Get graphics card now or March?

linkgx1

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Sep 27, 2012
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Okay, so I'm building my own PC with a Core i5 processor, 16gigs of ram and what not. But the PC itself isn't what I'm concerned about.

Now I have been debating whether or not I should get a graphics card now or not. I heard some new ones are coming out near March, and I'm thinking I should wait until then to get a video card. Or I can get a cheaper video card now (under $80) that should get me by now and then I can slap that into an older computer

I'll eventually be looking for a midrange card.
 

Witcher79

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Jan 9, 2013
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First Im going to say getting a video card under 80 bucks wont get you much and you will regret it. I'm not sure on any new releases on graphics cards; the 7000 series from AMD and the new nevidia cards are pretty new. So i don't know what else could be out in march. If you want a mid ranged card you should be looking to buy a card in the 250-400 dollar range.
 

linkgx1

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I guess I'll get a $250-300 gpu then. I think that should be good. I hope.
 

johanpeeters83

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Jan 21, 2013
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you may wan`t to check out `nvidia roadmap` based on that in 2013 a new architecture codename maxwell will be introduced
 

Opaz1ka

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Dec 18, 2012
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There is no way you should spend less that $170 for a GPU on a system with core i5 and 16GB of ram, the answer is yes you should wait, the integrated gpus on the ivy core i5s can play most games in low quality, the radeon 8850 seems like a solid choice: 25% performance increase and lower pricing than the 7850.
 

xxtman3

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Jun 19, 2012
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I have 2 GTX 670's in SLI and they max out almost everything at 5760x1080 resolution. So at 1920x1080 with one card you will max out most games just fine. It's 375 with a mail in rebate on newegg.
 

linkgx1

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Sep 27, 2012
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Something to consider. I'm wondering if I shoudl get a SLI/CrossXfire moddaboard.
 

johanpeeters83

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Jan 21, 2013
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On Fermi, the cores run on double the frequency of the rest of the logic. On Kepler, they run at the same frequency. That effectively halves the number of cores on Kepler if one wants to do more of an apples to apples comparison to Fermi. So that leaves the GK104 (Kepler) with 1536 / 2 = 768 "Fermi equivalent cores", which is only 50% more than the 512 cores on the GF110 (Fermi).

Looking at the transistor counts, the GF110 has 3 billion transistors while the GK104 has 3.5 billion. So, even though the Kepler has 3 times as many cores, it only has slightly more transistors. So now, not only does the Kepler have only 50% more "Fermi equivalent cores" than Fermi, but each of those cores must be much simpler than the ones of Fermi.

So, those two issues probably explain why many projects see a slowdown when porting to Kepler.

Further, the GK104, being a version of Kepler made for graphics cards, has been tuned in such a way that cooperation between threads is slower than on Fermi (as such cooperation is not as important for graphics). Any potential potential performance gain, after taking the above facts into account, may be negated by this.

There is also the issue of double precision floating point performance. The version of GF110 used in Tesla cards can do double precision floating point at 1/2 the performance of single precision. When the chip is used in graphics cards, the double precision performance is artificially limited to 1/8 of single precision performance, but this is still much better than the 1/24 double precision performance of GK104.
also i`ve seen some gtx470 second hand for 90$ and a asus directcu2 gtx580 for 200

at last l2 cache on fermi is 768kb vs 512 for kepler
i`ve seen gtx470 for 90$ and asus directcu2gtx580 for 200$


 

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