What GFX to get? 7970, 670, or Titan?

[Faithh]

titan is about 10% behind the 690, it's not going to get better than that with time, it's physically short on cores

a 690 doesn't really count as SLI because it has active internal bridging

both will run all games at 1920, between the two the titan has the most potential, but the 690 has actual performance

What do you mean with active internal bridging? Something I always found annoying with SLI/CF is, if you tab out of a game it really is delayish like 3-4 to get to your desktop and the other way around as well. Does a 690 have this?

[Deleted]

680 Classified
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages..._review,1.html

Beast!

But my vote goes to 690 Signature
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages..._review,1.html

If you have the cash for it and don't care about power consumption 690 Signature beats everything, even Titan.. yes yes its a dual gpu I know but still does not count as SLI.

signature editions only include more goodies usually they also contain SC/FTW/classified in their name/tittle in order to state if they are better chips/higher overclocked.
also good overclocking i can see a titan being on par with 690 already. (working on that as we speak)

[Guruftw]

Indeed, thats how you sell shit ^^
Cool names are cool.
And that is alos true, it all depends on who own's the card.

I just wanted to be a rebel and mention the 680 and 690 becouse he did not :P

(working on that as we speak)

Nice man

[slasher0161]

Personally if your worried about the electricity bill from going dual gpu lets do some math. Power consumption figures are all probably slightly overmarked and assuming overclocked.
Card || Power consumption ||
660ti sli = $600 || 450w ||
Titan = $1000 || 300w ||
7970 = $400 || 250w ||

So to compare this further working on the price I pay for electricity of 22.011 cents (AUD) per KW/h to make up the price difference of the titan vs 660ti you would have to run the 660ti's at full noise for a total of ($400/AUD$0.0990495 per hour) 4038.38484798005 hours (168.2660353325021 days).

However, that is ignoring the power consumption of the titan, if you were to compare how long it would take to close the gap if both setup's were chewing the same power as the titan then your looking at the following. ($400/$0.0330165 per hour) 12115.15454394015 hours (504.7981059975063 days) [1.383008509582209 years].
These times are for full noise power consumption and i'm fairly sure if you run a card at 100% load for 504.798 days straight your card might be die.

I'm not here to tell you what to get but if it was me personally i would get a 7970 for now and then when the next gen cards come out pick up something else then, or go the 660ti route, titan isn't worth the money especially on single screen.

[Deleted]

wall of text.

comparing energy bills for gaming computers is kinda a silly point.
however a lower wattage with higher performance is better from an overclocking PoV. (aka more headroom since heat creation is 99/100 allot less)
see it as buying an expensive car but finding that it uses too much fuel . (i mean doh performance allways has a pricetag is some shape/way/form)
as for titan on single screen it is overkill for most things , however i barely managed a heaven 4.0 run with everything maxed on my overclocked titan with +- 63 fps average, hell i even dipped in the low 50's there.

[Lemmiwink]

How much tweaking did that overclock require Shroudster? They just got in my Titan so it's being sent Monday. Looking to beat you now

[slasher0161]

comparing energy bills for gaming computers is kinda a silly point.
however a lower wattage with higher performance is better from an overclocking PoV. (aka more headroom since heat creation is 99/100 allot less)
see it as buying an expensive car but finding that it uses too much fuel . (i mean doh performance allways has a pricetag is some shape/way/form)
as for titan on single screen it is overkill for most things , however i barely managed a heaven 4.0 run with everything maxed on my overclocked titan with +- 63 fps average, hell i even dipped in the low 50's there.

The point of that is the OP's argument against sli was the increased electricity bill.

[Cyanotical]

What do you mean with active internal bridging? Something I always found annoying with SLI/CF is, if you tab out of a game it really is delayish like 3-4 to get to your desktop and the other way around as well. Does a 690 have this?

no, even with quad-SLI my alt tabbing and gaming is fine, occasional stuttering and framerate dips, but nothing compared to the 590s, and certainly not as bad as crossfire

but on both the 590 and 690 there is a small controller chip that controls communications between each gpu, the one on the 590 is a basic NF200 iirc, but the one on the 690 is more advanced, for the most part with a single 690 you wont be able to tell you are running SLI without a benchmark

[glo]

mostly right, there are still a few differences, SLI is much better than Crossfire, but whats annoying is that CrossfirePro is better than SLI, by a huge margin, but AMD reserves that only for the workstation cards

Nvidia has SLI profiles down, and even when a game does not have an SLI profile, you would never know it because it runs fine anyway, AMD still has yet to get this nailed down in their drivers, as well the CCC seems a bit more intrusive than nvidia's, CCC opens up like a software suite while NCP opens like any settings window

but even looking at cards, if you are not on the market for a $1000 GPU, and you don't plan on using multiple cards, get a radeon, for single card performance they really are better and better for the price, but i would avoid crossfire like the plague

I think the over generalization on Crossfire is a bit outdated, as much so as the micro stutter issues. It really depends on a game to game basis. For instance, Nvidia is very poor in Crysis 3 in terms of frame latency. Single card Radeon cards have almost none, and crossfire scales considerably better than SLI (in said new game).

