TR Forums

Yeah. For sure I'd have a 750W Corsair (or better) in my main rig but I was seduced by the prospect of a toaster-sized ITX box that fits a H80 (double-thickness radiator HSF). Hence 4.5Ghz 2500K.

The 450W Silverstone PSU is a SFX form factor PSU. So that's gonna stay there simply because it's the most powerful SFX PSU available anywhere. I definitely wasn't going to entertain the prospect of installing a GTX 480 in here, I'll say that much.

I'm going to find a 7950 3GB with a dual or tri-fan cooler and I'm all set.

JAE, he's using an Silverstone SG06. Which is a mITX case and doesn't fit a standard size PSU. Regardless, I'm willing to bet the the GTX 260 draws more power than an HD7970, and the load in such a system is not likely to be hitting 400W.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22192/14

APWNH, I'd be careful with assumptions that more fans equals better cooling. Especially in a case that's limited more by the lack of ability to exhaust the hot air building up inside. I never really had problems with my SG05 and heat though.

Thanks for linking that Washer.

Good to see even the 7970 requires less power than the GTX 280.

It's still going to use more juice than the 260, but definitely not the 100W extra that I thought. So 7970 is viable (and would be awesome).

However at this bleeding edge a GTX 680 is much preferable: More performance, less power. It's a no-brainer, really.

Amazon is selling 680's at over $600. I'm gonna go through the list of 680's at Newegg and sign up for auto-notify.

APWNH wrote:

Amazon is selling GeForce GTX680's at over $600.

...and that would be why I haven't upgraded yet.

The GTX 680 is pretty much perfect for my setup. The absolute maximum in performance per watt. This system is begging for it. I just installed 16GB of ram in it too.

I was having too difficult a time determining if the HD 7970 or 7950 cards are going to fit within my space constraints. I have right around 275mm of space.

I do know a GTX 680 will fit with room to spare. So that's a reason to wait.

.

In the GTX 680 review all of the cards tested (5870, 6970, 7870, 7970, three flavors of the 560, 580) except the GTX 580 resulted in load system power of under 300 watts. So as far as power goes you're safe with any HD 7000 series card, and you're safe with the GTX 680.

Good points made.

I'm about ready to throw in the towel and fork over the dough once I find a 79xx that has the appropriate physical dimensions.

Nobody thinks the GTX 680 will ever drop to $400 in a few months?

Since i am running a 1920 display I reckon I'll get blisteringly fast perf with a 7950 anyways.

Say, is there a way to do tri-screen gaming if I have two flanking 1280x1024 screens? Make some sort of.. 1280+1920+1280 horizontal by 1024 vertical resolution? Are these things able to customize multi display resolutions to this extent?

Eyefinity is limited to using displays with the same resolution. You can put up to 6 of them in a display group that keeps them all in the same orientation and combines to make a rectangle.
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pa ... nfigs.aspx

APWNH wrote:

JustAnEngineer wrote:

APWNH wrote:

I don't have an 8 pin PCI-e power plug.

Problem solved:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812887001

Do you think the PSU is up to the task? It seems like full load draw with a 7970 will be somewhere approaching 400W. This little PSU can *probably* handle it. I wonder how the 7970 compares to the gtx260 in power consumption.

I will say it's handled the 2500K @ 4.5Ghz with the GTX260 quite well. Very stable.

Sapphire 7950 is looking mighty good at this point. 3GB of VRAM. Yes. Do want.

Edit: One more point of consideration though. I'd like better-than-average cooling (2 or more fans preferred). My setup is really cramped.

Thanks again JAE. You're a machine!

Update: According to this page the 7950 (and 7970 of course) both consume a good bit more power than the AMD 4870, which is pretty similar in power usage to the GTX 260. A 7970 may be pushing my PSU almost 100W harder. I think I'd go with the safer option with the 7950.

My current Rig draws 338w max load that I have recorded using a Kill-A-Watt. I think you would be fine with your PSU presuming that it is a single rail and decent quality.

I bought a 6950 last summer for $250. It still sells for the same price. I just saw that there was a sale on a similar card for $200, but that sale seems to have ended.

