What would you do in this situation ? Dual card or single solution ?

[MentalIlness]

Ok, I have a HD 6870 and a EVGA GTX 460 EE Superclock (core clock 763). Both cards in sig.

I am looking to upgrade the FX computer. Initially thought about going with a HD 7870, but since I have both of these, would it be better to go 6870 Crossfire or GTX 460 SLI ? I have never ran a dual card solution before, but from the sounds of it, I seriously doubt "microstutter" would bother me at all.

And just in case, I don't want to sell my cards to get a top of the line card, mainly because I collect and keep the cards I get. I just got the GTX 460 last night for $40 and it was only used for a few months.

How would each of the dual card solutions compare to say something like the GTX 680 or HD 7970 ?

So.....

HD 7870
HD 6870 Crossfire
GTX 460 SLI

What would you do ? I game at 1080p. My PSU is a Corsair 750TX

 

[Arkaign]

Sell both, get 7950.

 

[Arkaign]

Why would you collect video cards? You can always buy them ~5+ years out for peanuts, but right now they're worth decent $$$. To each their own, but this makes no sense to me at all.

 

[MentalIlness]

Why would you collect video cards? You can always buy them ~5+ years out for peanuts, but right now they're worth decent $$$. To each their own, but this makes no sense to me at all.

Not sure why to tell ya the truth. But I do see your point. A lot of people collect their cards actually. I seen a member here with at least a dozen listed in his sig. A "wall" of video cards would look pretty good for the man cave.

And on a side note, I won't be buying any more XFX cards. If I end up with a AMD card, it will be ASUS. If it is Nvidia, it will be EVGA or ASUS.

 

[Arkaign]

Perhaps consider just getting a list of all of the cards you have owned (and if you really want to collect interesting ones, even adding ones you never owned to begin with), and buying them later on.

Right now I see Radeon 9700s, 8500s, 6600GT, etc, all kinds of classic cards for dirt dirt cheap. Older stuff like Geforce 3ti, Radeon 7500 is like $1.

 

[The_Golden_Man]

Go 6870 Crossfire. Should compare well to a 7970. Don't know if yours has 1GB or 2GB. But 1GB may be a little drawback. You'll do fine with 1GB for the most part at 1080dpi though.

Link to review

 

[Jaydip]

+1 to 6870 cfx

 

[aaksheytalwar]

7870 ESP once over clocked will hands down be the best experience. Close to a 7950~670 ish stock, perhaps closer to the former but will be much smoother than 6870cf which will run like crap

 

[The_Golden_Man]

7870 ESP once over clocked will hands down be the best experience. Close to a 7950~670 ish stock, perhaps closer to the former but will be much smoother than 6870cf which will run like crap

How do you know they will run like crap? I've heard AMD have fixed many of the crossfire issues and much of the microstuttering in their 12.7 Beta drivers.

I have two 5770's. just waiting for my crossfirebridge to test it out.

 

[jacktesterson]

+1 to 6870 cfx

+1

 

[RussianSensation]

And on a side note, I won't be buying any more XFX cards. If I end up with a AMD card, it will be ASUS. If it is Nvidia, it will be EVGA or ASUS.

Asus can be a hit and miss. With 7970 series they had a lot of VRM cooling and driver crashing with their DCUII series in the beginning of the generation. On the AMD side, you really ought to consider Sapphire, MSi and Gigabyte along with Asus. Also some HIS cards have great quiet coolers on the AMD side. Pretty much everyone besides XFX made good cards this round, even Galaxy . EVGA brings little to the table anymore besides customer service. Their coolers are lame and their cards are almost never built with premium components outside of the ridiculous Classified card.

HD7950 OC / HD7970 OC and GTX680 OC will roughly equal HD6990 (which is HD6970 CF). So any of those cards would beat GTX460 SLI, HD6870 CF or a single HD7870.

GTX460 at stock speeds ~ HD6850

The problem with GTX460 1GB SLI and HD6870 CF is that they'll run into a 1GB VRAM bottleneck in some newer games:

Also in some newer games such as Dirt Showdown and Sniper Elite V2 that use DirectCompute and contact hardening shadows, it's game over for HD6870 or GTX460:

HD6870 is also in trouble in any game that uses Tessellation because unlike HD6900 series it only has 1 geometry engine, not 2:

Unfortunately GTX460 doesn't fair any better. This is because for Fermi architecture, the GTX460 was neutered on the tessellation side because GF114 was far worse than GF100 in that area since the tessellation units are attached to the SMX clusters (or w/e AMD called them at the time).

It gets hammered even more than the 6870 in games that use Tessellation.
Batman AC
Anno 2070
Crysis 2 is nearly 3x slower than the GTX680
Metro 2033 is horrendous on the 460

For the price, it's good since you can probably pick up 2x GTX460s for less than $100 together. GTX460's saving grace is 825-850mhz overclocking. At stock speeds, they are dogs now. If I had too chose between HD6870 CF and GTX460 SLI, I'd go with HD6870s. At 800mhz, GTX460 ~ GTX470 ~ HD6870. Not worth the extra power consumption at this point to put up with overclocked 460s vs. 6870 CF imo.