xfx ATI 6950 or gigabyte GTX 470 SOC

[Marvin]

i think the 6950 it is then

i will xfire these soon as well

cheers guys

beasty

Nice! XFire scaling on these is amazing!

 

[An Exception]

lol now i am really confused

theres just as many 470 voter than there is 6950

if the 470 is now EOL what would be the next card from nvidia to replace the 470 ???

if i get the 6950 it will be the XFX model, do these cards unlock to 6970's ??

beasty

TBH at current prices, I don't know how anyone can recommend a 470 to you over a 6950 with a clear conscience, especially if you plan on going multi GPU.

 

[Marvin]

TBH at current prices, I don't know how anyone can recommend a 470 to you over a 6950 with a clear conscience, especially if you plan on going multi GPU.

Not sure about the whole conscience thing, but I'd otherwise agree - the 6950 is faster than the GTX470, so for the same price it seems a bit silly. If you were getting a GTX470 at £180 there'd be a stronger argument.

 

[An Exception]

Not sure about the whole conscience thing, but I'd otherwise agree - the 6950 is faster than the GTX470, so for the same price it seems a bit silly. If you were getting a GTX470 at £180 there'd be a stronger argument.

Just looks like some people don't care what's best for the Op and are just letting fanboyism influence their tainted recommendations (as the 6950 is clearly the better choice, so it's not like people are recommending the 470 by accident).

 

[Barzini]

Remember that you can perform the bios flash on 6950s to unlock them to 6970 speeds.

 

[Ezyryder]

Indeed, my recommendation though is only to unlock the shaders though as unlocking the card to 6970 might kill the memory (very few cases reported) whilst unlocking the cores is a 99.9% sure thing

 

[easyrider]

6950 all the way

 

[Rroff]

For the exact same money as the GTX470 SOC you could have a 6950, which unless I'm much mistaken is a fair bit faster, and does overclock (maybe not as well as the 470, but it's faster in the first place). A 470 is not going to overclock to GTX480 speeds unless you get them to over 850 core, which is hardly guaranteed, and something that I'd use watercooling for.

The 6950 also has other benefits such as extra memory (although the importance depends on your resolution - I find that Black Ops at 1920x1080 can approach 1GB memory usage, and it's not that demanding, so Metro or Crysis might push the 1280MB barrier), a second BIOS (so you could flash the Asus BIOS for unlocked voltage tuning - without much worry as you have a back up BIOS), and the card is a little lighter on the power/heat front (50W less power consumption, ~10C less heat). Oh, and of course the good probability of unlocking to a 6970.

setter, no offence, but how exactly would a Gigabyte 470 SOC have a lower power consumption figure when it uses the same GPU core and memory as all the other GTX470s, at higher than stock clock rates?

The 6950's resale value should also be higher for longer too.

The Gigabyte GTX470 SoC does have atleast 17% lower power useage clock for clock than the reference design - this is through a combination of cherry picking low leakages/low power use cores, more efficent power circuitry on the board and using lower power useage components on the PCB than the reference design.

While granted you need 840MHz on the core to match or beat the GTX480 in every aspect you only need ~745MHz on the 470 to match a stock GTX480 in 90+% of todays games as the only area thats not as fast or faster at that (~745MHz) clock speed is the pixel fillrate. An 840MHz GTX470 will leave a stock GTX480 behind by quite a way except at very high resolution/very high levels of AA.

Granted stock for stock the 6950 is clearly the better choice but overclocked v overclocked the picture is nothing like as clear.

 

[tommybhoy]

looks like some people don't care what's best for the Op