About video card choice..

B

broddy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 18, 2011
Messages
242
So..I find it difficult to decide on my next card. Make it easier..let me post my need..
I will be building a SFF, therefore, no SLI or Xfire. I will be playing skyrim or BF3 with highest setting on just 1 monitor. My monitor is 27" capable of 2560x1440 or maybe i will just do 1080p. Im looking at sapphire 6950 2GB that's unlockable to 6970 (possibly) or GTX 570? Im concerned about VRAM. Just exactly how much I need if I need to play at 2560x1440? Thank you for your suggestion and patience. I hope the card will last 3 yrs.
 
I'd go for the Sapphire Toxic 6950 so you have the highest chance to unlock. I've heard that BF3 is a VRAM hog.
 
Yes more Vram the better, an XFX XXX dual fan(clocked at 830 core) 2gb card can be overclocked to exceed most 6970 performance even with the extra shaders, the aforementioned Toxic, there is also another Saphhire one with dual bios that apprently something like 80% of them can unlock and can enable 6970 power tune limits as well, there is also one from MSI twin Froz III power edition that has a very high unlock rate to become a 6970 if the shaders cannot unlock, in MSI afterburner by doing this it will up the overclocking headroom and very likely will actually exceed by a large margin the vast majority of 6950 or 6970 for that matter.

http://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/msi_r6950_twin_froz_iii_power_edition_unlocking,1.html this explains it better.

I myself would just go with a good 6950, it may not be able to run the game at the absolute highest details/fps, however, it will play and look extremely nice regardless, many of my fellow XCF clan members are using 6950s, as long as you have very low limits of AA and turn off defered AA, it will play plenty fast/smooth and give gobs of eye candy, if you overclock(easily done provided you have a sufficent cooler on card and your case) you may be able to turn most settings up even higher, currently the Radeons do not like AA in BF3 especially the defered one, it is a known issue, the Nvidia counterparts are not quite effected by it in the same way, but, do you really "need" AA at 1080p if the game is done well?

Running at high/ultra with some settings, believe me looks great, however, only a GTX580 can effectively run this game close to maxed out via a single card, to run it at 2560 res level you would need CFx or SLI with 2 very high end cards, not to mention you will really not have the best frame rates even then-the cards become Vram starved quite quickly.
 
Thanks guys, i will stick with 2g 6950, one thing about toxic and flex compare to other sapphire 6950s...they only have 1 fan. I just hope it will run as cool as 2 fan counterparts. XFX and MSI cards are too tall to fit in the silverstone sg07. The heat pipes might hit the support bar inside the case. I guess only sapphire is short enough. I will look into the fan issue.
 
None of the cards you mentioned are going to max most DX11 games by themselves at that res (even a 580/6970 will struggle with low frame rates). If you have to have a single card, get used to turning down the settings on a game like BF3. The game looks great even at medium settings so I think you will be happy if you go with a 6950.
 
and like I pointed out, with current drivers, defered AA, AA, and Ambient Occulsion hurt performance quite a bit, the dfered AA is a huge performance hit for any Radeon card, just by having it on one can lose something like 20fps if not more, and it really is not a huge graphical feature, not enough to lose performance, better to just use standard AA like edge detect to reduce some aliasing then to lose frames outright in a huge fashion.

1080p with decent frame rates can be done, but 2500 range, it will not be comfortable, the 7k series, maybe, but nothing really does it right now as a single card, x2 style or not.

Also just an fyi, the XFX XXX that uses a reference style(more or less, as it is off center of card compared to reference the fan is at but end) is the same dimensions as a reference 6950, the MSI one that I had mentioned, looks to be a tad wider, but only a tad so should fit no problems, however I can see what you mean by space issues in reagrds to width, the XFX dual fan one prob would not fit do to the heatpipes coming into contact with the crossbar.

http://www.msi.com/product/vga/R6950-Twin-Frozr-III-Power-Edition-OC.html just to show you what I mean, to my eyes it barely looks wider, longer or thicker then a reference style card, at least the heatpipes are near the slot instead of hanging over the edge.
 
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