Palit

thingemajib · 5 Feb 2011 at 23:14

RavenXXX2 said:
£200 spent on a GFX to me is not a big deal when it comes to invalidating the warranty if that means super cool temps and a silent card for next few years

and to others £200 is a helluva lot of money. Personally if i went down that route and something non cooler related were to go wrong within the warranty period then i would be absolutely gutted. More than likely id be back on my IGP for quite some time...

RavenXXX2 said:
Check the 6970 pulling the juice, looks a bit inefficient to me, right up there with a 570/480.

Am i missing something here? I thought the 6970 was supposed to compete with the 480/570. Surely pulling a similar amount of power seems likely (scuse the ATI fanboism coming out here, but i cant help but point out its pulling slightly less than the 570 and significantly less than the 480 in that graph)

RavenXXX2 · 5 Feb 2011 at 23:54

MikeHiow said:
That all depends where you look:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/292?vs=309&i=228.229.233.232.231.230.234.235

Shows the 6970 is significantly quieter, cooler and more power efficient than the 480.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/306?vs=309&i=228.229.233.232.231.230.234.235

Also shows the 570 being a fair bit quieter, cooler and more power efficient than the 480.

And for the sake or being complete - 6970 vs 570

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/306?vs=292&i=228.229.233.232.231.230.234.235

Yeah that's the AMD powertune kicking in with furmark. My link has it disabled.

MikeHiow · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:00

So?

Disabling a power saving feature and going "HEY LOOK GUYZ IT USES AS MUCH POWER AS THE HOLY GRAIL" is completely and utterly backwards.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the ATI card uses much less power

[TW]Fox · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:04

Interestingly Mike it has made me wonder more about what you said about video memory. I noticed when playing Crysis that my max memory usage was 1230mb. Concerning really - what would happen if i only had 1024mb or 1280mb of memory? Slowdowns?

233 · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:07

in fairness (going back to p1 here)

the latest drivers havae given me a good boost in dirt 2 framerates with my 6970

RavenXXX2 · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:08

MikeHiow said:
So?

Disabling a power saving feature and going "HEY LOOK GUYZ IT USES AS MUCH POWER AS THE HOLY GRAIL" is completely and utterly backwards.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the ATI card uses much less power

Fact is the AMD cards do not use much less power as shown by the crysis power usage. Your link to furmark charts is useless with powertune enabled.

Gerard · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:14

MikeHiow · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:14

[TW]Fox;18401508 said:
Interestingly Mike it has made me wonder more about what you said about video memory. I noticed when playing Crysis that my max memory usage was 1230mb. Concerning really - what would happen if i only had 1024mb or 1280mb of memory? Slowdowns?

I imagine you'd get slowdowns as it had to load textures etc. more often? Much like going into swap/page when you run out of ram on your PC?

I think in small amounts, this is rather insignificant, but in larger amounts it could be crippling.

RavenXXX2 said:
Fact is the AMD cards do not use much less power as shown by the crysis power usage. Your link to furmark charts is useless with powertune enabled.

What? My link provides Crysis and Furmark graphs, and they both show the ATI card to use significantly less power.

kitch9 · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:16

MikeHiow said:
So?

Disabling a power saving feature and going "HEY LOOK GUYZ IT USES AS MUCH POWER AS THE HOLY GRAIL" is completely and utterly backwards.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the ATI card uses much less power

Nvidia and AMD are both checking for the likes of Furmark (And others.) and throttling in one way or another when detected with their latest cards. (Nvidia 5** or 6*** series.)

Don't use Furmark, simple as, whether you are checking an overclock or just want to know power usage. It makes your gpu do stuff it was never designed to do, and only now are the manufacturers doing something about it.

RavenXXX2 · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:17

MikeHiow said:
What? My link provides Crysis and Furmark graphs, and they both show the ATI card to use significantly less power.

20 watts lol, yes very significant. What part of " furmark charts are useless with powertune enabled " do you not get.

MikeHiow · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:17

I'm not really concerned with Furmark, but the Crysis graph shows an identical trend.

RavenXXX2 said:
20 watts lol, yes very significant.

Are we looking at the same graph? I see 80 watts?

RavenXXX2 · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:24

Obviously I'm referring to the 570 v 6970, and at max output the 570 draws watts similar to a 480 as in my link.

