# HD 6970 vs GTX 560Ti vs GTX 570 vs HD 6950 vs ????



## groph (Jul 6, 2011)

I'm looking at a couple of PC upgrades this summer. I'll be swapping my AMD Phenom II 940 out for a 965 Black Edition so I can overclock the piss out of it, and I'll be turfing my HD 4870 for a current DirectX 11 gaming card. I'll snag another 4GB of RAM too. I may be able to convince the parents to get me the processor for my birthday so that will free up some cash for a nicer graphics card. I was originally looking at the HD 6950 since I can get it locally for a reasonable price and Canada Post decided to fuck us over by going on strike so I couldn't order anything online. Luckily they got legislated back to work so now I can get stuff from a site like Newegg.ca which has very reasonable prices. I can get a 6970 for the price of a 6950 locally, and the Nvidia cards aren't ungodly expensive either. I'd rather stick with the AMD cards since they're generally better priced but I'm not a fanboi.

My budget is $350, I'd like to stay under $400 grand total. I have an ASUS M4AN78 - PRO AM2+/AM3 socket motherboard. I have an Antec 900 case, it's a fairly large mid-tower with fan cooling. I have a 650W power supply, and I am not interested in Crossfire/SLI. When Battlefield 3 comes out, I want to be able to play it on high settings at 1600 x 900 resolution with at least 30-40 FPS. At the moment, I play a lot of Supreme Commander 2 so anybody who is familiar knows it's a massive scale strategy game that involves thousands of units and bajillions of nice particle effects and awesome graphics. I get a bit of slowdown at the moment but I figure a faster processor will help that a bit. Still, I'd like better performance out of that game too.


* - No Crossfire/SLI, single GPU only
- 1600x900 resolution on high settings, 40 FPS at least
- Battlefield 3
- Under $400 grand total
*


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## dacimvrl (Jul 7, 2011)

Though I've been a fan of nVidia and used nVidia cards exclusively. I have to say that I would recommend the 6970 out of these choices in terms of raw performance. In terms of C/P value, 560Ti gets my vote.

6970 > 570 > 560Ti > 6950

(Provided that you stay away from brands like Zotac, PNY, Colorful, POV, PowerColor, Club 3D, AFox, Sparkle)


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## Sicarius (Jul 7, 2011)

I was looking at this one Newegg.ca - ASUS EAH6970 DCII&#47;2DI4S&#47;2GD5 Radeon HD 6970 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card 

I'm probably going to move on from my 4870X2 to this one. Under $400 and it's gonna exceed what you're looking for.


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## dacimvrl (Jul 7, 2011)

Sicarius said:


> I was looking at this one Newegg.ca - ASUS EAH6970 DCII&#47;2DI4S&#47;2GD5 Radeon HD 6970 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
> 
> I'm probably going to move on from my 4870X2 to this one. Under $400 and it's gonna exceed what you're looking for.



sh!t, this 6970 is a beast, 6 outputs, voltage tweak...etc. unbeatable in this roundup


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## groph (Jul 7, 2011)

I've gotten it narrowed down to the HD6970 and the GTX 570. The 570 has me almost sold because it runs cooler with less power, and it appears to perform nearly identically to the 6970 in the benchmarks I've looked up. It's also a shade less expensive, I can get an EVGA one for around $320 which isn't bad.

What has me wondering are the unknowns:

- The rest of my system. Most benchmarks seem to use nice Intel i7 setups with DDR3 ram while I'm going to have an AMD 965 BE at best with DDR2 ram. Not a bad cpu at all but my point is that it might favor one card over the other and I have no way of really knowing that.

- The 6970 has a bunch more memory. I don't game at massive resolutions, 1900x1080 is the highest I could see myself going, and to do that I'd need a new monitor. Right now I'm at 1600x900 and it's doing me fine. The extra memory helps with higher resolutions which I don't necessarily need, but it also helps with cranking up settings like anti aliasing (gets rid of ragged edges) and anisotropic filtering (keeps textures consistent), AA especially goes a long way in making graphics look way better and I like turning that stuff up. Still, the 570 is pretty much the same as the 6970 in benchmarks that are at higher resolutions that I use, so I guess 1.28GB of memory is plenty as opposed to the 2GB the 6970 has.

