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RicochetOrange wrote on 2011-12-16 19:14
Yes. Both are within my budget. I'm running a 22' monitor with a max resolution (I think) of 1920x1080, or something like that. Its widescreen, it works its fine. Because me recent (cheap) graphics card's fan began making awful noise from the fan (and because I wanted an upgrade anyway) I'm selling a bunch of old games, some very good, some not so good, but on average they seem to sell for about $10 each.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130625
vs.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102931
Specs seem similar but one is Nvidia and the other is a Radeon card. Unless you guys have any better suggesions, which one is generally better? My max budget is around $150, but I'm fine with going a little over.
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Osayidan wrote on 2011-12-16 19:33
I don't know individual ATI cards, but that nvidia one is pretty good, and the 500 series Nvidia cards are pretty silent compared to ATI, which is why I like them so much.
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BobYoMeowMeow wrote on 2011-12-16 21:01
there's recently been some problems people been having with Radeon cards and skyrim
so kind of biased for Nvidia now
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-12-16 23:39
The 550 Ti is quite a bit weaker than the 6790.
I'd rather get a 6850, though. Price is comparable.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102908
The Cat is correct in that AMD's driver didn't handle Skyrim very well, but I believe they have fixed it since.
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protoman206 wrote on 2011-12-17 00:11
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Akemii wrote on 2011-12-17 00:13
Quote from BobYoMeowMeow;694959:
there's recently been some problems people been having with Radeon cards and skyrim
so kind of biased for Nvidia now
trufax.
I have a Radeon and I run it sorta laggishly.
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-12-17 00:22
Quote from protoman206;695165:
http://www.build-gaming-computers.com/best-video-cards.html
Noob-article!
Quote from Akemii;695166:
trufax.
I have a Radeon and I run it sorta laggishly.
Update your driver. There's the 11.11c hotfix, which improves performance in Skyrim:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalyst1111cperformance.aspx
There's also the newer (but actually older, due to more testing time spent on it) standard release 11.12, although I'm not sure if the Skyrim fixes were added into it yet.
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Akemii wrote on 2011-12-17 00:23
Quote from Yoorah;695184:
Noob-article!
Update your driver. There's the 11.11c hotfix, which improves performance in Skyrim: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalyst1111cperformance.aspx
There's also the newer (but actually older, due to more testing time spent on it) standard release 11.12, although I'm not sure if the Skyrim fixes were added into it yet.
I have to delete my current driver though, right?
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-12-17 00:24
Yep, just uninstall it using your control panel, and select "express uninstall all AMD software" or something like that. Your display will go low res, and ask you to reboot. Then install the new one.
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RebeccaBlack wrote on 2011-12-17 03:12
After buying an ATI card, I kind of hate it. Yes, they make powerful cards, sometimes more powerful than Nvidia cards, but they run into so many driver issues that it's just an enormous pain in the ass. You'll screw around with 5 different drivers until you find one that does what you want, and then you'll find it broke some other game you play. If you only intend to play super popular/mainstream high budget games, then sure, you'll probably be alright. But if you play free MMOs such as Vindictus or Mabinogi and run into problems, good luck with that. Your only hope would be to find third party software that might improve performance by tweaking some things. Nvidia typically did not run into this problem from my experiences.
I've had it with ATI's **** and thus will have to recommend to Nvidia equivalent. ATI cards are great when they do what they're supposed to, and they usually do for big games (if not immediately, official fixes are made later), but when they don't work... they really suck. They can be worse than a card of half the value when they decide to not work properly on that obscure game you love. And if you do just play those big games all the time, Nvidia usually has them optimized and working right out of the box, as every other game seems to be made for Nvidia cards. Expect a more stable and reliable performance from their products. And please, never base it solely on the highest performance a card can give relative to the price. A $200 card will certainly do better than a $100 card, but if they're in the same general price range then reliability should be a big deal, even if there are noteworthy performance differences.
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-12-17 03:32
Never had any issues with Vindictus or Mabi, or any other game for that matter. I've heard NVIDIA has been giving grief to people on Maplestory, though. lawl Been using this AMD Radeon HD 5770 for two years now, ever since they came out.. after my NVIDIA card started acting glitchy. And while it's true that in the distant past (2~3+ years ago) ATI had a pretty bad track record in terms of driver quality, NVIDIA had a pretty bad track record in terms of hardware reliability, which is a much bigger deal. The latter is why I switched. Since then, it looks like NVIDIA cards don't fail as often, and AMD drivers have been decent, so it comes down to average gaming performance you get for the $. If you care about energy efficiency, AMD has had a pretty significant lead here as well.
