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AMD 5870 or NVidia 470

J

jlfirehawk

Senior member
I just got done rebuilding my pc which now has Intel 980x processor, Asus P6X58D-E motherboard, 12GB Crucial Ballistix memory, Vertex LE (Sandforce controller) LSI 9840 Raid Card with 2 Intel 80GB SSD in raid 0 and a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drive as well as two velociraptor 300GB drives in raid 0 as well. Now as far as Video I have both a AMD 5870 sitting here and a NVidia 470 card, which one would end up being the better card in this setup?
 
Honestly, probably the HD6870. If you need more firepower, HD6850 in CF or GTX460 in SLI. The 5870 is massively overpriced and GTX470 is worse than HD6870 because they have similar performance, but 6870 is cooler, quieter and consumes less power.
 
None of them...lol The 5870 is the faster card. But:

In that id put either a single card: HD5970/GTX480 or wait a a few weeks(a month) for the new HD6970.
 
I already have both card so price issue doesnt come into play, I just want to make sure I am using the best of what I have.
 
The 5870 is generally a tad faster. The GTX470 has Physx, if you are intersted in using it. I doubt you'd notice much different between the two, honestly.
 
jlfirehawk said:
I already have both card so price issue doesnt come into play, I just want to make sure I am using the best of what I have.
Click to expand...

Oh I misread your original post. If you already have the HD5870 and GTX470, then the ATI card is better in performance, power consumption and noise - hands down. Sell the 470.
 
SlowSpyder said:
If you are into overclocking, 5870's generally can go pretty high with a voltage bump. I think GTX470's are more hit or miss.
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Well actually with overclocking, GTX470 might win. Most do 750mhz with ease. At 800mhz on the 470, 5870 will likely keep up in non-DX11 games but once you consider DX11 games (Dirt 2, Civilization 5, Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033, STALKER:Cop (sunshafts)), an 800mhz 470 will easily beat a 950mhz 5870. The problem is overvolting the 470 on the stock cooler is not fun. 😀

Remember Fermi scales better than Cypress.

GTX470 @ 607--> 800mhz (+32% overclock!!)
HD5870 @ 850 --> 1000mhz (+17% overclock)
 
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Also there are indications that the nV 40nm chips have matured a tad, and may consume less power than the launch/review cards.
 
RussianSensation said:
Well actually with overclocking, GTX470 might win. Most do 750mhz with ease. At 800mhz on the 470, 5870 will likely keep up in non-DX11 games but once you consider DX11 games (Dirt 2, Civilization 5, Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033, STALKER:Cop (sunshafts)), an 800mhz 470 will easily beat a 950mhz 5870. The problem is overvolting the 470 on the stock cooler is not fun. 😀

Remember Fermi scales better than Cypress.

GTX470 @ 607--> 800mhz (+32% overclock!!)
HD5870 @ 850 --> 1000mhz (+17% overclock)
Click to expand...


I'm not disagreeing with what you said. All I was saying is that it seems almost every 5870 overclocks well if you are willing to bump the voltage. From what I've read (I have no first hand experience, this is just my opinion formed from what I've read on forums in the past) the GTX470 is more hit or miss... some overclock quite stoutly, others don't get much.

So the 5870 is a tad faster and overclocks well. The GTX470 scales better and may also overclock well.

Again, like I said earlier, I doubt you'd notice much difference betwee the two. They're pretty close.
 
5870 is a better card, hands down. The 470 is a great card too though.

I'd sell the 470 while it still has some value in it. I think the 5870's are going to lose a lot of value in the used market, if they haven't already, when the 69xx gets released.

Edit: Nice quote Spyder. Gotta give it to that guy, he was all messed up on his takes.
 
Winter is on the way so use the GTX 470 overclocked of course to keep you warm and toasty while your gaming 🙂

If no need for the physX or CUDA of the GTX 470 then just go with the 5870
 
Sickamore said:
Can someone explain what cuda is for me. Haven't been in the graphics game in while.
Click to expand...

Right from the wikipedia:
CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA. CUDA is the computing engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) that is accessible to software developers through variants of industry standard programming languages. Programmers use 'C for CUDA' (C with NVIDIA extensions and certain restrictions), compiled through a PathScale Open64 C compiler, to code algorithms for execution on the GPU.
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA
 
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