

[Splurgeworthy]

There's no 8GB 6500 XT. As said above, try to up your budget if you can, because the 6500 XT isn't really an upgrade to what you have (especially on PCI-E 3.0).

The 6600 is a much stronger card, doesn't have the tiny 4x bus, has the full rdna2 media engine and comes with 8GB of memory.

You might like to watch this:

Best Value GPUs Right Now: Radeon vs GeForce (June 2022 Update)

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hardwareunboxedJoin us on Floatplane: https://www.floatplane.com/channel/HardwareUnboxedBuy relevant products ...

www.youtube.com

Thank you all for the tips so far; Budget may be a bit flexible, but I'm still hashing through the options. Regarding the memory size, I think one of the sites did sneak in a 6650 that I didn't notice; I've done more reading around, and the 6500 seems to be getting hammered by the more tech literate, but alas current GPU prices are still somewhat scary for anything actually admired. I'm watching your video now and clicking all the links above... The one from Varkanoid isn't working for me either.

Unfortunately I hadn't also taken into account most GPUs are rated at PCIe 4.0, but the board indeed seems to have a 3.0 slot, so the pure comparison to the 970 GTX are off, as the 970 is at maximum, but a new GPU will be below peak when slotted into my computer. But a new motherboard as well is right out for now. To at least test whether the hard lock ups in some games is a failing GPU or an AMD/Nvidia clash I may just have to settle for slightly better, if not satisfyingly improved performance. Damn sillicon shortage!

 

[Armageus]

Have a quick look here:

*** GPU Hierarchy ***

NVIDIA AMD INTEL Tier - Suggested Resolution/FPS RTX 4090 Tier A - "Elite Tier" RTX 4080 Super RTX 4080 RX 7900XTX RX 7900XT Tier B RTX 4070Ti Super RTX 3090Ti RTX 4070Ti RX 6950XT RX 7900 GRE Tier C RTX 3090 RTX 4070 Super RTX 3080Ti RTX 3080 (12GB) RTX 4070 RTX 3080 RX 6900XT...

forums.overclockers.co.uk

It gives a rough guide to how different generations of cards stack up - with a 6500XT being only 1 tier higher in performance than a GTX970, which for the most part will be barely noticeable

If you're dead set on spending only £200, then the GTX1660 is at least another step faster than a 6500XT, and at least has more ram than your current card (6GB)

 

[Splurgeworthy]

Have a quick look here:

*** GPU Hierarchy ***

NVIDIA AMD INTEL Tier - Suggested Resolution/FPS RTX 4090 Tier A - "Elite Tier" RTX 4080 Super RTX 4080 RX 7900XTX RX 7900XT Tier B RTX 4070Ti Super RTX 3090Ti RTX 4070Ti RX 6950XT RX 7900 GRE Tier C RTX 3090 RTX 4070 Super RTX 3080Ti RTX 3080 (12GB) RTX 4070 RTX 3080 RX 6900XT...

forums.overclockers.co.uk

It gives a rough guide to how different generations of cards stack up - with a 6500XT being only 1 tier higher in performance than a GTX970, which for the most part will be barely noticeable

If you're dead set on spending only £200, then the GTX1660 is at least another step faster than a 6500XT, and at least has more ram than your current card (6GB)

Thanks for the response; The problem is that when I look at the next step up, the price leap is another £100-200 more, and that's stretching things a bit too far sadly, especially if I also have to budget for a secondary issue that might be underlying it all. I would consider Nvidia, I do like their products, but the only information I could find on the error logs generated as per my OP, and when my system fell over but didn't fully lock up and die, was pointing in some people's experience to a conflict between AMD motherboard drivers/bios and Nvidia graphics drivers, so I wanted to be able to eliminate that as well as potential hardware failure with a new GPU.

(I'm leaning towards agreeing it's a very specific problem, as I can run some games all day without issue, and temperatures never exceed 81 centigrade, but particular games will trigger it often; Dark Souls 3, Elite Dangerous, and weirdly ancient classic Darwinia lock up my system. Darwinia I was able to minimize to one crash over multiple hours by switching rendering to DirectX, but OpenGL and Vulkan were every 10m or so, which also leads me to suspect it's a problem with how it's handling specific driver calls?)

