2x 6950 vs 1x 7950

Hey everyone,

I recently bought an MSI 6950 1GB after reading reviews that 1GB is all you would need for 1920x1080. I went with the 1GB over 2GB to save money, and I had also planned to buy another of the same card and Xfire them.

Well, after receiving some sage advice from EarthDog, I am rethinking my plans. I wasn't aware that 2x 1GB cards will only put out 1GB of memory. I also wasn't aware that more than 1GB would be beneficial on my 1920x1080 setup. So here's the thing...

Should I sell off my 1GB and get a 2GB, then plan on getting another in 3-6 months and Xfire, or should I go with a newer card, possibly a 7950?

There is one more issue however - the mobo I have only supports up to PCIe 2.0. The 7950 is PCIe 3.0.


Any suggestions on this matter?


P.S. - Maybe it would be helpful to describe what I do with my comp:

Battlefield 3!
3ds max
+some other modeling programs (Maya, Zbrush)
Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere

Thanks!

Well, some details change my tune a bit....

I would go with an NVIDIA card to take advantage of some of the hardware acceleration in PS and 3DS, (maybe others too). GTX570 or greater... or wait until Kepler releases supposedly in April.

Well here's the other thing, I built an AMD system and decided to go with dual AMD graphics cards so I don't really want to get an Nvidia unless I'm sure I'm not going to want to SLi.

Thats a shame considering the applications you use can be accelerated significantly in some aspects via an Nvidia GPU.

TerranCmdr said:

Well here's the other thing, I built an AMD system and decided to go with dual AMD graphics cards so I don't really want to get an Nvidia unless I'm sure I'm not going to want to SLi.

Click to expand...

Why can't you go with an SLI setup? You still on the 8xx chipset? If you are on the 9xx chipset they mostly support SLI.

890fxa...

I'm honestly okay with AMD cards, I just am not sure if I should get another 1gb, or get a new 2gb, or try to rebuild my system for a 3gb 7950.

Why would you have to rebuild your system for a 7950?

Because my mobo only has PCIe 2.0. Unless not all 7950s are PCIe 3.0?

EarthDog said:

Why would you have to rebuild your system for a 7950?

Click to expand...

I think he is worried about the possible bottleneck of running a pci-e 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot.

@op it won't bottleneck it that much. If you are that worried about performance you would be better off upgrading to a 990 chipset board and go with an nvidia card and take advantage of the CUDA acceleration in the apps that support it. