Radeon HD 6950 vs. GeForce GTX570 for a new build

[Muya]

Both with dual fans and both at/a little above 300$.

Question is which is better? I originally had my mind set on the 6950 but after a trip to Fry's with my friends, one has actually convinced me to take a look at the nVidia chipset.

I've read that nVidia is ahead in certain things, while ATI/AMD are in others. Which is better for just OCing slightly and playing Steam GPU instense games, WoW and other games that have heavy GPU requirements?

[Biggiej]

Both with dual fans and both at/a little above 300$.

Question is which is better? I originally had my mind set on the 6950 but after a trip to Fry's with my friends, one has actually convinced me to take a look at the nVidia chipset.

I've read that nVidia is ahead in certain things, while ATI/AMD are in others. Which is better for just OCing slightly and playing Steam GPU instense games, WoW and other games that have heavy GPU requirements?

People are probably going to tell you that you can unlock a 6950 to a 6970. but I mean you can also OC a 570 as well. I am not an expert, but with the amount of games that work with nvidia in the first place, I would just go with them. WoW works a lot better with nvidia to I hear, since they developed together.

[Rodpad]

The 6950. It's cheaper and can unlock to a more powerful 6970.

WoW doesn't favour any brand of graphics card.

[Muya]

Sorry, I forgot that I'm going to be running an i5-2500k OC'd to at least 4.8 along with this and 4 gigs of 1600 1.5v CL 7 RAM.

Biggie, thanks for the fast response. I haven't really been thinking too much about it since I'm going to most likely wait to buy my MB, GPU and PSU for now. I have everything else pretty much ready to go.

WoW doesn't, but from what I've noticed, Rod, many other games run better on nVidia chipsets. Take Rift for example, even though I don't plan to play it.

[taurendeathknight]

Never ask people's opinions on things like this, you only ever get people who favour ATi and others who favour NVIDIA - just look at benchmarks. :P

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...6970-review/23
http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...6970-review/22

These tests show the GTX 570 beating the 6950 by a small margin that you might not even notice, but if they're the same price, or cheaper, etc, the 570 is better. Quite common opinion is that ATi drivers are unstable as well, so, NVIDIA tends to have that stability going for them as well.

As for overclocking a GPU, I always find that unneccesary so I have no opinion.

[haxs101]

gtx 570, obviously (;

(sig)

[knightwulf]

As it has been since the beginning of time and 3D accelerators were hewn from living stone, so shall it always be:

AMD most often has the more robust hardware that will chew up the benchmarks and possibly provide a modicum of real-world, perceptible performance increases. ...if you can get it to play nice with the rest of your system.

AMD's chip designers are brilliant individuals.... The driver team is made up of 3.4 specially-abled chimps with Alzheimer's.

nvidia does tend to lag a bit in raw, unfettered horsepower (...and sometimes feature sets... DX11 adoption or Eyefinity vs. 3D Vision, anyone?), but their drivers are digital prose in comparison.

The price to performance ratio varies wildly by target market, planetary alignment and phase of the moon.

I've used cards from both camps for as long as there's been 3D acceleration.

There is no black & white answer, but for me, nvidia is where I drop my benjiis as of late.

AMDs have some serious incompatibility issues and general wonkiness with ultra high-end hardware (EVGA Classified series, etc...).

I'm past the days when I enjoyed tearing my rig apart on a daily basis, just to eke out another .5 FPS or to track down the latest of random freezes. Now, I want to be able to sit down, fire it up, chuckle a little sadistically as my block suffers a momentary brownout when the 1.2kW PSU awakens, and have it just work.

With that in mind, I choose nvidia, simply for the lack of headaches.

[Deleted]

The 570 is just a better card, nothing to do with preferring Nvidia or ATI. If I had the extra budget, I'd snap it up in a second!

Also, I assume you are talking about the 6970. The 6950 is the lower end card, and is currently at around $240 if I'm not mistaken. The 6970 is the one just above $300.

[Escariot]

Nvidia all the way dude!

