I am going to be upgrading from a gts 250 1gb ddr3 by Nvidia to a Radeon 6850 ddr5. Since my motherboard supports ddr3 memory I would assume that there would be no problem with running ddr5 on my pci express 1.1 slot and that 2.0 is backwards compatible. I was considering an Nvidia gtx 460 as well but am leaning toward the radeon. If I overclock my gpu is it safe to run the fan at 100% all the time to keep it cooler on a higher overclock or will it just burn it out? The tech specs totally blow away my current card has but why is it that ati cards have so many shaders. What will having over 900 shaders compared to 128 do for me as well as the double the memory bandwith on the card? I am looking to play a game called Rift. It is currently barely even playable partially due to my cpu which is another story. Thanks.
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ati radeon 6850
- Thread starter Drose911
- Start date
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2008
- Messages
- 2,214
pci-e 2.0 is indeed backwards compatable. Also, it's irrelevant what type of main memory your motherboard supports in deciding the type of memory the video card uses, the video card handles all of that separately, it has its own memory controller.
Running the fan at 100% is fine, but just know that it will be loud and the fan may indeed go out sooner (some of my older x800xt and geforce4 ti4200 fans went out 8 years later... not exactly very soon). As long as you have reasonable temps your ok on the video card itself.
I can't comment on the shader count as i simply look for reviews on the cards and pretty much ignore all the tech specs on cards these days.
I am pretty sure that although PCI-e 2.0 should be backwards compatible the latest cards, at least on AMD's side, aren't too happy playing there.
On my old rig with a http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=945GCM-S i had to get a beta bios for the mobo to actually accept my 5670 and my 6850 afterwards.
The memory type of the mobo doesn't matter
So just google your mobo type and "radeon 6850 hd".
We need to know the rest of your current configuration to give you a proper performance expectative.
Don't put the fan to 100%, the newer fans have a very reliable automated fan control, and there are lots of programs that let you do a curve of "this temp => that fan speed" more or less.
As for the shader count, well, you can't really consider them that way because of the massive difference in architecture; for example the 6850's are VLIW4 so the 960shaders are actually 960/4= 240 clusters of shaders, that is what you could compare to the 336 cores of a 460gt, but even then the comparison isn't fair because of the different architectures (Nvidia's is a brute force architecture, while AMD's actually needs a good deal of driver finesse to extract it's power).
On my old rig with a http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=945GCM-S i had to get a beta bios for the mobo to actually accept my 5670 and my 6850 afterwards.
The memory type of the mobo doesn't matter
So just google your mobo type and "radeon 6850 hd".We need to know the rest of your current configuration to give you a proper performance expectative.
Don't put the fan to 100%, the newer fans have a very reliable automated fan control, and there are lots of programs that let you do a curve of "this temp => that fan speed" more or less.
As for the shader count, well, you can't really consider them that way because of the massive difference in architecture; for example the 6850's are VLIW4 so the 960shaders are actually 960/4= 240 clusters of shaders, that is what you could compare to the 336 cores of a 460gt, but even then the comparison isn't fair because of the different architectures (Nvidia's is a brute force architecture, while AMD's actually needs a good deal of driver finesse to extract it's power).