Questions about hd7000 series Before purchase

[ShadowVVL]

Helping a friend buy a new gpu.

He doesn't want to go over $290. I found the powercolor radeon 7870 for about 279.99 with free shipping.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131467


I don't have a lot of experience with amd/ati cards.I have worked with them only a few times so I have a few questions.

1.I have heard power color is a good company but I don't know much about power colors warranty service. is it any good?

2.When you update drivers for amd can you install over the old driver or do you have to use driver sweeper before installing new drivers?

When ever I update my nvidia driver I don't use driver sweeper and have had no issues.But I have heard every time you update amd/ati drivers to always run driver sweeper before installing the new drivers.

3.How well is the CF for the 7000 cards? just in case later down the road he decides to double up.

4. What are the know issues such as driver quality and micro shutter?

 

[cmdrdredd]

Helping a friend buy a new gpu.

He doesn't want to go over $290. I found the powercolor radeon 7870 for about 279.99 with free shipping.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131467


I don't have a lot of experience with amd/ati cards.I have worked with them only a few times so I have a few questions.

1.I have heard power color is a good company but I don't know much about power colors warranty service. is it any good?

2.When you update drivers for amd can you install over the old driver or do you have to use driver sweeper before installing new drivers?

When ever I update my nvidia driver I don't use driver sweeper and have had no issues.But I have heard every time you update amd/ati drivers to always run driver sweeper before installing the new drivers.

3.How well is the CF for the 7000 cards? just in case later down the road he decides to double up.

4. What are the know issues such as driver quality and micro shutter?

2) you can install over the top but usually I'd just do a full uninstall and driver sweeper. I feel safer that way.
3) It works fine, microstutter is noticeable sometimes
4) Not every game will work and some get bad scaling while others get great scaling. Each CAP and driver release should only improve compatibility.

 

[Smoblikat]

Helping a friend buy a new gpu.

He doesn't want to go over $290. I found the powercolor radeon 7870 for about 279.99 with free shipping.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131467


I don't have a lot of experience with amd/ati cards.I have worked with them only a few times so I have a few questions.

1.I have heard power color is a good company but I don't know much about power colors warranty service. is it any good?

2.When you update drivers for amd can you install over the old driver or do you have to use driver sweeper before installing new drivers?

When ever I update my nvidia driver I don't use driver sweeper and have had no issues.But I have heard every time you update amd/ati drivers to always run driver sweeper before installing the new drivers.

3.How well is the CF for the 7000 cards? just in case later down the road he decides to double up.

4. What are the know issues such as driver quality and micro shutter?

1. I have owned powercolor before and have always thought they are extremely low end and cheap cards.
2. You can install on top of other drivers, I dont.
3. From what I have heard CF scales significantly worse than SLI, but isnt that bad compared to how it used to be.
4. I have owned several ATi cards and even having quality in the same sentence as driver is a joke, though this experience is based off of the HD5000 series and HD6000 series and after each series drivers seem to improve.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Crossfire either scales great or really bad. SLI never usually scales as good as crossfire when it works great in a game, but generally scales some in more games.

 

[ShadowVVL]

alright thanks for the replies.I guess will look around a bit for and see if I can find a better hd7000 for same price.If no luck I will tell him to wait a until next pay check and get a gtx 670.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Well, you don't need the 670. You can do well with a 7950 and do a bit of overclocking.

It's a bit cheaper if price is really a concern and SLi/X-Fire is not an immediate possibility.

Sapphire, MSI, and Gigabyte make good cards for $340-$360

This Sapphire is overclocked to 950Mhz and can likely do 1Ghz or more if you're willing to add a little voltage. Also comes with 3 free games (via coupon). Personally I'd wait the extra week or two and grab this or a 670 if you want to go with Nvidia.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102991

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

I install on top of older drivers and I don't have issues. The only time when I did have an issue was when I tried out some beta drivers and that required an OS install to fix. The issue I had was quite rare and as far as I know I was the only one to have it.

Mostly AMD drivers are very high quality in my experience and work just as well as modern nvidia drivers. I have no experience with SLI or Crossfire this is just what I have gathered from my experience with single cards.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Multiple cards are more sensitive to drivers. Without a game profile you basically run on one card and the other one is wasted.

