6870 or 6950, c.2006 system

V

Venner

n00b
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Jul 14, 2004
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So I'm driving myself nuts deciding whether to upgrade my video card or not, and to what.
Done lots of reading on all the 6870/6950/6970 and GTX 460/560/570 lines, but my situation is that (a) my computer is a few years old and (b) this is likely the only upgrade I will be doing for the next couple of years.

My current setup is:
Intel Core2Duo E6600 @ 2.4Ghz
MSI 975X Platinum Ed. mobo
6Gb DDR2
MSI Radeon X1900 CF Edition (card #2 is kaput)
600W Silverstone PS
Windows 7 Ult. x64

How I game:
I play at 1920x1200 on a 24" monitor, preferrbly with lots of AA &AF. Nowadays, it's mostly TF2 to blow off steam, or some Civ 4. Even TF2, I have slowdown/jitter on the newer maps sometimes. Definitely the video card, as I hear it whiring up and down under stress. I also have a number of games that I want to play (Bioshock 2, The Witcher, Stalker: CoP, etc) that just don't work great with my current card.

Ideally, I'd be < $200 AR for the upgrade -- money doesn't grow on trees these days -- although I almost impulse bought that Powercolor 6950 today for $230 AR.

My big question is, what should I get? Is a 6950 overkill for my rig -- will I really see much better performance than a 6870 or 460? Any other thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks all
 
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Not with that CPU no. Personally I'd say go with an HD6850. It's still four times as powerful as your pair of X1900's best efforts, it's only $175, and has no compatibility issues with old Intel chipsets, unlike the GTX460. Frankly I think anything more powerful than a 6850 will be lost on an E6600.
 
The 6950 would be overkill for your system and the games you play. You'd be better off with just a single 5870 which can usually be found for under $200 fairly easy
 
HD6850 is usually cheaper than the HD5870, a lot more compact and not a great deal slower (I'd say almost unnoticeably so with an E6600).
 
Consider overclocking and/or getting a used $100 q6600 cpu.
 
I wouldn't say a Q6600. I'd say either an E8x00 or a Q9x50 if the board will take one, and if not, then just wait until the whole lot can be upgraded to a P67 or similar. There's still room to upgrade graphics on that system.
 
I agree w/ 6850 for that system. It will be a huge upgrade over 1900 cf. As mentioned, go AMD with older Intel socket MB as nvidia has compatibility issues.
What about OC that CPU?
 
I would strongly consider either upgrading to a quad core CPU and going with a lower-end card (6850, or 6870). You just won't benefit from the 6950, just as you thought (I mean, you will, but not maxing out the card). I say this because I'm still rocking my Q9300 quad core, and all of my 3d benchmarks are coming in well under where they should be. As I keep increasing my CPU speed, they slightly increase, but I'm not comfortable getting more than 35-40% on top of my CPU's rated capacity (and it's having booting problems after 3.3ghz on a 2.5ghz labeled proc).

Depending on what games you play, you may see a much greater benefit by upgrading to a C2Q and getting a lower card (6850). I know that Battlefield Bad Company 2, which I play a lot, has been getting better and better and has been playing smoother with higher CPU overclocks, and is fully multi-threaded, so it takes advantage of those multiple cores. Your games may not work out the same, but it definitely helped me.
 
BFBC2 is one of the most CPU-intensive multiplayer titles out there right now, so having a good CPU for it is very important.
 
I would stick with a lower end card like others have suggested. A 6850 will do you good. I would stay away from any Fermi cards because they require a faster cpu to get more benefit out of them compared to AMD, since you're rocking a really old platform. Stay away from the high end because they require a modern system to really push them.
 
rUmX said:
I would stay away from any Fermi cards because they require a faster cpu to get more benefit out of them compared to AMD,
Click to expand...

Interesting argument. Not saying you're wrong, but got any links to this?
 
samuelmorris said:
I wouldn't say a Q6600. I'd say either an E8x00 or a Q9x50 if the board will take one, and if not, then just wait until the whole lot can be upgraded to a P67 or similar. There's still room to upgrade graphics on that system.
Click to expand...

Did the 975x take 45nm chips?
 
