I feel so dirty...

C

Croak

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 16, 2006
Messages
1,138
Just picked up a pair of Asus DirectCU II GTX 770's, since my month-old Matrix Platinum 7970's have been nothing but trouble, with one card having VRAM problems that ended up with the pink/blue/green screen of death, and the other card unable to run without artefacts even clocked down to 900MHz.

I bought the cards online (and cheap) from Scan.co.uk since none of the local vendors here on Malta carry high-end (or even mid-grade) AMD cards, Nvidia has this market sewn up.

Long story longer, I got about 75% of my money back in the from of store credit at Scan Malta (an affiliate but not the same company as Scan UK). Sounds like a sucker deal, but it would have cost me €50 just to ship the cards back to the UK (those bitches are bulky and seriously overpackaged!) and I would have been without cards for more than a week at least (sold my 6950's already).

Sadly, Maltese pricing sucks, and as I mentioned, no choice but to go with Nvidia.

Paid €385 each for the 770's, had the choice between the DCII or EVGA ACX, opted for the Asus again because I'm not a fan of gold.

My other option was to bump up to €715 for an EVGA reference 780ti, or go with Palit or PNY for hideous and cheaply built non-reference GTX 780s at €600 each. Nothing else in stock, and no new stock coming until December 12.

Now for the good news, and the feeling dirty part. These cards are sweet. Dead silent even at 65C where they tend to settle after a long BF4 session (and with only one slot spacing between them). They're easily as fast as the 7970's (when I could get them to work), and I've managed to get a stable boost clock of 1300+ with 8000 on the memory out of both cards in SLI.

So yeah, now I'm batting for the other team for a bit. That might change once the non-reference 290's start hitting the market though. :)
 
Lord help me. I just exchanged the the two DCII 770's for a "regular" EVGA 780ti, figured the extra gig of VRAM and more bandwidth would keep me happier at 1440p. Besides that, I've been dual-card gaming since the Radeon X1900, kinda looking forward to single card gaming for a bit. Though I doubt that will last, there's a chance I might go nuts and pick up a second one this week. :)

For one card, it's damned near as fast at the same settings as my dual 770's (or my dual 7970's for that matter).

Compared to the 770 setup, it runs a few degrees cooler at idle, though it's a fair bit louder under load (though not really annoying). With stock fan settings and clocks it runs as hot stress testing as my 770 SLI setup did overclocked to 1306MHz (around 83C after several runs of Unengine Valley at 1440p/Ultra/8x AA). BF4 temps are a bit higher as well. I reckon I'll be dicking around with fan curves in AB or PrecisionX shortly.

While the cooler design is quite nice for an OEM, I'm really really REALLY not a fan of that green GTX lettering, and it drops the impression of quality down quite a bit IMHO, it's just plain tacky (so sayeth the man who had two Matrix Platinums with garish LED lighting, but at least it wasn't bile green).

I see some mild modding in my future, some black or red vinyl cut to cover that hideous colour is my first thought. Thankful in the meantime I can disable the LEDs via software rather than having to break out the gaffer tape.

As for overclocking I'm not able to get much OC out of the VRAM, +100 offset is about as much as she can handle (compared to the 770's that would hit +500/8GHz). Good news is, the core will truck up to 1306 under boost if I throw ALL the extra voltage at it. ASIC quality is 72.4% according to GPU-Z, if that even matters.

So I think I'm done for now if I can stop that second card itch. My Red roots run deep and I might have some serious buyers remorse when the non-reference 290's hit the market, and/or Mantle turns out to be a big deal after all.

And really wish Nvidia had picked a different corporate colour. :)
 
Croak said:
And really wish Nvidia had picked a different corporate colour. :)
Click to expand...

It's fine. Just think of this as 'getting into the holiday spirit' for now. When it's past the holidays, just keep telling yourself you just really love Christmas colors.
 
GTX 780 Ti SLi is fantastic. I don't get the part where you feel dirty though.
 
I feel dirty since I've only bought ATI cards for my personal rigs since 2001, with one brief detour with a free developer program supplied FX 5900 Ultra for a few months back in 2003/2004, since we found we couldn't actually use them at the studio due to excessive noise. Some irony there. :)
 
I only wish I could feel so dirty with 2 780ti's!!! what setup man! those things will hav no problem running anything for a long time I suspect.
 
Yeah, I've just been running some benchmarks, these things are scoring 1000 points higher in Unengine Valley at 1440p Ultra/8X AA than the 770 SLI/7970 CF setups were, about to fire off a 3dMark before I head dinner. EDIT: 16084 Firestrike, at 1050Mhz base clock, stock VRAM...and a warm fuzzy from reading "Better than 99% of all results".

And the nice thing about the blower coolers, the top card runs exactly the same temps under load in SLI as it did as a single card, whereas my previous experiences with non-blower dual card setups always heated up the top card at least another 10c (including the GTX 770 DCII units).

Couple things suck though. I paid a "Malta Premium" for these cards to buy them locally from Scan Malta, €700 each after VAT (about $950 USD), which roughly $75 more each than getting them just about anywhere else in Europe.

To top that off, I found out I can't cash in on the Pirates, Heroes, and Spies promotion since nobody in Malta is participating. That's €300 in lost value.

And finally, the new card is missing the metallic decal from the embossed "G" in the "GTX 780 Ti", which ain't no big deal but you gotta wonder how that passed QA, it's glaringly obvious, and the fingerprints on the protective sheet over the vapour chamber tells me somebody looked at it (and it was assembled in Germany, not a China sweatshop).
 
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While the coin mining craze is grabbing AMD all the attention, Nvidia has always made better cards with better drivers. JMO.
 
I took your spot on the AMD team, so don't feel dirty. Take the deals whenever you can, regardless of team.
 
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