Your thoughts about this i7 set up for work

Thanks all for input so far.

I'm still edging towards the ATI cards for this reason: £ for £ the ATI cards, on paper, seem to be so much higher spec's. I've just been looking at the ATI cards and they seem to have a faster core, bigger memory running at a faster clock. Granted, I may not be comparing equivalent cards as I'm comparing them based on price (ATI 4870 vs GTX260) but that is a massive difference (for the money) in numbers.

Accepting my knowledge is limited so speaking as a layman, but it would appear that if I went with the NVidia cards I'd need the CUDA software just to match the performance of the similar priced ATI.

Or am I missing something here (be gentle, I did say I'm a layman) (At 33 I feel too old to say "noob")?
 
mr_jmm said:
I'm still edging towards the ATI cards for this reason: £ for £ the ATI cards, on paper, seem to be so much higher spec's. I've just been looking at the ATI cards and they seem to have a faster core, bigger memory running at a faster clock. Granted, I may not be comparing equivalent cards as I'm comparing them based on price (ATI 4870 vs GTX260) but that is a massive difference (for the money) in numbers.
Click to expand...

It's all about how the actual gpu architecture works, just because the ATi card you're looking at has 800 stream processors compared to the nvidias 216 doesn't nesecarily mean it's faster. You only have to look at some benchmarks to find out that both cards are in fact very similar in terms of performance.

Each one of Nvidia's shader processors can perform 5 operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide and modulus) whereas ATi's shaders can only perform a single task at a time. Therefore if you divide the 800 by 5 = 160 you get a more realistic idea of the shader performance from the ATi card.

The ATi card does make up a bit with it's higher clock speed and faster GDDR5 memory which obviously gives it far more memory bandwidth, compared to Nvidia's GDDR3, but as I mentoned above this sort of equals them out to be very similar in terms of real world usage.

I would personally go for the GTX 260, they overclock well, the stock heatsink and fan is pretty quiet especially in 2d mode as the driver downclocks the speed, hence they run relatively cool, and I just prefer Nvidia's drivers.

However I'm sure whichever card you buy you will be more than happy with and will do you just fine. :)
 
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coupe69: Many thanks for that, I actually understood it all!

However, you're not making it easy for me, but that's a good thing.

So, GTX260's are on the cards at the moment.

Assuming no one gives me reason to change my mind again before I get the purchase order number from work, I'll order it all and let you know.

Thanks again.
 
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