5870 xfire or 470 sli ? ? [Archive]

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mosleypup

09-03-10, 04:45 AM

fundip

09-03-10, 08:22 AM

Ok guys i need some help / convincing here
i currently have a thought rattling round in my head that i need to ditch my asus 5870's and get some 470's instead.
can anyone offer me some GOOD advice on what I should do ? whats the best option ?
many thanks

benchmarks rank them about equal in dx11, i feel it would be a waste of money to switch. the only difference would be physx support. but you can use a $50 gt240 for that if you really want to have physx.

WayOut

09-03-10, 11:53 AM

^One huge advantage the 470's have over the 5870's is tessellation... If he uses any games with that feature, the 470's will blow away the 5870's in performance hands down.

However, I suggest you wait until the holiday season (as that's when I'd assume nVidia will release their new GF104 cards; along with ATI's 6000 series) and pick up a newer card; maybe a couple of GTX 475's instead? GF104 eliminates some of the power consumption and heat problems that the original Fermi cards had, and provides superior scaling in SLI, all along with its ability to clock much higher than GF100 cards.

Basically by getting two 470's now, you would see some better performance in some games, and much better performance where tessellation is used, but the heat and power trade-offs are not worth it at this point IMO, especially when nVidia has cards that solve both of those problems just around the corner.

RADIO_ACTIVE

09-03-10, 02:30 PM

Are your 5870s not performing??? Those are good cards and so are the 470s. When I built my signature rig I was going to go with 5870s but ended up choosing the 480s over them. I chose Nvidia beacause I wanted to experience Nvision 3D and the driver support IMO is better. But I think you should keep your 5870s, they can handle every thing you throw at them. Then when the next generation comes around, consider going a different route.

mosleypup

09-03-10, 04:41 PM

fundip

09-03-10, 06:19 PM

oh no, there is nothing wrong with the performance
im just one of those people who doesnt know what he wants ! :bang head
thing is, the place were i buy all my gear from has asus 470's at a very good price this week, when the 6 seriese cards come out my 5870's are going to loose even more money, so, i need to sell them while the price is still okish
i just dont know
keep them ?, 470sli ?, 1 480 ?, :bang head

i say keep them, and stop worrying. maybe 470sli will perform slightly better with high tesselation but your cards will dominate anything you throw at them,so trading them in for the new breed really wont give you better performance and it wont make any game better, thats left to the game developer. just enjoy your kickass hardware.

RADIO_ACTIVE

09-08-10, 03:58 PM

With the 6000 series pictures leaked, I would wait till those are released to make any changes :) It is right around the corner.

mosleypup

09-08-10, 04:08 PM

what exactly do you think we will get from ati for the 6870 ?

EarthDog

09-08-10, 04:24 PM

I would buy a 30" monitor (2560x1600) to actually stretch the legs of your current setup... You would be exchanging gold for gold in what you are asking in the first post.

RADIO_ACTIVE

09-08-10, 04:32 PM

what exactly do you think we will get from ati for the 6870 ?
MORE POWER!!!:attn:

WayOut

09-08-10, 08:11 PM

I have a feeling that nVidia is timing the release of their new GF104 series the same time as ATi's 6000 series... maybe you should wait to see what they do with 'em first.

edit: wait jk... i basically had the exact same post above. ignore this please ;)

Pvt.Dancer

09-08-10, 08:20 PM

id go with earth dog on this one if you want to spend some money get a bigger monitor you would get nothing except new drivers and an Nvidia logo if you switched. no real noticeable performance upgrade from what you have or better yet you can send me the money you can PM me about that later... but i would wait the only reason i have a 5870 now is because my 4870x2 died i was waiting for the 6xxx series myself.

Killador

09-08-10, 09:59 PM

I was going to get 2xGTX470's since they scale extremely well in SLI. However, im thinking of waiting till the holidays. I want to see how the GTX475's scale...if Nvidia releases them.

Exempt

09-08-10, 10:18 PM

Im running quad 5870's, at first I honestly have to say it was a nightmare for setup. I had three 1gb cards of the 5870's, and added a fourth 2gb 5870, which threw the whole setup outta whack for some reason, major bluescreens, poor FPS, just a horrible experience. I ended up selling the other 3 1gb 5870's and picked up 3 2gb ones instead.

I really enjoy the setup, and my buddy has 4x 480's, and I've played on his rig extensively. Honestly, I think that the Nvidia card's just make things look "smoother" and I'm not talking about AA or AS, it just has a completely different look to the graphics. FPS a couple months ago, he was beating me a bit, but with the 10.7 and now the 10.8 catalyst, my performance has increased a good 20% making our FPS identical. One negative thing about his setup, is those cards put off MAJOR heat and require MAJOR power.

If you haven't invested in a larger monitor grab either a 30" Dell, or one of those sexy 120hz LED monitors. For the mean time, no I wouldn't jump ship, your trading "gold for gold" as someone above said. I am a little doubtful as far as how the 6870's will perform.

I think the next gen just brings speed up for DX11 games, which there are not many that are great that take advantage of this aside from Metro 2033 and Starcraft. Enabling DX11 on my quad setup with Metro 2033 at 2560x1600 just kills my FPS. Some games like Mafia II I can play at absolute maximum settings at 2560x1600 with full AA, and other games, I stick with 1920x1200 maxed out.