6950 2GB or 560 2GB?

[theitaliansico]

okay so today im customizing a pc for my friend. Not sure what his display is going to be but i have 3 choices. a 32 inch 1080p display or a 26 inch 720p hdtv or a 17 inch monitor. Now the card i need must be ready for either one of these displays.
here is what i came up with for my budget:
GTX 560 ti 1gb
GTX 560 ti 2GB
Radeon 6950 2GB
Im aware of the GTX 570 but it is too expensive.
The power supply will be this 850 Watts - Corsair CMPSU-850TXV2 80 Plus Power Supply - Quad SLI Ready
crossfire and SLI are not an option.

 

[borden5]

i think you can't go 3 monitors using a single nvidia card unless they are special edition or something, hd 6950 2gb would be your best choice since it support eyefinity and an extra gb ram should help you on that resolution.

 

[slhpss]

i think you can't go 3 monitors using a single nvidia card unless they are special edition or something, hd 6950 2gb would be your best choice since it support eyefinity and an extra gb ram should help you on that resolution.

and don't forget the 6950s can be unlocked to 6970s

 

[nordlead]

1GB either way if you only have a single 1080p display. Recently I've been leaning towards AMD since it takes less peak power and they have had slightly better performance per dollar, but the 560Ti is a good card too. Whichever is cheaper might be a good solution

If you aren't going SLI/Crossfire, then why a 850W PSU? You could go down to the TX650V2 and invest the money in other components or just save $40. Even then, you can crossfire 6950's on a TX750V2.

 

[theitaliansico]

on the website it gives me a free upgrade from a 750w to 850w. anyway sorry for the misunderstanding he will not be using more than one display. IM going to convince him to use the 32 inch 1080 so im thinking 6950. I dont want to give him 1gb because he may be running at 2560x1600. is the 6950 a better choice?

 

[theitaliansico]

*** i just compared the two and 560 ti looks like its better for gamin not really sure what to do. Hes gonna be running BF3 all the time on a 32 inch sounds like 6950 is my best bet but i dont know.

 

[slhpss]

There is a really great article giving true measurements of video cards capabilities i will look it up and post it here. The thing that caught me the most (especially since I had just bought a 6950) was that when looking at per frame render speeds ATI cards tend to stall on a single frame occasionally causing noticeable lag in the game, but since it only happens for one frame their overall FPS doesn't drop significantly. So though I own ATI and have for a while now I'm starting to lean towards the nvidia camp.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/1

^^ article referencing... pay attention to the second chart on page 2 with the single frame jumps. those jumps would be a significant freeze in a game and detrimental to play... Nvidia doesn't seem to suffer from this. The rest of the article details a lot of SLI benches but it's still relevant.

 

[klorry56]

The microstuttering article here on Tom's Hardware also has a good show of performance between the cards and also lists the cards in SLI/Cross-Fire. It's worth looking into for comparing cards for what you are going to use them for.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html

Personally, I am picking up a 6950 2gb because my goal is to run two of them in cross fire here soon. It's all in what you want to do with them. I believe the 6950 1gb are better than the 2gb ones due to the GPU running out of juice before you will use all 2gb of Ram on the board if you're not going to cross-fire them, but if you're going to run cross-fire, you need to pick up the 2gb ones.

 

[beltzy]

*** i just compared the two and 560 ti looks like its better for gamin not really sure what to do. Hes gonna be running BF3 all the time on a 32 inch sounds like 6950 is my best bet but i dont know.

You can only run in 2560x1600 if you have a monitor capable of doing so. There are a handful of computer monitors (usually 30") that can do this, but they cost in excess of $1,000. A 32" TV will not be able to run that res; the max should be 1920x1080 for any HDTV.

At that resolution getting a card with 2GB of memory is not going to provide any additional performance above a 1GB version of the same card. Unless your friend is planning to upgrade to a higher res monitor in the near future or use 3 monitors, I'd recommend saving them 30ish bucks and going with the 1GB.

If you know they're not going to crossfire or SLI, either the 6950 1GB or GTX 560ti 1GB would be fine with a 650w PSU (like the corsair tx650v2 that a previous poster mentioned). These cards perform nearly identically overall and either would be a great choice.

Good luck with the build!

 

[gnomio]

on the website it gives me a free upgrade from a 750w to 850w. anyway sorry for the misunderstanding he will not be using more than one display. IM going to convince him to use the 32 inch 1080 so im thinking 6950. I dont want to give him 1gb because he may be running at 2560x1600. is the 6950 a better choice?

forget about Vram amount 1Gb is enough. At higher than 1080p resolutions the cards don't run into Vram problems but they're processors are just too weak to handle dx 11 and Tesselation at that resolution. Remember todays dx 11 cards are still weak in dx 11 standards. When they slow down at higher resolutions its not the Vram just the processing. They added only two extra shaders to do a heavy job like Tesselation that's why metro bring any gpu to a halt at high resolutions

 

[amuffin]

Wait until december when there is the 560ti upgrade...

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Two factory OC'd 560 Ti (900Mhz) @ $215 each get 862 fps in Guru3D's game test suite .... two factory OC'd 6950's get 759.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=-1&IsNodeId=1&Description=560%20Ti%20900Mhz&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20

Screen size is irrelevant, at 1920 x 1080, i'd use 1GB

 

[christop]

6950 FOR THE WIN THEN FLASH TO 6970 LATERZ

 

[bliq]

on the website it gives me a free upgrade from a 750w to 850w. anyway sorry for the misunderstanding he will not be using more than one display. IM going to convince him to use the 32 inch 1080 so im thinking 6950. I dont want to give him 1gb because he may be running at 2560x1600. is the 6950 a better choice?

I don't understand. he's going to use a 1080p TV as a monitor? That pretty much guarantees that his max res will be 1900x1080 doesn't it? To get 2560x1600 requires one of the expensive 27 or 30 in monitors.

 

[bliq]

6950 FOR THE WIN THEN FLASH TO 6970 LATERZ

Only the 2GB 6950s can flash to 6970 but why wait til laterz? I did mine the day I brought it home. works fine. that's the main reason for stepping up to the 2GB version, even though with stock bios, there's not much benefit.

 

[slhpss]

Only the 2GB 6950s can flash to 6970 but why wait til laterz? I did mine the day I brought it home. works fine. that's the main reason for stepping up to the 2GB version, even though with stock bios, there's not much benefit.

This is not true... I know for a fact at least one of the 1 gigs can flash and I bet the majority can (I have a 1 gig with unlocked shaders and have helped one person in these forums do the same.)

 

[gnomio]

Here you go
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102951&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&AID=10440897&PID=3067296&SID=

 

[theitaliansico]

after reading everything i have decided to go with gtx 560 ti. Maybe i will convince him for CHristmas to buy a second GTX 560 ti if he has performance issues. anyway gotta go play skyrim download just finsihed