As my edit above though, doing some more googling I've noticed that yes, the board is PCIe 3, which means the 970GTX can run at full potential, but any upgrade now is rated at 4.0, and what I really need is a benchmarking site that allows me to set the bus speed for a direct comparison for how the more modern GPUs run on the 3.0 board; does anyone know of such a site?

 

[Armageus]

As my edit above though, doing some more googling I've noticed that yes, the board is PCIe 3, which means the 970GTX can run at full potential, but any upgrade now is rated at 4.0, and what I really need is a benchmarking site that allows me to set the bus speed for a direct comparison for how the more modern GPUs run on the 3.0 board; does anyone know of such a site?

The issue isn't so much running PCI-E 4.0 GPUs in a PCI-E 3.0 board, it's more than AMD in their wisdom cut down the physical connection to the 6500XT GPU from a PCI-E 4.0 16x connection to a PCI-E 4.0 4x connection. (the 6600 cards are slightly better with a 8x lane connection)

In a PCI-E 4.0 board this isn't a problem as 4.0 Speeds in a 4x lane configuration gives enough bandwidth, but when run at PCI-E 3.0 speeds, the 4x lanes aren't enough. The equivalent NVIDIA cards don't suffer from this.


Personally I'm more inclined to suggest that either your motherboard (low end, and uncooled/weak VRMs) or PSU (what model are you using?) are more likely to be an issue, rather than it being an NVIDIA issue - after all there are likely to be thousands of people even on these forums using NVIDIA cards with AMD motherboard/processor without issue.

 

[Splurgeworthy]

The issue isn't so much running PCI-E 4.0 GPUs in a PCI-E 3.0 board, it's more than AMD in their wisdom cut down the physical connection to the 6500XT GPU from a PCI-E 4.0 16x connection to a PCI-E 4.0 4x connection. (the 6600 cards are slightly better with a 8x lane connection)

In a PCI-E 4.0 board this isn't a problem as 4.0 Speeds in a 4x lane configuration gives enough bandwidth, but when run at PCI-E 3.0 speeds, the 4x lanes aren't enough. The equivalent NVIDIA cards don't suffer from this.


Personally I'm more inclined to suggest that either your motherboard (low end, and uncooled/weak VRMs) or PSU (what model are you using?) are more likely to be an issue, rather than it being an NVIDIA issue - after all there are likely to be thousands of people even on these forums using NVIDIA cards with AMD motherboard/processor without issue.

Regarding the power supply, it's a Corsair VS550 (550w); as for VRM I'm not expert enough to say, I've not seen high board temperatures on the sensors it has, and it's very clean inside, but I am getting buzz from a speaker subwoofer when scrolling webpages (especially if there's a lot of bright white) and in some games, which googling suggested GPU coil buzz, but again not an expert. I can't pin down when the crashes started, as I don't play DS3/Elite Dangerous often, but the only change since purchase a few years ago was adding another 8gb system ram to take it to 16, and I don't recall any issues with it during that change.

 

[Armageus]

Regarding the power supply, it's a Corsair VS550 (550w)

I'd be replacing this, it was a poor quality PSU even when new

 

[ASMB]

Also any other recommendations would be appreciated. I love Nvidia cards, and if I could be sure it wouldn't generate the same problem as above, I'd happily go for one of them around the same price. Buying former mining rigs is not a risk I want to take. Needs to be able to do 1920x1080 at 144hz to match my monitor. My hardware is;

I am afraid that no new budget card is able to do 1080p at 144hz, in the latest triple AAA games at high settings. The 6500xt will sometimes perform better than your 970 and sometimes worse. On average the 6500xt can fall well short of 100fps in 1080p, medium settings in many modern games let alone 144fps, https://youtu.be/NCMjyAPTKt0?t=220

 

[eddyr]

@Splurgeworthy
Have you tried underclocking and undervolting your GPU to see if that returns stability?
It will reduce the power demands on the PSU and board power circuitry etc, your card may no longer be stable at certain frequency/voltages, particularly if the power delivery is no longer keeping up.

