need help with upgrading my PC

[happi]

i have XFX 790i Ultra motherboard and am looking for good graphic card in $300-$400 range. what would you recommend and which one will fit my motherboard.

i was thinking about Radeon HD 7970 or GTX 660ti, i know 660ti will work fine on my board but am not sure about the Radeon HD 7970 because i never ever used their cards before.

any suggestions

[GeToChKn]

7970 is a dual gpu video card, monster size, monster power, monster price but gets great performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/508?vs=647


Really it comes down to whats games you want to play the most, use that site I linked to compare cards for the games you want. Some games amd is better, some nvidia, some they are even, some were worse at the time the benchmark was done but are winning now with new drivers or game patches. lol. It's all very confusing.

[Apyrase]

Originally Posted by GeToChKn

7970 is a dual gpu video card, monster size, monster power, monster price but gets great performance.

7970 is NOT a dual GPU card. The 7990 (made by only a couple brands since it's not technically a real card pushed out by AMD) is the dual GPU card.

The 7970 is the flagship card for AMD and currently the best single video card solution (beating even the 680) but the 660ti is the 3rd highest on nVidia right now. nVidia's prices are always higher because there are so many people out there who swear that they're the better brand (not true, they're very even).

In my opinion (excuse my low post count, I'm new to aquariums but a veteran in computer parts), you should get the 7970, as it has more VRAM and a higher memory bus than the 660ti, which is definitely more futureproof than nVidia cards. You will have to take in consideration of having ~500w power supply at least and enough room in your case though.

[HD Blazingwolf]

GTX 690 GPU Engine Specs:
3072CUDA Cores
915Base Clock (MHz)
1019Boost Clock (MHz)
234Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)GTX 690 Memory Specs:
6.0Memory Speed (Gbps)
4096 MB (2048 MB per GPU) GDDR5Standard Memory Config
512-bit (256-bit per GPU)Memory Interface Width
384Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)



radion 7970 GHZ edition
Up to 925MHz Engine Clock
3GB GDDR5 Memory
1375MHz Memory Clock (5.5Gbps GDDR5)
264GB/s memory bandwidth (maximum)
3.79 TFLOPS Single Precision compute power
947 GFLOPS Double Precision compute power
GCN Architecture
32 compute units (2048 Stream Processors)
128 Texture Units
128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
32 Color ROP Units
Dual Geometry Engines
Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE)



nvidia has more process cores, more memorry bandwidth, and basically more pwoer. period
radeon's are smoother running just don't have as much nuts. similar to when intel and AMD where battling out processors. amd' cpu's are better all round cpus and intel's are just power hogs.. but intel played their hand and AMD waved the white flag. they will no longer be running the race, just content to have second hand cpu's at an affordable price

[Apyrase]

Originally Posted by HD Blazingwolf

nvidia has more process cores, more memorry bandwidth, and basically more pwoer. period

Now see, this is where you're wrong and an example of the fanboyism I talked about.

1) The GTX 690 is more than twice the price of a 7970, so this is not even a fair comparison. He did say he wanted to spend $300-400, not $1000+.
2) More processor cores does not mean better performance in all cases. It depends on the architecture.
3) Since the 690 is a dual-gpu card, it effectively halves the specs listed for memory bandwidth. In actuality, it only has 2 Gbs of usable VRAM and a 256 bit-bus, compared to the 7970s 3Gbs and 384bit-bus.
4) You want actual benchmarks, not just specs.

Here's a good benchmark comparing a 7950 to a 660ti which are at exactly the same price point (~$300). You'll notice that it's faster than even a 670. Now keep in mind that the 7970 is even better than the 7950 and still the same price as a 670.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/..._670_hd_7950/3

Originally Posted by HD Blazingwolf

radeon's are smoother running just don't have as much nuts. similar to when intel and AMD where battling out processors. amd' cpu's are better all round cpus and intel's are just power hogs.. but intel played their hand and AMD waved the white flag. they will no longer be running the race, just content to have second hand cpu's at an affordable price

We weren't talking about CPUs though...

[HD Blazingwolf]

i know we werent talking about cpu's but my statement before that brought that to mind

im running radeon's if it makes u feel better.. im not a nvidia fan boy

benchmarks are good, but on what board, on what cpu? they can't logically be the same,
even if a board can run both cards, it will run one better than the other

[Apyrase]

Oops, sorry if I jumped to conclusions!

It's going to vary between CPU to CPU but the difference is very negligible.

Comparison between a high end Intel processor (i7-3930k) with a rather low end AMD (Phenom II x4):

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3090-10.html

The difference between FPS is what, like, 1-2. This is assuming they held every other variable constant, including the GPU. The motherboard and CPU obviously have been changed though.

[GeToChKn]

Sorry, I was wrong on the card.

Looking at the OP's motherboard, it's only a 775, so core2duo, core2quad maximum cpu, so any decent GPU is probably going to top out fine and their CPU is going to bottleneck at some point, especially if it's a dual core in games like 64player BF3.

[happi]

i went for gtx 660ti Sc and running everything on ultra settings. thanks guys

[CoffeeLove]

I'm partial to nvidia. They release great drivers and games usually run into less problems with an nvidia card

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[HD Blazingwolf]

glad to hear!!! the gtx series was a good jump for nvidia
they stil lhave a lot of R&D the need to invest in, thye personally spend too much on making their video cards do more than they should.. they just need to make them play games the way we want them to be played!!!!!!!!

[CoffeeLove]

Originally Posted by HD Blazingwolf

glad to hear!!! the gtx series was a good jump for nvidia
they stil lhave a lot of R&D the need to invest in, thye personally spend too much on making their video cards do more than they should.. they just need to make them play games the way we want them to be played!!!!!!!!

What? They do. At ultra and 60fps.

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[happi]

Originally Posted by CoffeeLove

What? They do. At ultra and 60fps.

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am running BF3 at ultra with soild 60fps

pc specs:

Nvidia 790i ultra motherboard
Intel Q9550 4.0Ghz CPU
1600Mhz DDR3 (10GB)
GTX 660TI SC

[HD Blazingwolf]

I KNOW they play games good.. sheesh

but nvidia does more than graphics cards now.. their expanding to full entertainment needs

ahh maybe im just being stingy.. i do like nvidia.
just like intel rox but i'm an AMD fanboy for sure

[CoffeeLove]

Amd is ok for budget builds especially in their cpu department where everything gets stomped on by Intel.

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