Good point, no I don't think they did. I keep confusing the 975X with the 965P which I'm pretty sure did.
 
Venner said:
Even TF2, I have slowdown/jitter on the newer maps sometimes. Definitely the video card

My big question is, what should I get? Is a 6950 overkill for my rig -- will I really see much better performance than a 6870 or 460? Any other thoughts or suggestions?
Click to expand...


If you get any of those newer card and keep E6600, you will be CPU limited in some games, but fine in others which are not so CPU intensive.

Like in TF2 which like all Source game runs almost entirely on CPU. You will be TERRIBLY CPU bottlenecked. You'll get fewer frames then ppl with Q6600 and 8800GT, I can guarantee you that.

But you will see whole new world in Call of Pripyat.

And even 6970 will run 95% of time at 95%+ GPU usage - in other words you won't be bottlenecked.
 
HohnyF said:
I can confirm that.

And it's more documented then "460 and older Intel chipsets incompatibility" that you constantly wallow over :p
Click to expand...

Considering how documented that is, then the fermi CPU bottleneck issue must be everywhere. I haven't really researched CPU bottlenecks as an entity as I'm able to tell whether or not they're there simply by eyeing up a benchmark with powerful hardware at low resolutions. Typically the CPU limit for frame rate has seemed relatively similar in the past for geforces as radeons, with geforces marginally behind by a few percent. With Fermi that's greater then, is it?

toms junkware.
Click to expand...
I'd so give you +rep for that pun if such a thing existed here :)
 
samuelmorris said:
Interesting argument. Not saying you're wrong, but got any links to this?
Click to expand...

samuelmorris said:
Considering how documented that is, then the fermi CPU bottleneck issue must be everywhere. I haven't really researched CPU bottlenecks as an entity as I'm able to tell whether or not they're there simply by eyeing up a benchmark with powerful hardware at low resolutions. Typically the CPU limit for frame rate has seemed relatively similar in the past for geforces as radeons, with geforces marginally behind by a few percent. With Fermi that's greater then, is it?


I'd so give you +rep for that pun if such a thing existed here :)
Click to expand...

Im just being creative with name sites, like analtech (anandtech), hardware kapoots (hardware canucks), dodo3d (guru3d), hardSOB (hardocp), semiinaccurate, etc. . .
 
HohnyF said:
It's not bottleneck, if you have powerful enough CPU. It's overhead.
More work from CPU required for rendering.
Click to expand...

Overhead? Read one of those articles related to cpu bottlenecking from a hardware site instead of a forum and you will see that Radeons performance are consistent with slower cpus than Fermi cards in which performance tends to divenose.
 
3dMark 11 Physics test clearly shows that rendering on Nvidia cards leaves CPU 13% less powerful to deal with the rest of on-CPU calculations.

But it goes both way. Fermi scales better with faster CPU's. And with GPU overclocking.
 
Well i imagine they do scale better with CPU because they're using more CPU to start with!

Overclocking is not necessarily true. It's true of the GTX460, but the 570/580 are a mixed bunch for overclocking.
 
Oh cmonn, this is all too well known.
Whole Fermi bunch scales pretty much linear with GPU clock.

Cypress scaling is solid, but not linear, and Barts and Caymann...uhmm.
 
Thanks for the advice and discussion. I'm leaning towards a 6870 now, once another deal shows up. Missed yesterday's on Amazon, since power was out most of the day.

I'm only on stock cooling (although with self-applied better thermal compound), so I hadn't played around much with overclocking this time around. I fiddled a bit the other night and brought my cpu up from 2.4Ghz to 3.0Ghz. (266x9 to 333x9) at 1.30v.

Idles a bit warm, but it's stable and doesn't hit critical under long-term load. Even just with that, I can tell a distinct difference in performance; a new video card will be a great boost. If I had better cooling, I'd try for 3.6Ghz (400x9) since my ram can more than handle it.
 
Good choice, the HD 6870 snip the heels of the GTX 470 in lots of scenarios with half of its power consumption which is no slouch as the GTX 470 isn't slow by any means.
 
Overall, the HD6870 is faster than the GTX470, despite using two thirds the power, it's a great card.
 
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