Of course the card's physical size might make this a pretty easy decision. The 6970 is 10.6" long and the 570 is 9". My current HD4870 is apparently 9.5" and the last time I checked, there might be an inch to spare so I bet the 6970 would be a tight fit if it even fits at all. The fact that I'm on air cooling also complicates things. I read that the 6970's run pretty hot and loud while the 570's are a bit more moderate.


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## Sicarius (Jul 7, 2011)

Are you changing out your mother board?

or does your current one allow you to use either Nvidia or AMD?


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## groph (Jul 7, 2011)

No, I'm leaving it as it is. It's an ASUS M4AN78-PRO, I figure it's compatible with either but I'll feel like a giant idiot if it can only work with AMD. That'll make my choice easy though.


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## dacimvrl (Jul 7, 2011)

you pretty much summed it up yourself.

more memory = better performance at higher resolutions and anti-aliasing...etc., if you don't really care for all that, or don't plan on getting a new monitor, then 570 pbly.


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## groph (Jul 8, 2011)

The parents don't seem too sold on the idea of getting me a processor so it looks like I'll have to foot that bill if I want one, meaning the graphics might suffer a bit. Maybe a 6950 will have to do. 

I'd like to get away with as close to $500 as possible if I'm buying all this shit myself. Apparently the AMD 1090T sixcore will give me better performance in CPU intensive strategy games like Supreme Commander 2, which I play a fair amount but I figure a fast clocked quad core will do much the same, and most games don't even make use of four cores yet anyway.

WAT DO


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## Pauly (Jul 9, 2011)

Getting 6970's is uneconomical when you can basically unlock a 6950 to essentially become a 6970:
Unlock your ATI 6950 to a 6970 Thread - Overclockers UK Forums

Dunno if that's just the reference cards or includes ones with better coolers (I'm sure you can google it). Saves you money though, which you can put towards a CPU. I don't think you'll notice enough of a difference in games using 6 cores vs 4 to really make it worth spending the money, especially when new AMD have next-gen CPUs coming out real soon.

At your relatively low res, you won't need a card with loads of memory. 1GB would probs be fine.


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## groph (Jul 12, 2011)

You can only flash up the older 6950's with the stock coolers, or something like that. I understand that ATI caught this problem and nipped it in the bud so you can't mod a current 6950 to a 6970.

I've decided on the GTX 570.

- The memory is enough, even for resolutions higher than mine
- They bench higher on Battlefield Bad Company 2 tests and they bench pretty much the same as the 6970 on most other games
- The updated Frostbite engine used in Battlefield 3 makes use of PhysX, which is unique to Nvidia cards
- The test footage of Battlefield 3 was being played on a GTX 580 and the 570 isn't very far off in performance, especially at my resolution.
- It's a tiny bit cheaper
- It has a bigger memory bandwidth than the 6970, enabling it to send and receive data faster as I understand, which is a crucially important thing.

The 6970 seems to shine through on very high resolution tests, probably multi-monitor ones with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering cranked up, but that's pretty much it so it strikes me as a "specialist" card while the 570 is a damned awesome general purpose high-end-but-not-uber-high -end gaming card.

I've also been shown that getting a motherboard that supports DDR3 RAM is practically a must. I nearly called off this whole upgrade but then I remembered that my dad got a new system a couple of months ago and his board has 1333MHz DDR3 which should do me just fine, so we're going to trade motherboards. We both use AMD AM3 processors so there won't be any problems with incompatible sockets. Mine is more than enough for his needs, he doesn't play games, at least not current ones. Right now I have 800MHz DDR2, which runs the risk of creating a bottleneck in my system. Slow RAM = slow computer. I'll pick up another 4GB and then I'll have 8GB of DDR3 1333MHz which should cause me no troubles at all.

Pricy upgrade, but this is the justification:



JESUS.


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