I expect that prices will dip when the mid-range 7*** series and 6** series cards come out. Still it's strange that a piece of high end computer hardware could have the same price tag after 1 year.

TurtlePerson2 wrote:

I bought a 6950 last summer for $250. It still sells for the same price. I just saw that there was a sale on a similar card for $200, but that sale seems to have ended.

I expect that prices will dip when the mid-range 7*** series and 6** series cards come out. Still it's strange that a piece of high end computer hardware could have the same price tag after 1 year.

Right. I guess this effect is what I was commenting on in the OP.

TurtlePerson2 wrote:

I bought a 6950 last summer for $250. It still sells for the same price. I just saw that there was a sale on a similar card for $200, but that sale seems to have ended. I expect that prices will dip when the mid-range 7*** series and 6** series cards come out. Still it's strange that a piece of high end computer hardware could have the same price tag after 1 year.

Yep, that's the point being made. Oh, and, the mid-range 7*** cards /are/ out. The HD 6950 was actually selling for less (around $215-220) /before/ the 7800 cards launched.

TSMC seems not to be able to keep up the Moore's law pace for shrinking transistors, and they seem to need an extended tuning period for new processes. Unless GloFo saves the day we'll see more than one, maybe even more than two generations of GPU released on 28 nm, I think, and after 5 years of telling use that Moore's law is coming to an end, Krogoth will finally have something to show for it.

I've just bought the AMD HD7950 and it's a monster card. I upgraded from an HD5850 and the performance gains are amazing. It also overclocks for fun. I set the core to 925 and memory to 1375 (7950 clocks) and it managed easily.

My Dirt3 score went from 43 minimum, 52 average to 71 minimum, 83 average fps in Ultra DX11 mode with 8xMSAA! All other benchmarks were between 40% and 60% faster than my old card. It cost me £295 whereas my old HD5850 cost me just £200 but an old Nvidia 7900GT cost me £300! Could really do with dropping in price IMHO but for the performance I am not complaining at all.

I can also now play Crysis 2 in DX11 mode with no stuttering and Battlefield 3 in HQ mode is amazing. Originally I was very critical of the 78xx series as I thought they were too hobbled for the price but the 7950 for me is the real sweet spot and I am a really happy gaming chappy at the moment. I was hoping that Kepler might come along and persuade me to go back to NV but there is no chance of this now. The card also has 3GB of ram so should last me for at least another 3 years or more.

A good place to get comparisons of both current GPUs and also VERY VERY OLD GPUs is here:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php
I know it's only one benchmark, but it is better than nothing....

FYI, the GTX260 gets 1748 points, the 7770 gets 1980 points. In other words, two years of progress gets you 15% more performance for 33% less money.
But, the 7770 is lousy value for money. If you buy a radeon 6850, for example, you can get 60% more performance than the GTX260 for 33% less money.

It's not apples-to-apples, but performance per dolloar seems to have followed Moore's law, near enough.

Chrispy_ wrote:

A good place to get comparisons of both current GPUs and also VERY VERY OLD GPUs is here:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php
I know it's only one benchmark, but it is better than nothing....

FYI, the GTX260 gets 1748 points, the 7770 gets 1980 points. In other words, two years of progress gets you 15% more performance for 33% less money.
But, the 7770 is lousy value for money. If you buy a radeon 6850, for example, you can get 60% more performance than the GTX260 for 33% less money.

It's not apples-to-apples, but performance per dolloar seems to have followed Moore's law, near enough.

Pfft, Passmark testing. It's worse than nothing, because it could be misleading.

Best bet is to do a little digging at Techpowerup.

I got an email from Newegg that the EVGA 680 was in stock. Unfortunately I only saw it about 50 minutes after the email was sent so there was no way I could snag one.

Lordhawkwind thanks for the subjective overview of your 7950. It's good to know that if I went that route I'd be quite happy with its BF3 performance as well.

It's also good to see that the new architectures do bring the usual benefits. I just know I'd regret it going with 40nm rather than 28nm at this point in the game. I'm looking to get my hands on a 680 if I can because i know a 7950 will lose some of its value a short time from now. With Moore's law really grinding to a halt I reckon a 680 will remain effective for the newest games for a great deal of time, more so than has ever been the case. So that does help put that price tag in a better light.