Games used to be more often optimized for NVIDIA than ATI, but that stopped being the case after NVIDIA's delayed-delayed-delayed-failed launch of their Fermi architecture. Since then, several high profile titles, like Crysis, worked better on AMD cards. I believe Valve (think Source engine, Vindictus etc) partnered with AMD to optimize their engine for their cards, too. On the other hand, there are titles like Civ 5 where NVIDIA had the lead. This is why you look at average performance between several games.
But in the end, you're building it for yourself so buy whatever makes you feel happier inside. :P
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RebeccaBlack wrote on 2011-12-17 03:52
Quote from Yoorah;695415:
Never had any issues with Vindictus or Mabi
I've never had issues with Vindictus relating to my video card, but I've had some problems with other games. I've never played Mabinogi with this video card.
ATI had a pretty bad track record in terms of driver quality, NVIDIA had a pretty bard track record in terms of hardware reliability, which is a much bigger deal.
I'm just going by personal experience. I had two Nvidia 7900GS cards in SLI from 2006 to 2010 and my cards did die at that point. Well, they didn't die, but they were getting annoying pixelation errors which led me to drop them. They were on the way down, basically. But using the same video card for 4 years and having them both die at the same time was sufficient for me. They were getting older at that point and were pretty much becoming obsolete. The "average" build with a $100-150 card performed better. Despite the SLI setup, the cards never really ran into problems at all.
I've had this ATI 5970 since and it has given me a lot of driver issues. The fact that it's a dual GPU card doesn't help, although it's certainly not the sole cause. Other people with single GPU cards often run into the same problems I do. Seems like it's an ATI thing.
I think the Valve partnership with AMD is recent. I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but I've only been hearing about it for the past few months.
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Yoorah wrote on 2011-12-17 21:17
Yep, that's the same issue my 7600GT had, except it started happening after only 2 years. It was minor at first, but it got increasingly bad so I replaced it after about a year later. The cause was thermal cycling stress not being accounted for in the materials and chip design NVIDIA used. More importantly, the way NVIDIA handled the issue was horrible. At first, they were trying their best to just pretend there was no problem, and their solution was to increase fan speeds to delay the death of the chip. Then they claimed they had switched materials to "most of the ones used by Intel," except the keyword here was "most"--they actually kept some incompatible materials in the chip, which made the issue just as bad, so the whole thing lasted for several generations of parts, IIRC. Naturally, it affected laptops more, since those experience more thermal cycling, but desktop parts were also affected. I think there's been a class action lawsuit or two against em for this. Apple switched to AMD in their Macbook Pros, etc.
All in all, when I think back, buying a NVIDIA card given the above would be a big no-no. I went the AMD route, figured the drivers couldn't be as bad as some people have been claiming, and they weren't. :P As for right now, I wouldn't know. I'd hope that they would have solved their chip design/manufacturing issue by now, but on the other hand, Fermi is a far more complex chip, and it also has a much worse TDP than their old ones. So if they've made a mistake again, the issues would come out even harder. AMD has a much better design, hardware-wise.
In your case, a dual GPU card... yeah. CrossFire stuff needs patches for everything. This is why I don't like multi-GPU. NVIDIA's solution is more stable in this regard, I'll agree with you there--but from what I've heard, it's not perfect, either.
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Sapphireoath wrote on 2011-12-18 01:09
I've had 0 issues with my 6970 (no, I'm not getting confused with 6790). Then again, I don't really have that large of a game library...so I can't say that for all games.
I don't even hear it during graphic intensive games like BF3. Only fans I hear are the 4 fans on my case and even those aren't that loud on Middle speed :P***
Latest AMD updates apparently fixed issues with Skyrim.
nVidia vs AMD is like DK vs Pally :P, each have their own pros and cons.
Edit:***What I'm saying is I don't get why I see so many people complaining about AMD card noises :P
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RicochetOrange wrote on 2011-12-18 04:19
Quote from Sapphireoath;696475:
I've had 0 issues with my 6970 (no, I'm not getting confused with 6790). Then again, I don't really have that large of a game library...so I can't say that for all games.
I don't even hear it during graphic intensive games like BF3. Only fans I hear are the 4 fans on my case and even those aren't that loud on Middle speed :P***
Latest AMD updates apparently fixed issues with Skyrim.
nVidia vs AMD is like DK vs Pally :P, each have their own pros and cons.
Edit:***What I'm saying is I don't get why I see so many people complaining about AMD card noises :P
Well my old GPU, (some cheapo $50 AMD card) had a pretty quiet fan up until a few weeks ago. Then you could hear it on the other side of the house. :x
Also, for anyone that knows, what would be a comparable nVidia card (specs-wise, not price) to an ATI Radeon HD 6850 (the one that Yoorah suggested)? I'm not too familiar with graphics cards, so I'm not sure exactly what would be as good.