hmmm, which gfx card to choose?
Community Forums/General Help/hmmm, which gfx card to choose?
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| Trying to pick between these 2 (in no particular order) as an upgrade from my ancient 8800GTS 320MB card: Gainward Geforce GTX460 Goes Like Hell (800Mhz), 1GB GDDR5 (4000mhz), PCIE2.0, Dual DVI, VGA, HDMI http://www.gainward.com/main/vgapro.php?id=395 Gainward Geforce GTX460 Golden Sample (700Mhz), 2GB GDDR5 (3600mhz), PCIE2.0, Dual DVI, VGA, HDMI http://www.gainward.com/main/vgapro.php?id=400 More mhz or more ram is the question burning a hole in my brain. Considering I'm not going to upgrade cards again for at least 3 years, which of these would you recommend that I get and why? Last edited 2010 |
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| I'd probably go for the higher RAM based on the fact that the clock speeds are not to vastly different, but the RAM is double. Depends on the types of games you play though, in terms of the extra RAM. GTA IV and quite a few games these days can benefit greatly from this. Newer games will utilise the 2GB of the second card. You can probably safely overclock the 2GB card anyway. Last edited 2010 |
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| What monitor resolution do you use? |
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| I'd go for the higher RAM version I think, as either should be more than adequate for 3 years in terms of processing power, and you can always overclock... |
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| Yeah, I've been thinking along the same lines. The difference in price is $305 for the 1GB compared to $330 for the 2GB, so that's not really a factor. About the overclocking...I found a review after posting here where they overclock the 2GB card GPU from the 700Mhz up to 875Mhz as well as taking the shader clock from 1400Mhz to 1750Mhz. Kind of defeats the purpose of buying the 1GB card. Games wise, I'm playing Nehrim which is a total conversion mod for Oblivion, combined with Quarls texture pack. It's definitely struggling for texture memory playing this on my current card. Also, the 2GB is likely going to be more crucial in games that come out over the next few years. I'm using a 720p projector so its 1280*720 on the resolution. Last edited 2010 |
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| Is this for your Win 7 Ultimate x64 machine? Only 2gb is going to be a huge whack out of your address space on a 32 bit OS, but so long as you're running Vista 64 or Win 7 64, that won't be an issue. |
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| Yep, it's Win 7 x64 so there won't be that 4GB max. I was thinking the 2GB card before even posting, but I wanted to bounce it of you guys just in case I missed something. Been a while since I've bought a nice card;) Last edited 2010 |
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| Ended up getting that 2Gb card yesterday, and then fitted it last night. I ran the Furmark xtreme burning stability test for a few minutes but the temp was getting close to 85C, so I put another fan in there (that's 11 now!!) pointing at the card and run the same test for 30 mins with the temp peaking at 77C. Idles at 31C. It's about 2.3 to 2.5 times quicker than my old card, depending on which benchmark I try or frame rate I look at. Certainly made a huge improvement. Seems to get along fine with the cpu overclock too. Thanks for all the advice everyone. Last edited 2010 |
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| On full load I'd expect it to be around 80-85C. I think cards should be able to cope with 100+C. |
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| More ram without question. Or you won't be able to use antialiasing at high resolution - period. That was my mistake, skipping on ram. Last edited 2010 |
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| Yep, I ended up getting the 2GB one Rob. I skipped on ram last time too, getting the 8800GTS 320MB version instead of the 640MB. The price difference was a big jump for the 640 card at the time. To make matters worst within a short time they phased the 320/640 models out and replaced them with 512/1GB versions at basically the same price. puki: Probably me just worrying needlessly, but it's starting to get warmer and we have some damn hot days in summer here. |
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