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6970 vs GTX580

I

I3eyond

Gawd
Joined
Jan 14, 2006
Messages
937
I searched for this and surprisingly didn't find anything. Maybe I was just overlooking the answer?

Anyways which is faster? $370 vs $500 is a big difference. Does more money mean more performance in this scenario? And maybe I'm just not comparing the right ATI card, which is highly likely because I don't know much about modern day cards like I used to.
 
Anandtech has a bench page that lets you select and compare newer GPU's. GTX580 is faster but the 6970 wins if using 5760x1080 or above resolution with high AA. If you aren't gaming on multiple monitors, anything over 1gb vram is plenty.
 
The GTX 580 is the better card of the two, but the price is outrageous. A better comparison would be between the 6970 and GTX 570's. You will get different answers as to which one is better depending on the game and what site you get your info from, but the 570's have been approaching the $300 price point recently, so my advice would be to wait for a decent brand to hit that $300 mark.
 
I forgot to add, don't buy an overclocked 570, save your money and OC it yourself with Afterburner
 
OP I hope you are not considering buying either of those with your current rig. even your gtx275 is being limited by that E6600 of yours in many games. a gtx580 or 6970 would be laughably bottlenecked.
 
cannondale06 said:
OP I hope you are not considering buying either of those with your current rig. even your gtx275 is being limited by that E6600 of yours in many games. a gtx580 or 6970 would be laughably bottlenecked.
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Good point. My neighbor has an E4400 @ 3.2ghz and I swapped out a GTX260 for an 5870 and the damn thing ran slower in Black Ops. You are better off dropping money on a better mobo/cpu/ram upgrade. As far as the 6970 and the 570 I can tell you I owned both. My 570 burned up 3 weeks later. I ran it overclocked but at stock voltage so I am surprised it started going out. I was unhappy with the reference cooler on the 6970 so I picked up a dual fan Diamond card which is silent at idle and runs VERY cool compared to the reference cooler. Both cards overclocked ran basically the same for me but I noticed the ATI felt smoother in Black Ops. I was surprised it felt smoother considering they both pushed about the same frames. I think it had something to do with with the Nvidia card not liking the fact shadows was enabled. So probably drivers will smooth that out later on. Also if your trying to save some money you can pickup a 6950 and just unlock the shaders (reference cards only) and basicaly have a 6970. Make sure you avoid running the 6970 bios on the 6950 which has been burning up ram for a few.
 
The card would slow down a little but it will still be a big upgrade. 6970 is still faster than a 6950 at the end of the day. Just because you won't get 100% out of a card is no reason not to buy one. If you upgrade your cpu later, good for you. If you don't, You will still see a much better experience than your old card.
 
lloose said:
The card would slow down a little but it will still be a big upgrade. 6970 is still faster than a 6950 at the end of the day. Just because you won't get 100% out of a card is no reason not to buy one. If you upgrade your cpu later, good for you. If you don't, You will still see a much better experience than your old card.
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you have to be kidding. an E6600 would not even allow a 580 or 6970 to deliver 50% of its performance. and by the time he upgrades the cpu to take advantage of a gpu like that we could have a completely different gpu situation. even the gtx275 he has now is being held back especially in cpu intensive games. upgrading to a 580 or 6970 would be foolish with a 5 year old E6600.
 
The severity will vary by game, but you will find yourself limited by an E6600 with cards of that caliber, quite severely in a few examples. I'd put towards a CPU platform upgrade soon.
 
lloose said:
Show me a single benchmark where at higher resolutions, an E6600 cuts any card by 50%..
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wow you don't know much about cpus do you?

as you can see here even with cards slower than a gtx580 he would get 50% or more cut in potential framerate in most games. heck in some of these games he would only get 1/3 or even 1/4 of what a gtx580 would be able to do. and this is not even covering games like GTA 4, Ghostbusters, Red Faction Guerrilla, BC 2 or plenty of other games where his old cpu would kill the performance of a gtx580.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...System-Requirements-and-Screenshots/Practice/

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...rks-75-percent-boost-for-quad-cores/Practice/

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...1-Phenom-doing-well-quad-cores-rule/Practice/

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...nom-strong-Update-Lynnfield-results/Practice/

here they don't even use a cpu as slow as an E6600 and you can see the massive difference. http://www.techspot.com/review/336-cod-black-ops-performance/page8.html
 
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lloose said:
Edit: You aren't worth arguing with.
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oh about some more games?

and this will give you an idea of how bad it would be in Bad Company 2. they used an E6400 but an E6600 would only be about 12-15% faster and you see its not even going to be really playable. http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/7

how about Metro 2033? well the E6400 can only give 31 fps so you know an E6600 would only be about 3-4 fps faster. http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/10

what about F1? yep another game that would not even be really playable. http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/9

and Starcraft 2 a cpu like his would be murdered. http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/6

and those tests were just with a gtx460. thats right his cpu would only deliver about 1/3 of what even a gtx460 is capable of in those games. heck it was not even playable at settings even that gtx460 is capable of in many cases. and a gtx460 that's only half as fast as a gtx580 so I was being very generous saying 50%.

bottom line is that even at 1920 he would not get 50% of what a gtx580 or 6970 is capable of doing. in some cases it will be only about 33% and you can see a cpu of his level is not even playable in some games at settings a gtx460 much less gtx580 or 6970 could otherwise handle.
 
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lloose said:
The card would slow down a little but it will still be a big upgrade. 6970 is still faster than a 6950 at the end of the day. Just because you won't get 100% out of a card is no reason not to buy one. If you upgrade your cpu later, good for you. If you don't, You will still see a much better experience than your old card.
Click to expand...

A little slower? really? Like the other guy mentioned the card would not run past 50% GPU power which is exactly what happened to me when I tried it. He is better off upgrading the rest of his system. He will spend 3-400 just to run games the same or worse.
 
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