MikeHiow · 6 Feb 2011 at 00:50

But again, my link shows a completely different story

Your fanboyism is getting ridiculous now, let's give it a rest shall we?

Oh, referring back to Dirt 2; I just grabbed the demo and all I can say is wow. It looks stunning and plays flawlessly with everything maxed out.

Fox, what do you play with? Keyboard, 360 Controller, Wheel?

[TW]Fox · 6 Feb 2011 at 01:00

360 pad for dirt2. Have a Logitech G25 as well.

MikeHiow · 6 Feb 2011 at 01:21

I was thinking that'd be a decent option, I had a spare that I was given ages ago - I feel like an idiot as I traded it in with my 360 (never got played) for an extra £1, basically.

Things change I've changed · 6 Feb 2011 at 07:47

[TW]Fox;18399914 said:
To be honest despite the obvious issues with noise and reviews it seems everyone agrees that of the current generation of cards, the 570 is one of the quitest. Therefore if a 570 is still too noisy then no card will do - ie, it could be put up with.

I can't really explain why I keep being drawn to the 570. It's about £60 more expensive than an equivilent 6950 and it probably doesnt offer £60 more performance. But it just seems right somehow

I'm in the same position as you, on the hunt for a fairly high powered GPU but one that doesn't sound like a hoover, I recently purchased a Gigabyte GTX560Ti SOC but found that was too noisy so RMA'd it, I like you am thinking of grabbing a reference GTX570, one thing I've learnt over this past year of upgrading GPU's is that you can't trust online reviews when it comes to noise levels, I've owned cards that should have been practically silent but were noisy and also owned cards that should have been loud and were dam near silent.

Aynway if you end up grabbing a 570 before me I'd be very interested in hearing what you think of the noise levels at load, I have to wait until I get refunded before I can pick up my 570 so could be a while for me.

Nelly · 7 Feb 2011 at 00:06

lowrider007 said:
I'm in the same position as you, on the hunt for a fairly high powered GPU but one that doesn't sound like a hoover, I recently purchased a Gigabyte GTX560Ti SOC but found that was too noisy so RMA'd it, I like you am thinking of grabbing a reference GTX570, one thing I've learnt over this past year of upgrading GPU's is that you can't trust online reviews when it comes to noise levels, I've owned cards that should have been practically silent but were noisy and also owned cards that should have been loud and were dam near silent.

One review I read said that it was loud. I was really tempted to get one myself at one point.

Was the Gigabyte GTX 560Ti SUPER OC loud just benchmarking with say furmark or in games too? also is it loud at idle? just curious.

Thanks.

Ravenger · 7 Feb 2011 at 11:55

My experience with Palit wasn't a good one. I bought a Palit GTX460 Sonic on the basis of reviews that turned out to be the platinum version. It wasn't made clear that the non-plat version had a much inferior cooling solution, and there weren't any specific reviews of the standard card.

The card itself was compact, and performed well, but ran hot - around 70 - 80 degrees, sounded like a hoover, and the fan had a very irritating whine that cut right through the sound from my headphones.

I returned it, and got a Gigabyte GTX 460 OC instead - much better cooler, doesn't go much above 60 degrees even when overclocked, and effectively silent.

skotish| · 7 Feb 2011 at 18:04

Ravenger said:
My experience with Palit wasn't a good one. I bought a Palit GTX460 Sonic on the basis of reviews that turned out to be the platinum version. It wasn't made clear that the non-plat version had a much inferior cooling solution, and there weren't any specific reviews of the standard card.

The card itself was compact, and performed well, but ran hot - around 70 - 80 degrees, sounded like a hoover, and the fan had a very irritating whine that cut right through the sound from my headphones.

I returned it, and got a Gigabyte GTX 460 OC instead - much better cooler, doesn't go much above 60 degrees even when overclocked, and effectively silent.

I stuck a gelid icy on my card to sort out the same problem it goes great now @ 40% fan

strumpusplunket · 7 Feb 2011 at 18:11

Pretty sure my 8800GT was a Palit. Like the OP, I hesitated a bit about ordering it because I didn't recognise the name.

I don't think it makes that much difference, though, apart from warranties. And the manufacturer of the card I now have, an Asus, is known for it's shoddy RMA procedures, I believe, so that clearly hasn't influenced me