It wouldn't have mattered if you had responded within 5 minutes of the e-mail. The phantom GeForce GTX680 only appears "in stock" long enough for you to click on the "add to cart" button and get the message that it wasn't really in stock and nothing has been added to your cart.

@JAE, http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?&m=1546222&mpage=1

Good luck! I'll be using it too.

Edit: Better: http://www.nowinstock.net/computers/vid ... ia/gtx680/

So it seems like Amazon themselves are not doing all that price-gouging, it's their marketplace sellers with the >$600 prices.

Sucks that nowinstock.net doesn't give status for newegg.

Double posting is bad forum etiquette but I don't care, because I just put in a pre-order on Amazon for an EVGA GTX 680 model 02G-P4-2680-KR, the vanilla model.

It "requires" a 38A +12V rail. My PSU's sticker says 36A.

JAE I suggest you try out nowinstock.net. It's how I got the tip for the Amazon pre-order.

Now if anybody knows how long the wait is before these preorders get filled.......

In my mind, every time that Newegg tells me that the GeForce GTX680 is "OUT OF STOCK", what I hear is "Your Radeon HD6970 is still OK."

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Radeon HD6970

Ah, yeah, I wouldn't even be considering a $500 GPU if I already had one of those... A 6970 sells for >$300 now!

Availability of the Radeon 7970 has taken a slump too while prices have hiked up to $500+.

Just last week the XFX Double D 7970 Black Edition was $499 and now it's $539 on Newegg. Amazon has it listed for $599. Only the few reference models are going for $479.

APWNH wrote:

Double posting is bad forum etiquette but I don't care, because I just put in a pre-order on Amazon for an EVGA GTX 680 model 02G-P4-2680-KR, the vanilla model.

It "requires" a 38A +12V rail. My PSU's sticker says 36A.

It's only got 2 6-pin connectors, so the maximum a 680 can possibly use and stay within PCIe spec would be 225W (3x75W), and in reality it's much less than that - the whole system was only drawing around 225W from the PSU under load in TR's test. 36A x 12V is 432W, so unless you're running a dual-processor workstation with a box full of HDDs, you'll be fine as long as your PSU is reasonable quality.

In Tech Report's tests, they're measuring AC power consumption from the wall. The actual DC power supplied from the PSU to the system is less. To be precise, we could multiply the draw from the wall by the ≈82% efficiency of the power supply in TR's test rig. However, I believe that you want at least a 20% safety margin between the continuous average draw that TR reports and the maximum capacity of your PSU.

All this speculation about the 670 is making me reconsider my 680 pre-order.

There is also the consideration that the GCN architecture cards are more compute-capable. With OpenCL becoming more and more relevant, I will probably find myself writing some GPGPU code at some point. But even with that in consideration there still is no real clear advantage for me to personally have a more compute-powerful GPU, since I'd want to evaluate how well compute-weak architectures (like GK104) cope with whatever code I write, since that code will in all likelihood be game-related. But i suppose a 7970 would be the better choice as an OpenCL developer.

So its either a 680 now, a 7970 now, a 7950 now, or a 670 later. I see no reason why Nvidia will not do everything they can to maintain the 680 at the $500 price-point. So maybe I will not actually feel bad when the 670 hits.

So I cancelled the 680 pre-order and should be receiving this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814125414

by Friday. Hopefully.

APWNH wrote:

So I cancelled the 680 pre-order and should be receiving this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814125414
by Friday. Hopefully.

You must have bought the last one. Out of stock now! I hope you enjoy it. That's too much card for me... I just don't game enough and I don't have a monitor anywhere near large enough. That looks like a very nice heatsink...

Yup. I look forward to playing around with the great OpenCL capability of the GCN architecture. I should buy some more monitors for some more BF3 awesomeness, too.

I just saw Vortez's review of this card, where they hit 1200Mhz on the core and 6GT/s (1500Mhz) with the memory (matching the 680! With an extra GB!). This is an 800Mhz stock part! It handily trounces the GTX 580 at stock. God, I love Scott's ms/f frame charts, too. The games run smooth as butter. Skyrim's going to be a hell of a treat.

Will that card fit in the case?