 

[ShadowVVL]

Yeah I didn't check msi I guess I will go look at them.I will talk to him and see which one he wants to go with.

Thanks for the help.

 

[ShadowVVL]

Update:We decided to go with the evga 670 ftw for $399 @ amazon

my thoughts... this card is nice! idle temps 39C at 85.1F room temp at 30% fanspeed. We tested it on diablo 3 at max setting on 1920 X 1080 temps went up to 47c with fan running at 40% and 42c at 55% fanspeed.

didn't have enough time to install and test more games but I was impressed at how cool & quiet it runs.

Also got a 1 tb raptor for storage so I figured I would post it.

 

[lehtv]

We tested it on diablo 3 at max setting on 1920 X 1080 temps went up to 47c with fan running at 40% and 42c at 55% fanspeed.

The load temperatures and noise levels are low because you're running Diablo 3 with VSync on and constant 60 fps. The GPU isn't doing a lot of work. If you can disable VSync or play a more demanding game or run a Unigine Heaven benchmark, you'll get a more realistic idea of the heat and noise of the blower-cooled 670.

 

[ShadowVVL]

The load temperatures and noise levels are low because you're running Diablo 3 with VSync on and constant 60 fps. The GPU isn't doing a lot of work. If you can disable VSync or play a more demanding game or run a Unigine Heaven benchmark, you'll get a more realistic idea of the heat and noise of the blower-cooled 670. __________________

ah,I didn't check if vsync was on or not. yeah I plan on running unigine and udk next week.
I ran the fan up to 68% and thats when I started to hear it but at 80% it was much quieter then my gtx260 is at 65%.

 

[Arkadrel]

1.I have heard power color is a good company but I don't know much about power colors warranty service. is it any good?

2.When you update drivers for amd can you install over the old driver or do you have to use driver sweeper before installing new drivers?

When ever I update my nvidia driver I don't use driver sweeper and have had no issues.But I have heard every time you update amd/ati drivers to always run driver sweeper before installing the new drivers.

3.How well is the CF for the 7000 cards? just in case later down the road he decides to double up.

4. What are the know issues such as driver quality and micro shutter?

1) powercolour make cheaper cards, but they offer good quality for the price they charge.
My guess is they use slave labour to cut down on prices of production or something like that.

But they make exciting solutions that are intelligent and arnt comprimised by component quality. Xfx make cheap cards too, but they "cut"corners, meaning you get "bad/cheap" quality components on cards. Powercolour from my understanding doesnt do this.

2) You can just install new drivers over the old.
Nvidia fanboys have been spouting the "amd drivers suck" for so long, its warped the minds of users on forums.

3) with the amd 6xxx series the scaleing was better than the 5xx nvidia SLI solutions.
Currently both are on new architectures and SLI/CF scaleing isnt as good "yet" as it was for the 6xxx cards. That said, yes down the road if he wanted too, he could double up.

4) Microstutter is subjective, which means most users cant precieve it, but some claim too.
Its there, and you can measure it though. Its not a issue with a single card though.

Driver quality is good with AMD, very simular to nvidias.

*edit:

nice looking PC
That corsair closed watercooling solution at back there looks good. Im guessing thats a quiet pc, which is something ive grown fond of (not a fan of noisy pc's).

 

[ShadowVVL]

Thanks arkadrel thats good to know,I wanted to give powercolor a shot but My friend just got done burying his 460 2win which turn out to be a POS after 6 months. so I decided not to risk it this time around.I am thinking of going with a amd gpu next year when I build my haswell workstation.Solong as price /perf of the Hd8000 is good.I might give power color or msi a go.

 

[Meghan54]

Powercolor......decent for the price, but I've seen on some of the cards I've looked at (5/6000 series) Powercolor will use electrolytic caps substituted for the solid caps found on higher quality cards (Asus, Gigabyte, Sapphire, MSI), and cuts in other places (lesser quality memory IC's, smaller coils, etc.)

You pays your money and you takes your chances.