570 or 6970

[dayman500]

What are the pros and cons of both graphics cards, and which one will scale better in Crossfire/SLI, as i plan to go Crossfire/SLI when i buy one.

 

[g00fysmiley]

traditionally nvidia had been scaling better in sli than amd/ati crossfire however the new hd6xxx series has bridged the gap and they now tend to scale about on par, some cases ati.amd is even beating sli (titles vary)

really the 6970 trades blows with the 570, but it wins more than it loses.

tom's did a good comparison yesterday

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950-cayman,2818.html

they are both damn good cards, given the choice if CUDA wan't needed i'd go 6970 , if you do need cuda (if you have to look it up then you don't need it) then 570

 

[eyefinity]

6970 crossfire is closer to 580 sli than 570. In fact I'd give that a few months and the 6970 crossfire will be faster than the 580 sli as well.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1488/1/

http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/zardon/his-hd6970-cfx-graphics-card-review/

 

[wa1]

Then better wait for a few weeks until the drivers "matured", cause right now GTX580 is still faster than HD6970.
But again, any setup that you choose are GREAT, you said that you want to CF/SLI either of those cards, right? I'm pretty sure Dual GTX580 or Dual HD6970 will crush everything easily...

 

[beltzy]

As an alternate suggestion, the 6950 in crossfire outperforms 570's in SLI for most titles for $100 less, and will save you $160 vs 6970's. The crossfire scaling really shines with the new optimizations they've implemented for Cayman- while weaker in single card performance, in crossfire it catches up and provides a great value.

If you're running at 1920x1200 it's probably more horsepower than you need. Something to think about. As mentioned by other posters, any of these solutions will perform very, very well. 6950 uses a bit less power than the other 2 cards (tom's article shows 570/6970 using about the same amount). 6950/6970 both have 2GB of memory on each card vs 1.25GB on the 570. The 570 has the bragging rights of being quite a bit less noisy than the other cards, despite the 6950/6970 both being less noisy than the 5800 series cards.

Good luck picking your cards- let us know what you decide on!

 

[dayman500]

Thanks for all the replies so far!
Right now I am leaning towards the 6970, but I am wondering will 2x 6970 be able to play games from 3 years from now, and also I heard rumors about the 6990 coming out, and will the 6990 be drastically better than the 6970, and will it be replacing the 5970 with the double GPU? Thanks in advance

 

[tigrc]

The 6990 will be replacing the 5970, they both have dual GPUs. You will be able to play games with 2x 6970 three years from now, no doubt about that, but you will most likely use a bit lower graphics settings for the new games of 2015

 

[dayman500]

Actually, I was looking at the 6950, and for the price of 6970, I could get 2 6950's, is there a huge difference the two of them?

 

[Mobutu]

Remember that 570 sli require at lest 750W were the 6850 crossfire I bet you my penny that it would run on a 600-650W supply. So it's not just the GPU's cost that you should consider but also the cash that goes into the PSU. I would go for the 6850's cross fired becouse of the MASIVE memory advantage that they hold over the 570's ( 4GB vs 2.4 GB ). That counts a lot in my book. cheers !

 

[dayman500]

I already have a XFX 850w Power Supply, but also the post I previously wrote, I was looking at the 6850, instead of 6950, which is why I thought I could buy 2 6950's for the price of 1 6970, I'm probably gonna stick with the 6970. I'll probably buy 1 first, because I have a 1920x1080 monitor, and i'm pretty sure Crossfire would be overkill, but thats the reason i'm getting 1 first, so If i decided I need more power, i'll pick up a second one. Also Im picking up the XFX 6970 from newegg.

 

[Rustyy117]

Remember that 570 sli require at lest 750W were the 6850 crossfire I bet you my penny that it would run on a 600-650W supply. So it's not just the GPU's cost that you should consider but also the cash that goes into the PSU. I would go for the 6850's cross fired becouse of the MASIVE memory advantage that they hold over the 570's ( 4GB vs 2.4 GB ). That counts a lot in my book. cheers !

The HD6850's have 1GB of memory (less than a GTX570)

Also when you crossfire or SLI the memory of the GPU's do not a combine, so 2 x 1GB HD6850's does not equal 2GB total VRAM, You get just 1GB which is still plenty for 1920 x 1080 gaming or below

 

[dayman500]

Best answer selected by dayman500.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey