Nvidia or ATI?

Twist86

Twist86

Active Member
SO I hear ATI is whipping Nvidia atm on GPUs and I am curious is this for the new age cards or the middle area?

I am upgrading to a new rig since I acquired a 125-140w complaint phenom board for helping a friend out on his quad-core (lucky break for me) but its 2.0 and I have a old PCI-e x16 GPU. I only have around 120 bucks or so to spend.

I was thinking of upgrading to
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814103050

or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130380


I will be upgrading to the 9750 Phenom with it.

The ATI seems faster but I hear they have horrible support for drivers.

or is there a better option? I don't care it can be TG or NE which ever has the better deal.
 
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You already have a 8800GT, so going to a 3xxx series ATI card is not really a good move (might even be a downgrade?). I would go for at least the 4850 if you're looking for noticeable improvement.

As far as I know, going from 8800 to 9800GT isn't much of anything, either.
 
smoothjk said:
You already have a 8800GT, so going to a 3xxx series ATI card is not really a good move (might even be a downgrade?). I would go for at least the 4850 if you're looking for noticeable improvement.
Click to expand...

I was going to say the same before looking at the specs on that 3870 card. 775MHz core and 2400MHz memory clocks is better than my 8800GT, and I have the OC edition. But I was wondering if the 8800GT Twist86 has is not already 2.0 compliant or at least 2.0 compatible.
 
Either way, I think if he's going to upgrade from an already-good card, he should make a bigger leap than that, no?
 
Well mine is non-2.0 compliant and the last time I ran a 1.0 card on a 2.0 board the MBs 2.0 slot died after 2 days of use.

though the 4850 is a good price perhaps I will look into them for a few bucks more.
 
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Twist86 said:
Well mine is non-2.0 compliant and the last time I ran a 1.0 card on a 2.0 board the MBs 2.0 slot died after 2 days of use.

though the 4850 is a good price perhaps I will look into them.
Click to expand...

Ah, OK, makes a little more sense now...sorry, must've missed that. But yea, I suggest the 4850. Probably the best bang for your buck right now.
 
What is a good brand of ATI though? I been a Nvidia since I started to play PC games 8 years ago. From when the FX 5200 128mb was a "omg godly" card to me ^-^

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161235

Seems like a good bang for buck for the price but never heard of them...seem to have good reviews how ever. Seems like it suffers from bad automative fan....which could be fixed with rivatuner perhaps?
 
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netrick said:
I was going to say the same before looking at the specs on that 3870 card. 775MHz core and 2400MHz memory clocks is better than my 8800GT, and I have the OC edition. But I was wondering if the 8800GT Twist86 has is not already 2.0 compliant or at least 2.0 compatible.
Click to expand...

it doesnt matter. its a common mistake for users to assume that higher clock speeds mean faster cards, but often that is a costly mistake. take this for example: the 8800GT operates at 600mhz core clock and so does the 8800GTX but the GTX performs about 16% better i believe.
 
Twist86 said:
SO I hear ATI is whipping Nvidia atm on GPUs and I am curious is this for the new age cards or the middle area?

I am upgrading to a new rig since I acquired a 125-140w complaint phenom board for helping a friend out on his quad-core (lucky break for me) but its 2.0 and I have a old PCI-e x16 GPU. I only have around 120 bucks or so to spend.
Click to expand...

If you have the 8800GT it is a 2.0 card not 1.0. If upgrading to the next one up it would have to be either a 4850 or a 9800GTX+
 
StrangleHold said:
If you have the 8800GT it is a 2.0 card not 1.0. If upgrading to the next one up it would have to be either a 4850 or a 9800GTX+
Click to expand...


You sure about that? There a way to be 100% sure because when I bought it said PCI-e x16 and on the box it doesn't boast about being 2.0 and here is a screenie of gpu-z

 
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Wow newegg lied to me then when they sold it.

Works in the end though I wont have to upgrade my GPU then to run off the new board...thank you very much you saved me 150 bucks. Now I can wait for the better GPUs to drop in price ^-^
 
Your GPU-Z screen shot shows what the boards slots is running at, not what the card is capable of. For some reason your slot is only running at X8. The 570 chipset is suppost to run at X16. In SLI it runs both slots in X8. Do you have it set for SLI?
 
hmmm any suggestions as to why? Could it be because its not a 2.0 board? When I bought this GPU the site said PCI-e x16 not 2.0 could that be the problem?
 
smoothjk said:
You already have a 8800GT, so going to a 3xxx series ATI card is not really a good move (might even be a downgrade?). I would go for at least the 4850 if you're looking for noticeable improvement.
Click to expand...

Agreed. The 4850 wil definitly be better. Getting a 3XXX would be a downgrade, just look at all the benchmarks. But I would get ATI. Their cards are much cheaper.
 
StrangleHold said:
No, the 570 chipset have version PCIe 1.1a with 16 lanes unless you run SLI and it splits them between lanes
Click to expand...

Could the board be enabled to SLI when there isn't a second GPU in the slot? If so where in the BIOS would I check?

hmm I checked online and it said this

PCI Express x16 2 x PCI Express x 16 (8x + 8x)

So I guess this board was made only for SLI and is set only to run 2 GPUs not 1 at x16???
 
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Twist86 said:
Could the board be enabled to SLI when there isn't a second GPU in the slot? If so where in the BIOS would I check?

hmm I checked online and it said this

PCI Express x16 2 x PCI Express x 16 (8x + 8x)

So I guess this board was made only for SLI and is set only to run 2 GPUs not 1 at x16???
Click to expand...

I would think the 8x + 8x only applies to when two cards are installed. Just out of curiosity, do you have the graphics card installed in the secondary slot?
Non-SLI mode Primary PCI-E x16 slot is compatible with PCI Express x16, Secondary PCI-E x16 slot is compatible with PCI Express x8
Click to expand...
From here: http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=&cat3_no=&prod_no=251
 
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