Other games are obviously going to be different, but the blanket arguments don't hold up much at all anymore.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ng,3451-6.html

[Cyanotical]

I think the over generalization on Crossfire is a bit outdated, as much so as the micro stutter issues. It really depends on a game to game basis. For instance, Nvidia is very poor in Crysis 3 in terms of frame latency. Single card Radeon cards have almost none, and crossfire scales considerably better than SLI (in said new game).

Other games are obviously going to be different, but the blanket arguments don't hold up much at all anymore.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ng,3451-6.html

looking for a few exceptions does not disprove the well known fact that crossfire is still very bad in usability compared to SLI, if you are building a general gaming computer, then avoid crossfire

[glo]

The second most recent game review from the site, scaling just as well:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rk,3357-6.html

It's been pretty widely known for a while now that Crossfire (especially in the 680 vs 7970 Ghz or 670 vs 7970) is scaling far better than SLI.

[Cyanotical]

The second most recent game review from the site, scaling just as well:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rk,3357-6.html

It's been pretty widely known for a while now that Crossfire (especially in the 680 vs 7970 Ghz or 670 vs 7970) is scaling far better than SLI.

there's nothing wrong with the scaling, quadfire 7979s is still one of the top benchmarks out there, but im talking more about usability, it's not really discussed much, but both Logan and TTL have alluded to it in reviews, and i have plenty of personal experience with the issue, crossfire just does not run as smooth as SLI nor is it as friendly to setup and run, many games still have issues and what not

basically, crossfire scores very well, and does make very good framerates, but it is not as good at daily use and user friendlyness, i imagine this will get better over time with AMD backing the drivers, but for now i would strictly avoid multi card solutions with radeon cards

[glo]

there's nothing wrong with the scaling, quadfire 7979s is still one of the top benchmarks out there, but im talking more about usability, it's not really discussed much, but both Logan and TTL have alluded to it in reviews, and i have plenty of personal experience with the issue, crossfire just does not run as smooth as SLI nor is it as friendly to setup and run, many games still have issues and what not

basically, crossfire scores very well, and does make very good framerates, but it is not as good at daily use and user friendlyness, i imagine this will get better over time with AMD backing the drivers, but for now i would strictly avoid multi card solutions with radeon cards

Have you looked into RadeonPro yet (majority of CFX users have it)? Pretty much eliminates any form of microstutter completely, pushing it well past SLI frame latencies. Another program to install, but it replaces Catalyst game profiles. Either way, this doesn't solve Crossfire driver issues if they exist in certain games. I personally wouldn't know since I'm only using a single card.

[Evil Inside]

Have you looked into RadeonPro yet (majority of CFX users have it)? Pretty much eliminates any form of microstutter completely, pushing it well past SLI frame latencies. Another program to install, but it replaces Catalyst game profiles. Either way, this doesn't solve Crossfire driver issues if they exist in certain games. I personally wouldn't know since I'm only using a single card.

I dunno bout the newer cards but I can say from experience that I have no issues whatsoever with crossfire on my cards, no matter what game I'm playing.

[Xofa]

The increased electricity bill is indeed a concern for me.
The 1200w PSU.. Why? Because I got it for free since my old 700w died.

And the SLI / CF.. I don't want to listen to all the noise coming from 2 video cards. I had enough trouble with my old card, 590, which sounded like a airplane during take off.

I have come to a decision.. 7970 GE - 1100MHz

[Deleted]

The increased electricity bill is indeed a concern for me.
The 1200w PSU.. Why? Because I got it for free since my old 700w died.

And the SLI / CF.. I don't want to listen to all the noise coming from 2 video cards. I had enough trouble with my old card, 590, which sounded like a airplane during take off.

I have come to a decision.. 7970 GE - 1100MHz

which model/brand?
also amd cards got the higher power usage

[Toffie]

The best cards for overclocking is the 7970 Gigabyte OC not the GHz Edition. Can run mine 1250/1870 stable. Even the 7970 Matrix/Lightning will have issues doing that. I may have been lucky though.

I had 2 of the same card to test. One was running 1220/1840 the other slighty higher at 1250/1870, so may just be Gigabyte being awesome for overclocking.