Korean Job Discussion Forums

[pkang0202]

I'm thinking about upgrading my video card. Currently I have an ATI 4670.

I've been looking at the ATI 6870 and the 6950. The 6950 certainly is nice, but I wasn't sure if the 2GB version was worth the extra premium over the 1GB.

I know that some Rev. 1 6950 2GB cards could be flashed "unlocked" into the 6970. However, I have no idea which cards are Rev. 1 or not.

6870 seems like the great bang for your buck card at around ~210,000w.


What do you guys think? The games I'm playing now are Starcraft 2, Skyrim, and will probably get into SWTOR.

[eamo]

For a game like Skyrim (also GTA4 and other open-world games) the 2GB cards are very useful as they will allow you to set the draw-distance and other scenery features to maximum.

This will make the scenery quite a bit nicer and more realistic as you won't be constantly seeing the medium to far-off details being added as you go along.


As for which card.....it's a pretty simple issue. Just get the best one you can afford!

Coming from a 4670 you're going to see an amazing jump in FPS and image quality with any of the cards you mention.

If I was putting a good chunk of my time into gaming then I'd get the HD6950 2GB.

Nice Sapphire one here for probably 357,000..
http://blog.danawa.com/prod/?section_m=PC&prod_c=1389908&cate_c1=861&cate_c2=876&cate_c3=971&cate_c4=0

[pkang0202]

[Ibsen]

Honestly between the 2 I'd go with the 6870 either way.

My reasoning:

1) You can play Skyrim and SC2 on a 1gb card at Max settings easy. Those games at max settings will probably barely utilize 1gb, let alone 2gb of vram, so it's kind of a waste. Only games like BF3 on Ultra settings at High Resolutions require upwards of 2gb of vram.

2) The xfiring on the 6870 scales extremely nice with the new drivers AMD has released. Much better than the 5870 (despite being a slightly weaker card). But because of the optimized drivers it runs cooler and draws less power, thus letting you xfire 2 68xx's on a lower PSU than 2x 5870's or 2x 69xx cards.

2.5) Since it draws less power and cost a whole bunch less than a 6950, you can use 1 6870 for now, and xfire it later as an upgrade. Since 6870's can be xfired with 6850's and only 1 6870 being required to unlock shaders, you save money on that as well while getting the gpu processing abilities of 2 6870's.

3) 2x 68xx > 1x 6990. Nuff said.

Anyway you probably already bought the card, just posting for anyone else in the same position as you.

[pkang0202]

Got the 6870, and it performs really well.

The only quirk was that I am using an HDMI cable instead of a DVI. There are black bars around the screen where the display doesn't fit the monitor.

I went into Catalyst Control Center, Scaling Options, and zoomed it in to fit.

Strange how DVI fit perfectly, but on HDMI I had to zoom in. The resolution was 1920x1200 for both.

[Ibsen]

Nice, I'm currently using a 6870+6850 in xfire and they play pretty much anything on the market in ultra settings