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dedicated power query

elindre

elindre

elindre

Associate
Joined
23 Jun 2010
Posts
2
Hello All,

I had a quick question regarding gpu's and dedicated power.

My 8800 ultra recently broke, and I was in the dilemma of purchasing an ATI 5700 series or a new nvidia.

The ATI card had 1gb ddr5 but no direct power from the psu and the nvidia had 1gb also but it was ddr3 and had 2 x 6 pin connections to the psu (like the the 8800 ultra).

My question is are gpu's that have dedicated power routes better / faster than those that do no?

I ask because I purchased an ATI card and havent been impressed with the performance so far. Its slower than my ultra and im wishing I had stuck with nvidia.

ps.
on boot up, it now takes a long time to get even to the boot screen. my cpu fan seems to do this intermittent whirring thing but finally boots up. Also games such as counter strike source and bad company 2 take a durating to boot, and the fps ratings are worse than the 8800 ultra

appreciate your insight :)
 
Hi and welcome elindre. Sorry to tell u, but you fell in to ATI's marketing trap. Nvidia do it as well.
Customers see that a Gpu has 1gb of ddr5 and think its really powerfull. Not always..
There is no pci only powered card that is anywhere near the speed of your old ultra. You would be best returning or selling what you have bought. Then buying at least a 5770.
 
Hi there, welcome to the forums :)

The external power connector just provides the card extra power if it draws more than 75W (i think) as that is the maximum the PCIe bus on its own can provide the card. High performing cards, top-end cards do tend to use more power than low-end cards - but I would strongly suggest against evaluating a cards performance based on its power connections. This is because newer cards tend to use less power to achieve the same performance of older cards.

However, 75W is still not much power - the current ATI top end card (the 5870) uses a maximum of 188W - so it also needs two extra power connectors, however the 5870 is several time more powerful than the 8800 ultra - but uses almost the same amount of power.

Out of interest, what is the exact model number of the ATI card you got? You can use GPU-Z to check. Please be aware that more video RAM and faster video RAM is not a good way to gauge the performance of a graphics card, the best way is looking at real-world benchmarks.
 
I'm also curious to know what ATi card you bought, and what Nvidia card you was considering. The 8800 card was a beast of a card.
 
When comapring cards you can't look exclusively at the on-paper specs when deciding. The 8800GTX was Nvidia's flagship 8 series card, and still quite fast. The 57XX series is ATI's mainstream level graphics card, and in line with their last generation top spec. When purchasing a graphics card, the only real way of getting an idea on how good it is is by looking at online reviews, where direct Framerate comparisons are made
 
Ok it actually gets worse... I bought a ATI HD 5670... I think i may have been sucked in by the marketing as suggested... its definately not as quick as the 8800 ultra, even though i bought it years ago!

not really sure what to do now as I bought it from PC world and its been installed. Im not an expert on their return polocy but figure that they wont accept it back...

any advice? :(
 
If you bought it recently, you could try refund it. If not, then I guess the only thing is, is to try sell it second hand. A 5670 is not really a gaming card, although my brother has been able to play a few games on near max on a 1440 x 900 res. A 5770 would've been a better move from the 8800. Best to check reviews instead of looking at the specs :p
 
Sell the card 2nd hand and buy the one you want (as suggested - a 5770 at the least). Unless you bought the machine recently and can return the entire machine and get your money back. I can promise you that you would get a FAR better machine with the same money if you went for one of the ocuk builds - or even better build it yourself.

i remember trying to buy a pc from that retailer and i had my heart set on another graphics card (that was not in the pc i was going to get). their position was that i would have to buy both and they wouldn't give me any money back for the unused card. immediately after that experience i got into pc building.

edit: as for the 5670 performance, you may want to look at this review. To give you some perspective, your 8800 Ultra performs approximately as well as the GTS 250 shown in those graphs (use the drop-down menu to see performance in other games).
 
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