Choosing a Graphics Card, 6870 or 7850?

m11rtin

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Oct 29, 2012
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I am thinking of buying a new graphics card next week for about 160 Euros (about 208 USD). There are two cards which i am choosing between, the

SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY Radeon HD 7850 Dual-X - 1 GB GDDR5 - PCI-Express 3.0 (197.74$)
http://www.pixmania.si/si/uk/12784835/art/sapphire-technology/radeon-hd-7850-dual-x-1-g.html
Latest technology (22nm), good performance, runs cool... note: this is the 1GB version

and the

AMD Radeon HD 6870 OEM - 1 GB GDDR5 - PCI-Express 2.1 (171.89$)
http://www.pixmania.si/si/uk/11391849/art/amd/radeon-hd-6870-oem-1-gb-g.html
I know it has a loud cooler and is a bit old, but it still performs quite nice.

I will overclock and play quite demanding games (Metro 2033, Just Cause 2, Crysis 2 and OpenTTD :p) at 1080p resolution.
I am a nvidia fan boy but there isn't such a bang for buck on their side (the GTX 650 Ti isn't as good as any of these cards at the same price). I am from EU, so stores like newegg and ncix aren't an option for me. I have a 650W PSU so it would handle both of these cards. I have an AMD Phenom II 1090T @ 3.7GHz. My current graphics card is an old 9400 GT which i got for 10€.

Sorry for my bad english..
 

getbacktosrinu

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Mar 30, 2012
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Hehe... even my old gfx card was a 9400gt...

Anyways I would suggest going for the 7850... cause it can be overclocked very well...

But u may have to give up high textures and maybe some AA bcoz of the 1 GB memory... (at 1080p resolution)

And some free advice: try using the 9400gt as a dedicated physX card... i haven't done it (yet)... but it should be doable
 

m11rtin

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Oct 29, 2012
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i tried googling it, but a dedicated physx card must have at least 32 CUDA cores, the 9400 gt only has 16 :/ . i tought i could use it for hybird physx but i can't :(
 

getbacktosrinu

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too bad...

but thanks for the info.
 

Limerick

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Oct 25, 2012
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I would get the 7850. The overclockability of that card is big. You can easily get it from stock to 1200+MHz. That birngs it to performances just a shade lower than stock 7950.
 

m11rtin

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Oct 29, 2012
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the thing is that i can get the 1 gb version for 150$ and the 2gb version for 200$ so there is a big difference in price...