Multimedia, Workstation, Gaming, stuck on the video card.

[epdark]

Going to build within the next month, waiting out CES to see if I may wait til Febuary.

Main uses are in the topic: Wanting to check out FFXIV and GWII, but Starcraft II, D3, and various FPS are undoubtable things to be played. Plan to use the PC as a media hub for blu-ray's and etc, as well as streaming to a PS3/360. Potential for some graphical design use.

Set in stone Build:

PS: OCZ Modxstream 700w (Own)

CPU: i5-2500k

Mobo: Gigabyte P67 UD4 or Sabertooth P67 (Depends on price/availability.)

Ram: OCZ Reaper HPC DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24 2x2gb (Own)

Case: Cooler Master Storm Scout (Own)

HD: C300 SSD 64g boot, 500gig samsung spinpoint f3 (I own the spinpoint)

Disc: Asus Blu-ray drive (Own)

Cooler: Cooler Master V6 (Own)

Monitor: Samsung 42" 1080p plasma (Own) (Planning to buy actual monitors at some point in future)

Videocard: Ugh.. why does this have to be so hard? I'm really leaning towards a HD 6850, 460? 6950 is REALLY tempting..

So yeah, I've been slowly acquiring stuff and then Intel threw a wrench and I'm being a traitor to my AMD love. My main question is in regards to video cards but any tweaks or suggestions. I have 8 terabytes of storage available between NAS etc, so.. yeah..

the 6850 seems like a steal, but then there's the 6950 rocking my socks, but it really pushes me beyond what I want to spend, so I'm really wanting some opinions on if I should get a 6850 and crossfire later and be happy? Is it bang for buck wise better then springing for the 6950? I've also considered abandoning AMD completely and getting a GTX 560 when the come out, anyone have any insights? Can I expect 6850 to compare to 560? Or will 560 compete with 6950? I really hate how Nvidia fights against the pricing schemes so much, it almost seems as if they purposefully confuse the market.

 

[epdark]

Forgot to mention, I'm probably going to just do a set it and forget it overclock of 4.4ghz on that i5-2500k

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I'm finding the 570 as the best bang for the buck of late. I don't actually get to play games much ..... get a chance now and then to play on my son's.... but do build a lot of gaming boxes. All things being equal, personally, I'd take the nVidia card since why give up CUDA and PhysX unless you're paying less....Since ya paying more and not getting that nor more fps .....

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=426&Itemid=72&limit=1&limitstart=17

Beginning with frame rate performance, the GeForce GTX 570 video card demonstrates how well NVIDIA has tuned the GF110 by matching performance with the more-expensive GeForce GTX 480. While these two products share 480 CUDA cores apiece, they don't share the same formula. In comparison to the Fermi GF100-powered GeForce GTX 480 with 1536MB of 384-bit GDDR5 memory, the GF110 proved how a refined balance of tessellation, shaders, and texture units can compensate for 1280MB of 320-Bit GDDR5. In the end, most of our performance benchmarks illustrated a back-and-forth struggle between the GTX 480 and GTX 570. It could be argued that they offer extremely similar graphics processing power, dependant on the application.

In our DirectX 10 tests, 3D Mark Vantage had the GeForce GTX 570 ahead of GTX 480 by almost 4 FPS in Jane Nash, and maintained its lead in New Calico tests. Crysis Warhead matches the GeForce GTX 570 to the GTX 480 equally, and dominate all other single-GPU AMD Radeon video cards. In our DirectX 11 tests, Aliens vs Predator puts the GeForce GTX 570 video card 6 FPS ahead of the Radeon 5870, and then positions it 15 FPS beyond the GTX 480 with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. BattleForge, Lost Planet 2, and Mafia II all report the GeForce GTX 570 even with, or outperforming the GTX 480. Testing with Metro 2033, the GeForce GTX 570 outperforms the ATI Radeon 5870 by 7 FPS, and beats the AMD Radeon 6870 by 6 FPS. Tom Clancy's HAWX2 clearly works better with GeForce tessellation, putting the GTX 570 and all other NVIDIA products way ahead of AMD Radeon video cards. Finally, the Unigine Heaven benchmark confirms the trends we've seen in all the tests leading up to this, positioning the GeForce GTX 570 slightly ahead of the retiring GTX 480, and nearly 13 FPS beyond the ATI Radeon HD 5870.

 

[epdark]

So if I get a 570, that makes me curious about folding@home, what the hell are the points about? People act is if they have something to gain for doing it. Devoting entire systems to folding? Is it just an absurd enthusiast hobby or is there actually something to personally gain from folding? (I leave my PS3 folding almost constantly.. not on a team tho.)