6970 vs GTX580

[Brokyn]

You have a meh video-card and a, for Wow, horrible CPU (I'm guessing Athlon and not Phenom).
You'll be fine with the GPU, but for Wow, it's not as simple as having a "two or more cores-CPU".

its an amd phenom II triple core 3.3

[Seiichiro]

its an amd phenom II triple core 3.3

I wouldn't be looking for such a high-end card with this CPU. You should go with a 460 like tetrisgoat said, or a 560 Ti if you must have something better.

[Cantii]

EVGAS 580 gtx is pretty over clockable by a good sum. And I don't know what you mean by good ati drivers, I have had to halt mine at a certain point, because 1 driver I installed made one game much worse so I said F that. Nvidia is coming out with new drivers soon to, they are in the beta versions but from what I am told, still very good drivers, that are giving a handful of games some touch ups to make them look much better. ATI is as well. my opinion is, I am going with Nvidia in the future, since ATI is slow to put out drivers, Rift was in chaos for days , FPS on a high end card was at 20 sometimes because well, ati didn't develop with them, along with a lot of other games out there, pita to be last in line for driver updates.

AMD's been putting out a new driver set every month now, sometimes twice a month and that's in this year alone. Catalyst drivers 10.10e through the current 11.4 Beta Preview driver have been some of the best drivers they've done with only performance hits in League of Legends... and who the hell plays that anymore these days? Hell, 11.2 and 11.4 have given me some of the best performance gains with my 6870 than any other set as well as just making my card run cooler overall while not being as loud.

@Seiichiro - I run 4x MSAA with StarCraft 2 on my 6870 @ 1920x1080... lolwut?

I don't get the bolded part. From the majority of benchmarking sites I've seen, HD6970 basically refuses to budge as far as overclocking performance goes. Increasing the clocks by 10-15% results in a <5% FPS gain in games. 6970's stock temperatures are also fairly high to start off with, so voltage boosts aren't recommended.
Meanwhile GTX580's design allows it to run cooler and it easily overclocks 10-15% without any voltage boost. nVidia cards have a track record of having beastly overclocking, GTX500 series live up to the reputation

I've OC'd a number of 6970s as of late a solid 10-12% over stock settings, one even close to 20% for friends and family with about 10-15% FPS gains. Some were flashed 6950s, others were XFX reference design 6970s. It's also very, very common for a GTX 580 to be under voltage brand new, severely reducing performance.

[BicycleMafioso]

I wouldn't be looking for such a high-end card with this CPU. You should go with a 460 like tetrisgoat said, or a 560 Ti if you must have something better.

This isn't the OP, though, his 450 will be fine.

[Seiichiro]

This isn't the OP, though, his 450 will be fine.

Oh, oops. Yeah, a 450 should be good enough.

and tetrisgoat, I was probably taking your posts a little bit too seriously - a 460 is enough to max out WoW at 1920x1080 at max in-game options if you're being dragged down by your CPU. The only reason to go beyond that is if you are just a crazy person like me who likes to crank up the AA, in terms of WoW - but of course it's not the only game in the world.

edit: Oops, I forgot, I also have smallcull distance maxed out and ground clutter density maxed out with the macro, and 2x sparse grid transparency supersampling enabled.

[Cilraaz]

Oh, you've read the Toms bullcrap and believe it? Then there's no convincing you.
You can't benchmark Wow.
Messing with image quality settings in drivers is a bad thing if you go for the "red team"

Actually, a flight path /timetest does effectively benchmark graphic cards. The problem with the Toms Hardware test was that they forced settings via the drivers, which lowers fps on AMD cards. The part of WoW that's not really able to be benchmarked is CPU impact.

[BicycleMafioso]

Actually, a flight path /timetest does effectively benchmark graphic cards. The problem with the Toms Hardware test was that they forced settings via the drivers, which lowers fps on AMD cards. The part of WoW that's not really able to be benchmarked is CPU impact.

My bad, then - the problem would then be to find the (neutral pref) flightpath.

Kindly accepting donations to prove my point, by reactivating my account for disbelievers.

[Brayden]

I don't get the bolded part. From the majority of benchmarking sites I've seen, HD6970 basically refuses to budge as far as overclocking performance goes. Increasing the clocks by 10-15% results in a <5% FPS gain in games. 6970's stock temperatures are also fairly high to start off with, so voltage boosts aren't recommended.
)

I don't know about what sights your looking at but in my case with no case fans because i lost the cords to my psu it only hits 50c in furmark running burn in while it being overclocked and i saw a decent improvement when i overclocked

[Xuvial]

I don't know about what sights your looking at but in my case with no case fans because i lost the cords to my psu it only hits 50c in furmark running burn in while it being overclocked and i saw a decent improvement when i overclocked

Your overclocked HD6970 tops 50c while running furmark?
Unless your computer room is refrigerated to stay below zero, I just don't see how this is possible.

[Rendhammer]

I bought a 580 for my recently new build and it rips. This card is amazing.

---------- Post added 2011-04-06 at 10:26 PM ----------

I don't know about what sights your looking at but in my case with no case fans because i lost the cords to my psu it only hits 50c in furmark running burn in while it being overclocked and i saw a decent improvement when i overclocked

Wait what? You have no case fans, and you are claiming you run a card being stressed tested at 50c? You may want to check your info. No card can do that unless they are under some serious liquid setup.