 

[Splurgeworthy]

@Splurgeworthy
Have you tried underclocking and undervolting your GPU to see if that returns stability?
It will reduce the power demands on the PSU and board power circuitry etc, your card may no longer be stable at certain frequency/voltages, particularly if the power delivery is no longer keeping up.

Hi there; it's something I can look into over this weekend, thanks... I've got a 3 pin power consumption monitor somewhere which I can use to check how much is being pulled from the wall, but is there any way to see what is being used across the board to see if it's dropping somewhere?

I'm currently still mulling options; I'm not too worried about AAA performance now, I'm happy enough with the settings the 970 can get with the games I do still play, but I'm aware the next generation it's going to struggle with (Elden Ring is the very first game I've noticed that I can't run it at all on my system)... the 6600 and 1660 both seem good options, but the former seems to be massively more expensive (at times, the price seems to have moved around a lot recently) and the latter is a good recommendation, as long as it's not an issue with AMD/Nvidia (I'm generating the same obscure error messages as the link in my OP, "Event ID 0/13/14 - nvlddmkm": I think it's a very rare edge case, but something is there)... I'll continue poking around in the light of advice here, I appreciate it all.

 

[eddyr]

Hi there; it's something I can look into over this weekend, thanks... I've got a 3 pin power consumption monitor somewhere which I can use to check how much is being pulled from the wall, but is there any way to see what is being used across the board to see if it's dropping somewhere?

I'm currently still mulling options; I'm not too worried about AAA performance now, I'm happy enough with the settings the 970 can get with the games I do still play, but I'm aware the next generation it's going to struggle with (Elden Ring is the very first game I've noticed that I can't run it at all on my system)... the 6600 and 1660 both seem good options, but the former seems to be massively more expensive (at times, the price seems to have moved around a lot recently) and the latter is a good recommendation, as long as it's not an issue with AMD/Nvidia (I'm generating the same obscure error messages as the link in my OP, "Event ID 0/13/14 - nvlddmkm": I think it's a very rare edge case, but something is there)... I'll continue poking around in the light of advice here, I appreciate it all.

It wont be something the wall meter can detect unfortunately. On the PSU side its whether it can respond to the sudden changes in load and maintaining stable voltage output, the odd transient peak loads that occur which last very short periods of time. The same can be questioned of the GPU boards power circuitry feeding the core voltage. GPU-Z will give you some sensor software readings of certain voltages on the GPU (12v from the PSU and the gpu voltage) if you want, however the accuracy/granularity may not be exact and not all graphics cards have the readouts. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

You might find shaving 10% of your GPU/memory clocks, or perhaps disabling/lowering boost clocks, returns 100% stability. Its worth a shot, see if it can tide you over a bit longer as the next gen of GPUs are expected in the next few months.

 

[Armageus]

As mentioned early, I'd be replacing your PSU with a better one first (something 650w gold rated ideally with 10 year warranty), as I bet any issues will disappear.

Edit:
Such as this one

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x Phanteks AMP 650W 80 Plus Gold Modular Power Supply (SKU: CA-09Q-PT) = £74.99

Total: £85.49 (includes delivery: £10.50)​

​

 

[Splurgeworthy]

Thanks for all the tips so far; I've gone for the 6600 here today first, it draws less wattage than the 970 it seems, so if I'm still seeing issues I'll know the power supply needs to be addressed next. In the end, all the models seemed nigh-identical, except for slight differences in case and fan size, and 3x DP 1.4 vs 1.4a on some models, so I went for price and 1.4a over a 10mm increase in fans size. Should have it in a few days, fingers crossed for an immediate improvement!

 

[welshrat]

Thanks for all the tips so far; I've gone for the 6600 here today first, it draws less wattage than the 970 it seems, so if I'm still seeing issues I'll know the power supply needs to be addressed next. In the end, all the models seemed nigh-identical, except for slight differences in case and fan size, and 3x DP 1.4 vs 1.4a on some models, so I went for price and 1.4a over a 10mm increase in fans size. Should have it in a few days, fingers crossed for an immediate improvement!

That is a much better purchase than a 6500XT, My son has the 6600XT and its a cracking card even at 1440p, doubt the standard 6600 is too far behind.