5870 vs 470 for an EVGA Fanboy

[SlowSpyder]

If this were actually the case, why did so many people vote for a 5870 over the 470? While the 5850 may have a clearly defined edge in price/performance, the 5870 does not. In terms of what the OP was looking for, he mentioned explicitly his main concerns were heat/noise, those aren't nearly the factors with the 470 that they are with the 480. Yes, it is hotter/louder then the 5870 but not that much and the 470 does have superior price/performance to the 5870(~11% more money for ~8% more performance).

Heat and power are his main concerns, yet he chose the GTX470 over the 5870... a hotter, louder card. And as others have pointed out, I'm willing to bet he did not pay $349 for his GTX470, chances are he paid very close to what the 5870 goes for (quite possibly he paid even more than what you can find a 5870 for).

So, going by prices the GTX470 actualy is current selling for, it offers quite a bit less bang for the buck than the 5870. It is louder than the 5870. It puts out more heat than the 5870. It uses more power than the 5870.

Based on everything the OP said he wants, there is no compelling reason whatsoever to buy the GTX470. And then to top it all off, when the vast majority of those who answered the poll choose the 5870 for the reasons I've mentioned above, one of the Nvidia fanboys here says that this form is just AMD-biased! Really? 18 people chose the GTX470, I think that group is your biased forum memebers...

And it seems fairly obvious that the OP was going to get the GTX470 regardless, so I don't really know why this thread was even made.

 

[Qbah]

(...)
So, going by prices the GTX470 actualy is current selling for, it offers quite a bit less bang for the buck than the 5870. It is louder than the 5870. It puts out more heat than the 5870. It uses more power than the 5870. (...)

And is slower than a HD5870.

And it seems fairly obvious that the OP was going to get the GTX470 regardless, so I don't really know why this thread was even made.

The thread topic kinda gave it away "... EVGA Fanboy". There's nothing wrong with preferring EVGA over any HD5870 cards - perhaps he likes the support more and is content with getting fewer "technical benefits" from going with the GTX470. However, there was no need to start a thread about it if he already knew what he would buy.

 

[Lonyo]

And is slower than a HD5870.



The thread topic kinda gave it away "... EVGA Fanboy". There's nothing wrong with preferring EVGA over any HD5870 cards - perhaps he likes the support more and is content with getting fewer "technical benefits" from going with the GTX470. However, there was no need to start a thread about it if he already knew what he would buy.

Well unless he's already ordered one he might not have much fun trying to buy one

 

[Keysplayr]

Anyone know of any o/c reviews of the 470? I'd like to see how it compares judging by the almost linear scaling I'm getting with a 480. Just thought it would be interesting from a performance standpoint if the 470 also shows almost linear scaling when o/c'd and how that compares to a stock and o/c'd 5870. I haven't really googled it yet, but I'll give it a go.

UPDATE: First hit shows TweakTown o/c'ing a 470. 80MHz on core and @ 160MHz on memory.
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3204/nvidia_geforce_gtx_470_video_card_overclocked/index6.html

Looks like the 470 equals or bests a 5870 at 16x10 and 19x12 and comes pretty close at 25x16 but generally lower or equal.

This is with only a 13% o/c on the core and shaders and it closes and exceeds the average 8% performance deficit compared to a 5870.

Of course, the 5870 can be o/c'd as well, but as Apoppin's benches have shown, it does not scale anywhere near as well as the GF100 architecture.

So, for you overclockers out there, if you can get the 349.00 470 and steer clear of the gougers, the 470 may be the better performance per buck card.

Stock to stock, the same kinda does hold true. As was said, an 8% deficit on average in comparison to the 5870 for 11% lower price (after the gouging subsides.). Heat and power consumption may even this out over a long time. I feel both cards are priced where they belong at the moment, or within reason.

 

[evolucion8]

Anyone know of any o/c reviews of the 470? I'd like to see how it compares judging by the almost linear scaling I'm getting with a 480. Just thought it would be interesting from a performance standpoint if the 470 also shows almost linear scaling when o/c'd and how that compares to a stock and o/c'd 5870. I haven't really googled it yet, but I'll give it a go.

UPDATE: First hit shows TweakTown o/c'ing a 470. 80MHz on core and @ 160MHz on memory.
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3204/nvidia_geforce_gtx_470_video_card_overclocked/index6.html

Looks like the 470 equals or bests a 5870 at 16x10 and 19x12 and comes pretty close at 25x16 but generally lower or equal.

This is with only a 13% o/c on the core and shaders and it closes and exceeds the average 8% performance deficit compared to a 5870.

Of course, the 5870 can be o/c'd as well, but as Apoppin's benches have shown, it does not scale anywhere near as well as the GF100 architecture.

So, for you overclockers out there, if you can get the 349.00 470 and steer clear of the gougers, the 470 may be the better performance per buck card.

Stock to stock, the same kinda does hold true. As was said, an 8% deficit on average in comparison to the 5870 for 11% lower price (after the gouging subsides.). Heat and power consumption may even this out over a long time. I feel both cards are priced where they belong at the moment, or within reason.

But you may overclock the HD 5850 as well and get GTX 470 at stock for cheaper. The GTX 470 may get better performance scaling with overclocks, isn't a spectacular difference and it doesn't overclock as good as the HD 5870, so is a matter of good luck finding a GTX 470 that overclocks well and doesn't melt a power supply or a better HD 5870 that overclocks better than the one that appopin got.

Look at his post from another thread:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_5870_overclocking/page12.asp

9% GPU overclock resulted in a 5% performance increase on 5870
9% memory overclock resulted in a 2-4% performance increase on 5870

This means a 9% overclock on GPU and Memory should produce a 7-9% performance increase overall. How is this poor scaling?

