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Monday, October 17, 2011

Crossfire, here I come. Gigabyte HD6950 1GB OC (GV-R695OC-1GD)

I decided to sell of my HD5870 and buy something big – something that fit the rest of the specs of my PC. Original plan was to ditch AMD altogether. Bye bye, red team. New trend of green tech. (ironically, NVidia cards are so power inefficient.)

Checked my options. GTX580 is the fastest single GPU card. But was the performance worth the price? A good quality GTX580, in this case an Asus Direct CU II or a MSI Twin Frozr model would set me back for more than JPY40,000. Ouch! (Looking at the current exchange rates, that is a massive investment in LKR). How much performance would I be getting? 30% on average, 50% at best, except for a couple of hardcore nVidia supported games like H.A.W.X. No good! No good at all!

Of course, there are second hand cards for as cheap as JPY30,000, but with this kind of money, I didn’t wanna take the risk. Besides, there aren’t any second hand custom PCB + custom cooler models. That might be an indication of the quality of the cards, that nobody wants to sell them back. If some people are selling off their GTX580s quite cheaply, there is a good chance that I won’t like them either.

So what are my options? SLI. GTX560 Ti was the next candidate. I can get couple of them for the same price as one of the GTX580s – brand new and with a good cooler. But, after reading reviews, everyone seemed to recommend the HD6950’s over there. I wasn’t particularly happy with the ATI drivers, but apparently neither are the people on the greenside. I was in dilemma for a whole week, checking the reviews and asking around the forums.

Now, all of a sudden, despite my original plan (of buying an NVidia card), there was a new candidate too. Not only that, there was a cheap Gigabyte factory overclocked model, going head to head with the GTX560 Ti Direct CU II. Reviews suck. On some systems, the NVidia setup was doing better on a majority of tests. On others, it was the complete opposite. No idea what to trust there days.

After readings the reviews and what people said in the forums, I gave up and bought the HD6950’s. Yeah,  you read me right. It set me back for a JPY42000, but I only had to pay JPY16000 as I had points (from selling the HD5870 and the SX1 IS camera.) So it didn’t make a big hole in the pocket.


IMG_1251

I haven’t had enough time to test the cards yet. But here’s a 3DMark11 score. Awesome! I only expected somewhere around 8500. 9000 max. But getting 10,000, even without an overclock was amazing! (That tiny winy overclock only gave me 100 points more)

Screenshot-2011-10-16_20.25.43

Crysis 2 was stuttering, that’s what it was like with the DX11 update + High res texture pack even on a single card, but FPS was over 60 for the most part. I don’t think it was micro-stuttering though. More like the cards running out of RAM! Yikes! Will report back how things go, as soon as I get some games in. Now that the exam is over, I have some free time! w00t. (Wait! Till the 11/11/11 that is :O)

P.S.
I have a new set of Corsair SP2200 speakers coming in soon. I hope they fix the weird issue with my current speakers. No idea when they will get here though.

5 comments:

  1. I thought you were through X-Fire after that FPS review.

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  2. well i assumed because the HD6970 was doing OKish for the most part in that article, the HD6950 also would. maybe i should have bought the 2GB models, but that's putting off another 8kish in total.

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  3. Holy, you bastard, lectured me on micro stuttering and you bought two Radeons :p, fuck micro stuttering im getting another GTX460(or not >_<), nice score btw those card should OC like mad, at least the size of the cooler suggest something like that :D,awesome Coolers on those cards, Happy Gaming, BF3 is already out ;)

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  4. they don't overclocked that well. no voltage tuning options. i can only hit around 920MHz max.they are already overclocked so there is not much left for me to do. RAM seems to OC well though, but with zero performance gains.

    they run cool and quiet though.

    i have preordered BF3 so i am waiting for it to come out. it is only 10 more days away anyways.

    scaling in games is pretty good, except that i ran into stuttering in Crysis 2 even with all the updates and latest drivers. doesn't seem to be happening in Crysis 1 though. but didn't play that much. getting over 200fps in BlackOps is funny though!

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