[Hinansho]

Knightwulf, i love you!

On-topic, as Knight stated, Nvidia will be a more stable choice.

[Wries]

People are probably going to tell you that you can unlock a 6950 to a 6970. but I mean you can also OC a 570 as well.

Unlocking the 6950 is more than just overclocking. You unlock actual shaders and gain a substantial amount of performance when doing so.

[Krunsh]

ATI is all but dead. nVidia currently outperforms ATI cards of equal category in almost all respects. ATI was great back a few years ago like 5 i think, but they have since gone down hill.

[Tarien]

GTX 570 all the way, it's what I own. I had a pair of 6850's in X-fire (I know, not the same as the 6950, but still, TWO cards) and I find the 570 to give me a faster experience overall, mostly because nVidia work closely with games developers. Their software as has been said already is outstanding, leaps and bounds ahead of ATi.

[Muya]

Alright, you guys have convinced me to give the GTX570 a shot, now the question is which brand? I see about 4-5 that are extremely highly rated and one that even dips to 295 with discounts and rebates, the only problem is that the brand is EVGA....I've been told by several people I know to stay away from the brand at all costs.

MSI and ASUS are also getting some pretty amazing reviews and ASUS is slightly cheaper than MSI.

[stalkerzzzz]

ATI is all but dead. nVidia currently outperforms ATI cards of equal category in almost all respects. ATI was great back a few years ago like 5 i think, but they have since gone down hill.

You are so right, oh wait.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...6670,2935.html

[Krunsh]

MSI is really good in my opinion.

[Biggiej]

Sorry, I forgot that I'm going to be running an i5-2500k OC'd to at least 4.8 along with this and 4 gigs of 1600 1.5v CL 7 RAM.

Biggie, thanks for the fast response. I haven't really been thinking too much about it since I'm going to most likely wait to buy my MB, GPU and PSU for now. I have everything else pretty much ready to go.

WoW doesn't, but from what I've noticed, Rod, many other games run better on nVidia chipsets. Take Rift for example, even though I don't plan to play it.

Np , I have heard of better performances by 5 or 10 fps when it comes to an equal ground card and nvidia having a bit more to it in WoW. It is not a large margin but I bought a 5870 with my first build I am still using here, and I regret it, the thing feelsl ike the biggest dump of 400$ ever, because when SC2 launched and the 5800 series was denied AA (Because again nvidia is quicker with the drivers and works better with blizzard games) They had it in working order during the beta, I felt so jiped because I paid for this thing to run my games and blizzard games are my favorite XD. granted the 5870 was a bit much in general, I wanted it for other games to.

But my lesson learned is go with nvidia , quicker drivers, more games are compatible with nvidia, the popular ones anyway from what I noticed. Also when I did rift in the beta, the fps was horrible on the 5870 I was so shocked by it, just because it was an ATI card o_O. I am not sure how terrible it still might be, I never did buy rift .

[Rodpad]

Whatever card you go for, make sure you choose the MSI Hawk variant. They're ultra silent.

[Muya]

You are so right, oh wait.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...6670,2935.html

I really hate you -_-

Playing devil's advocate....I've heard basically the same reviews from other 2-3 other websites that the 6950 goes up drastically in performance when you OC it. None of them really mention anything about drivers though.

---------- Post added 2011-05-22 at 02:32 AM ----------

Whatever card you go for, make sure you choose the MSI Hawk variant. They're ultra silent.

Only problem with that is that I can't find an MSI Hawk on anything relatively current. The highest I see is 6870 for Radeon and 560 for GTX.

[stalkerzzzz]

I'm just trying to post unbiased information. You can check sites like tomshardware,anandtech,techreport,techspot,fudzilla,overclockersclub and many more in order to see actual benchmarks with the cards. They also mostly tell you what version of the driver they use when they tested the card. Some games perform better on AMD cards and some on Nvidia cards. If you really want to buy a card for one game then look at some benchmarks for that specific game and buy the card that gives you a better performance. And don't get fooled by "Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played" , they actually pay the game companies to stick that one in.