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Graphics Card Confusion

MikeyTT

MikeyTT

MikeyTT

Associate
Joined
19 Dec 2012
Posts
15
I posted this question on the pCars forum but wanted a wider audience and arguably a more graphically focused group.

So I'm looking for a change to my HD6950 and I've been researching for days now and keep going in circles and I'm getting right confused with it all.

I'd like to state a few things that I've learnt in the hope that they are right (please correct me where appropriate) after reading this forum and several graphics review and benchmarking sites I've concluded the following:
  • That for 3 screen (5760x1050) the AMD cards perform better than Nvidia
  • SLI/XFire is not without it's issues compared to a single card
  • AMD 12.11 beta drivers are a must to unlock the power of the red corner cards
  • The naming and editions of cards between manufacturers is very confusing

I'm looking to spend in the region of £300. I'm not that interested in overclocking, just want a stable system. I've been erring on discounting Nvidia due to #1 above, but I'll include them for now, so I'm looking at the following:


Now these are slightly over the £300 budget, but I would be willing to stretch if it was really worth it:

Primarily I'll be playing pCars and Dirt 3, but will likely wander into the FPS arena like BF3 (currently love that on the XBox ATM). There doesn't seem to be a single chart that includes all of the current cards and certainly few that are running the AMD 12.11 drivers, which unlock the power of the AMD cards.

I've been running pCars on the 6950 @ 5760x1050, but with almost everything at the lowest setting, and I'd like to bump that up a notch or two. For those that know I appreciate that pCars is currently not optimized and will get better, which is fine, and when that happens I'll get either more FPS or can ramp the detail up even higher.

After a bit more research I think I'm looking towards this:

Finally........ Help!!.....

**Edit: For some reason my sig isn't shown so here is the rest of my system:
CPU: Intel i7-3820 @ 3.6GHz M/B: Asus P9X79 Deluxe Mem: Corsair Dominator 32GB DDR3 GPU: XFX HD6950 - 2GB RAM (12.8) Network Card: M/B Intel 82579V Gigabit Monitors: 3 x Dell 2208WFP-DVI, 1 x Dell U2311H-DisplayPort PSU: OCZ ZX1250W OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Storage: LSI 9260-8i Raid Controller - 750GB OSDisk (3 x SSDs Raid 0), 5TB+ DataDisk (4 x 2TB Raid 5) with SSD CacheCade Drive
 
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I vote for a 7950 since you are using a large resolution. You'll need two if you want to max games out however, though that would be the case with any single GPU card for triple screens. Rusty did a very good comparison between 680 SLI and 7950 CF on triple screens, with the 7950 CF winning quite comfortably. The 7970 is only 5% faster at the same clock speeds (both the 7970 and 7950 will reach the same speeds- just takes a few seconds moving some sliders in AB) which makes the 7950 better value. Get one now, and buy a second when you have the money is my suggestion. Or get two now if you can afford it :)
 
well at least my AMD bet wasn't wrong and you've not trampled all over that direction :-)

The only thing worrying me is the crossfire situation. There are loads of posts about this stuttering issue and people not being happy with twin cards and ultimately dropping them and getting a single card. I just don't want to be one of the unfortunate ones that suffers from this and I regret buying, what will be a fairly significant purchase.

I read the post from Rusty, which is actually the only reason I haven't completely discounted the crossfire setup. He doesn't seem to have any issues, outside of the comment about smoothness.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I'll do a little more crossfire digging tonight...
 
first of all, 660ti would be utter pants at that res, even sli would be naff. Call that an educated guess because I cba to look up benchmarks for it because the memory bus is simply too small.

no idea about pcars but iirc dirt 3 isn't very taxing, you may get away with using a single card for that. otherwise I'd suggest xfire/sli.

I don't have experience of xfire but sli can be a pain at times and I'm sure xfire is the same.

pretty sure the amd performance is from 12.8 onwards but yeah 12.11s.

The amd cards perform better over 3 screens, the only drawback being that they run hotter at idle than nvidia 600 series when connected to more than one screen. (I'm a silence freak and couldn't bare gpu noise @ idle). Swings and roundabouts because the 7950/70 have a clear lead over nvidia offerings at that res.

as for naming conventions it's usually a case of:

[company name eg Asus] HD 7950 [cooler name eg DirectCUII] [memory amount eg 3072MB]
 
Thought I would post back with what I ended up doing.

I ended up buying a pair of HIS 7950 IceQ BOOST 3GB cards. Firstly they are much larger than I thought and only just fit in the case. They take up most of the slot spaces on the motherboard, which only leaves me a single slot free for the LSI RAID card. Looks like my sound card purchase is out of the window now.

So the cards fired up ok, and there is a significant improvement in games, as you would expect. Tested crossfire off and on and it's working a treat. I need to check with a couple of other games, but pCars and rFactor2 seem to have a weird slowness to them, even though the FPS figures are in the 70s.

I also have an issue with the GPUs when the system is idling (me AFK that is). If I leave the machine alone and the screens go blank then the GPUs go on a rampage and start running at over 90%, heat goes up and fans kick in. What's weird is that I have disabled crossfire in the Win7 partition as I decided to not game from that install any more, but both cards are ramping up (I have no monitors in the 2nd card). I've yet to try in the Win8 partition.

If I disable the screen blanking then when I'm AFK the cards still ramp up, but not as much. Need to have a look see if there is an errant process running somewhere.

So I'm pretty happy, just sort these niggles and I'm good to go. Thanks for the advise and have a great New Year...
 
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