What video card did you buy and why?

[Artista]

I am curious and in the interest of discussing the psychology of hardware purchases here are a few questions:

What video card did you buy?



What was your primary factor in your purchase? (money, resolution, multi-monitor, wife has you on a budget, etc.)


Are you happy with your purchase?


If you had it to do over what would you buy instead and/or what do you plan on buying next?

Feel free to talk it up or not or to rag on a certain brand you bought. ("I had two cards of X brand arrive DOA." or "I over clocked X brand until it smoked but it never died.")

 

[RavenSEAL]

HD6850
Price/Performance/Power
Hell yes.

Bought sapphire! awesome brand, no issues with 3 i've had before.

 

[Soundmanred]

XFX HD6850, same reasons as above.
Awesome card (overclocks great too!) and was pretty cheap.

 

[Anomaly1964]

GTX 570, Nvidia fanboy!

Probably buying a second soon so I can gameplay on a 30" Dell!

 

[zerocool84]

XFX 5870

There was no competition at the time but was still an awesome performer. It's my first ATI card after 5 Nvidia cards and am very happy with my purchase.

 

[Castiel]

Asus Gtx 580 Directu II
Cause I like to waste money
Great card but should have waited for the Hd 6970 instead

 

[happy medium]

gtx460 for price/performance/overclockability and scalability/ still runs cool and quiet with overclock without max voltage.

 

[darckhart]

gtx580 sli
cuda, eyecandy
not 100% happy, only because it doesn't work 100% of the time. there seems to be some inherent bugginess with artifacting in 3d apps after long periods of idle state.

hmm i had ati before this and overall seemed a better experience counting: 1) 3rd party oc and IQ tools, 2) dxva playback

 

[OCGuy]

Asus Gtx 580 Directu II
Cause I like to waste money
Great card but should have waited for the Hd 6970 instead

6970 over 580? No thanks. Do you mean 6990?

 

[Vdubchaos]

MSI 460 Hawk

1920x1200 and plays all the game I currently play maxed out (BC2, F1, MW2, SC2, Fifa 2010 etc)

Not sure why I would want to spend more or buy anything better....glad I went with it.

 

[BD231]

GTX 460 1gb. It was $140 bucks used and my 512mb 4850 needed to go. Needless to say the performance jump was massive. If I had to buy again right now I'd probably step up to an ATI 6870 or 6950. My only gripe is that GPU usage is all over the place with this 460.

Still a decent card though, at least better than the 4850 I had.

 

[VirtualLarry]

GTX460 1GB x 2
Bought them to build a new F@H rig. Bought the 1GB versions, in case I ever decided to game. Upgraded my desktop rigs and put one card in each.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

My current card is an XFX 6870. I bought it because I couldn't resist when it went on sale for $179.99 in early January. It's really an excellent card, except the fan is a little bit loud. I keep it downclocked and the fan manually set to minimum when I'm not playing games. Now that I've switched to ATI, I'm really glad I did. I didn't realize how much a "minor" bug with my previous NV card was affecting my computing experience.

You see, I had an EVGA 460 768MB. After taking a long hiatus from computer games, SC2 made me decide to buy a decent video card again. It was the first card I bought to play games since I bought a Voodoo 3 3000 in 1999.

I was happy with the gaming performance of the 460, but its drivers were a mess for video playback. My computer is in my living room connected to an LCD TV, and the bulk of its workload is playing movies. The 460 had problems with jerky motion in DXVA playback, and it had serious audio sync issues with x264 content.

Using older drivers (or madVR for CPU decode) resolved the former issue but not the latter. The audio sync problem sort of drove me insane. I was constantly setting the audio delay manually in MPC-HC, trying old drivers and new betas, tinkering with my video filters, etc. Even though my new ATI card has no problem with audio sync, I'm still hyper-aware of it at all times... it sometimes feels like my cerebellum won't allow me to relax while watching videos for fear that the audio sync is off by a few ms.

Hopefully the paranoia will ease with time, but I don't think I'll buy another NV card any time soon. Even when I wasn't into gaming, I've always followed the hardware buzz. I'd heard people constantly talk about the inferiority of the ATI drivers compared to the NV ones, but my own experience has been just the opposite. The 460 was really quiet and ran cool with excellent game performance for the price. The hardware was nice, but the AMD drivers, at least as far as 2D goes, have been a lot better experience for me.

 

[dudeofdur]

What video card did you buy? HIS 6850 1gb
What was your primary factor in your purchase? (money, resolution, multi-monitor, wife has you on a budget, etc.) I just bought a new sandybridge build so i was a little short on cash. luckily the 6850 i bought was 140$.
Are you happy with your purchase? yes
If you had it to do over what would you buy instead and/or what do you plan on buying next? Maybe if I had more money i would have waited for the 560 ti's

 

[nyker96]

Asus GTX 460/768mb
just what I need
good price
very good cooling
low noise
very OCable

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Dual 6950s, cause they because they could become dual 6970s and crossfire's scaling is amazing.

If I could do it all over again I wouldn't have bought the 2nd 6950. I'm pretty awfully CPU limited, although bitcoin is changing my mind about having the 2nd 6950

 

[Grooveriding]

GTX 480s. Had 5870 Crossfire but ran into VRAM limitations at my resolution.

Added a third recently and bought another for another pc in the house. With used 480s going for $200-$250 it's hard to turn down a card that can overclock to match a stock 580 and includes the same big memory pool I need.

Only regret, they are too loud.

 

[Powermoloch]

6850 CF...best of its class/value when it came out

250 GTS...F'ing cheap and works great on my browsing comp !

 

[nanaki333]

dual 6970s for me and a single 6970 for the wife because they were freebies

 

[Imp]

Sapphire 6850

Lower power than Nvidia, was on sale for under $200, and performance was pretty good at 1920x1200.

Would have stuck with my 5770 if it didn't have to be RMA'd. Didn't have the patience to wait 2 weeks using my 14" laptop.

 

[NoQuarter]

Radeon 5770, price/performance because I was buying 3 monitors at the same time and now replaced with a 6950.

Would have been interested to try nVidia's Surround but $260 doesn't buy a good SLI solution for Surround (2x GTX 460 768MB = fail)

 

[ShadowVVL]

evga gtx 260, price /performance was good at the time and heard good things about the card.

its been 2 years now and its still performs great for my needs.

 

[Artista]

Interesting and cool.

I myself have been like a kid in a candy store unable to decide which to get. There are so many choices and it is amazing what a little extra money can get you. The 6850 are great and so are 460. Then you look at the 560 and the 6950. Wow.

 

[llee]

What video card did you buy?
I purchased an HD5870

What was your primary factor in your purchase? (money, resolution, multi-monitor, wife has you on a budget, etc.)
I was looking for the most powerful dual-slot graphics card that fit a Silverstone SG-05 Mini-ITX case and could (combined with the rest of my pc) sip less than 450 watts.

Are you happy with your purchase?
Yes

If you had it to do over what would you buy instead and/or what do you plan on buying next?
I would probably pick up a GTX560Ti

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

I bought a gtx 580 cause I got a great deal on it since it was newegg open box. I didn't really need it at the time but since I've bought a 120hz monitor and 3d kit. Now it seems like the 580 is underpowered since 3d cuts your fps in half and when I play 2d I like to average over 60fps since I can now see all my fps up to 120. Buying the gtx 680 the day of release. I'd probably buy a refreshed 580 if nvidia did one and it increased performance by at least 10%.