From a shader computational perspective, 5870 is 30% faster in shader ops over 5850 (850 x 1600 / 725 x 1440). If 58xx series scales poorly, why is it you can overclock 5850 to 950mhz and then match 5870's performance despite having 1440 shaders (i.e., 950 x 1400 / 850 x 1600)? 950 over 725 is a 31% overclock. Something doesn't add up for me. :hmm:

 

[Keysplayr]

But you may overclock the HD 5850 as well and get GTX 470 at stock for cheaper. The GTX 470 may get better performance scaling with overclocks, isn't a spectacular difference and it doesn't overclock as good as the HD 5870, so is a matter of good luck finding a GTX 470 that overclocks well and doesn't melt a power supply or a better HD 5870 that overclocks better than the one that appopin got.

Look at his post from another thread:

Looking at the Tweaktown review, what do you think a 5850 would need to be clocked to to at least equal a 5870 at stock? Considering at only an 80MHz increase, the 470 is already passing a 5870 by? We can work on that math if you'd like. Should be interesting, but I would also like to hear from a few 470 owners here what their average o/c's turn out to be.

And also ask them if their power supplies are melting when they do it. I think we won't find very many.

 

[ZimZum]

Anyone know of any o/c reviews of the 470? I'd like to see how it compares judging by the almost linear scaling I'm getting with a 480. Just thought it would be interesting from a performance standpoint if the 470 also shows almost linear scaling when o/c'd and how that compares to a stock and o/c'd 5870. I haven't really googled it yet, but I'll give it a go.

UPDATE: First hit shows TweakTown o/c'ing a 470. 80MHz on core and @ 160MHz on memory.
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3204/nvidia_geforce_gtx_470_video_card_overclocked/index6.html

Looks like the 470 equals or bests a 5870 at 16x10 and 19x12 and comes pretty close at 25x16 but generally lower or equal.

This is with only a 13% o/c on the core and shaders and it closes and exceeds the average 8% performance deficit compared to a 5870.

Of course, the 5870 can be o/c'd as well, but as Apoppin's benches have shown, it does not scale anywhere near as well as the GF100 architecture.

So, for you overclockers out there, if you can get the 349.00 470 and steer clear of the gougers, the 470 may be the better performance per buck card.

Stock to stock, the same kinda does hold true. As was said, an 8% deficit on average in comparison to the 5870 for 11% lower price (after the gouging subsides.). Heat and power consumption may even this out over a long time. I feel both cards are priced where they belong at the moment, or within reason.

The problem being, you're paying 5870 money and youre going to have to OC the hell out of 470 to get 5870 performance out of it, and even then it falls short. As you mentioned if you OC the 5870 it will again leave the 470 in the dust.

 

[RussianSensation]

5870 overclocked to 1500mhz scales pretty damn good in Vantage.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2067204

5870 @ 1525mhz = 29,342
5970 stock = 25,271 (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce-gtx-480_5.html#sect2)

Here is another article: http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/msi_r5870_lightning,11.html

Summary: With a 17.5% core overclock on the GPU and 12.5% on the memory "In short, the overclock meant that the MSI R5870 Lightning was on average 14% faster than a standard Radeon http://www.legionhardware.com/#5870 graphics card. R5870 Lightning really took it to the stock standard GeForce GTX 480, and overall came out on top as it was on average 5% faster."

Of course if you overclock the GTX480, it will be faster than an overclocked 5870. However, in some games 5870 still dominates:

Still, the heavily overclocked MSI R5870 Lightning enjoyed some one sided victory’s of its own, winning the Battlefield Bad Company 2 test by a 34% margin, 31% when testing with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Resident Evil 5 by 15.5% and a nice 22% win was enjoyed with Wolfenstein.

This looks like 5870 scales perfectly fine to me since it EASILY overcomes GTX480's 15% performance advantage with their GPU overclock (i.e., 1000 vs. 850 GPU) and memory overclocks.

 

[v8envy]

Although this is an enthusiast site we need to keep in mind that overclocking is NOT a guarantee. You have a shot at getting decent results. You also have a chance of getting a part that won't work even 1 mhz over stock.

A maximum overclock on one 5850 can exceed the performance of a max overclock on a different 5870, and both could be better or worse than the max overclock on a particular 470.

Comparing stock to stock is the only valid thing to do. If a significant number of Fermi parts reliably ran at 20, 30, 50 or more % over current clock rates (while still being in PCIe spec) NV would have sold at least one SKU at that speed in the first place with a corresponding premium. Ditto AMD.

Yes, Intel did sell parts which routinely clocked 50 to 100% over their rated speed. But Intel also sold parts at higher grades and levels of performance as well. The performance limitations on the budget parts were mostly market, not process limitation driven. That's definitely not the case with the current crop of GPUs for several obvious reasons.

The 470 and 480 are not a good value with or without overclocking. They should only be considered by die-hard fans of the brand and possibly Linux users.

 

[MagickMan]

But you may overclock the HD 5850 as well and get GTX 470 at stock for cheaper. The GTX 470 may get better performance scaling with overclocks, isn't a spectacular difference and it doesn't overclock as good as the HD 5870, so is a matter of good luck finding a GTX 470 that overclocks well and doesn't melt a power supply or a better HD 5870 that overclocks better than the one that appopin got.

As has been pointed out before, from an OC perspective, apoppin's 5870 is crap. Also, I'll put my 5850 OCed against an OCed 470 and beat it in 90% of games.

 

[RussianSensation]

Although this is an enthusiast site we need to keep in mind that overclocking is NOT a guarantee.

Ya, our discussion is centered around scaling argument however. I know I know that it's unfair to compare a stock vs. an overclocked part