Radeon HD 5870

[Shibathedog]

So I'm going to be building this PC for a friend, and he offered to buy my 4890. With the money I would get from that+the money I would get from building the PC I would have almost enough to buy a 5870. Do you think I should sell my card to him and go for it? I mean it IS a better card, but the card I have now already runs everything I want it to. I would get DX11 support but in the past it seems like whenever you buy the first generation of cards for a new DX you get screwed performance wise.

 

Basically I want it and I know it will be awesome but this voice in the back of my head is desperately trying to talk me out of it and can't find any real reasons why. I mean I don't really need anything else as far as expensive purchases go so I could get it. I guess I could get a 360 instead but that doesn't get me nearly as excited as this ridiculously powerful card.

[ken_cinder]

I too enjoy talking to myself...I mean we do. oO

 

You're asking, and appear to be at the least...on the fence. I say NO based on that.

[Inky]

I don't get boners from installing graphics cards that cost the equivelent of a months worth of household bills, so I vote no.

[Shibathedog]

Yeah, but it seems like I wouldn't have to buy one for a really long time if I got this. You can play Crysis at 2560X1600. That's just crazy.

[emsley]

Buy it.

Screw directX11

Pawn shit up now.

 

No slow down no s-s-s-s-stuttering just POAWAH!!!!

[The-Ice-Man]

You should get the 5970, it's a inch longer. It's great that you could now actually use a video card to bludgen someone to death with they're so big. I have a question, does Physx work on Radeons now, like it does on the Nvidia cards? I'm running a pair of 8800GTs and I like that I can use Physx without actually having a Physx card, but I would like to upgrade to a much more powerful single card at some point, and it seems like the Radeons are faster these days.

[Shibathedog]

Technically the Radeons can do physx. I've seen it done with a hacked driver. (I can point you in the direction of a download if you want) The performance was actually very good too. Officially they cannot but ATi is apparently working on an equivalent of physix/cuda. I wouldn't worry about it though. It never really adds anything to the game. Plenty of games have excellent physics without physx. It's not like it's for free either. My buddy with a GeForce card always leaves physx off because he says he always gets better FPS that way and there isn't even a real noticeable difference.

 

As for the 5970, the only way I would get one of those is if I wanted to do Quad Crossfire. I saw some benchmarks that showed two 5970s in crossfire and the performance wasn't any better than with one 5970. The CPU/chipset and everything was top of the line/overclocked too so I guess what this means is one 5970/two 5870s is already the maximum bandwidth possible with PCI-E 2.0. So I would rather pay for two GPUs over time (second one after a price drop) than 2 at once since getting any more than that would be useless. It could end up being a driver issue, but I don't think I'm going to drop that kind of cash on graphics cards anyway, two is enough for me, hell even one of these seems excessive.

[The-Ice-Man]

I think I'd need a bigger case if I wanted two of those boomsticks in my PC. I'd also have to take out my soundcard. I've decided that SLI and Crossfire aren't for me. I just want one card in the future. Much simpler that way.

[Shibathedog]

Yeah well in that case it's either one 5870 or one 5970 if you want to go nuts. You should take some measurements to make sure before you buy a new case though. My friend thought his was too small and the back of the card ended up extending into some of the free HDD bays so it worked anyway. In his case it was a different card but there would have been room for this because it was nowhere near the front of the case or anything.

 

Why would you take out your sound card though? Will it block the fan or something?

[The-Ice-Man]

I wouldn't have to lose the sound card after all, I was thinking that two dual slot video cards would block off both my regular PCI slots but they wouldn't. I'd lose one PCI and my PCIEx1 slot. My SoundBlaster would go in the one remaining PCI slot. I would have to lose my internal ADSL modem though which is PCI, so I'd have to switch to a usb one. I'm not gonna bother with dual cards again though, and I don't think I want to go with Nvidia again either. Their drivers suck. I've lost count of the number of blue screens of death I've had coz of their crappy driver errors. I like the look of this: http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/p...101&pid=293

 

Question though, I've got an EVGA nForce 780i SLI motherboard, which is 3-way SLI ready, not Crossfire ready, and blatently Nvidia branded. It even says Nvidia on that special northbridge fan we talked about a while ago. Does this mean it can only use Nvidia video cards period? Or that it just can't do Crossfire but can use single ATI cards ok?

Edited December 4, 2009 by The-Ice-Man

[Shibathedog]

Well here is another bullshit software technicality. Officially you can only do crossfire on an intel chipset, and you can only do sli on an nvidia chipset. (Although I think they got rid of this with X58) Unofficially there are hacked drivers that let you do them both on either one. I don't remember how well this worked though I just remember that it worked. Also doesn't your mobo have an ethernet jack? Why don't you just use that? Your link also just goes to the sapphire home page.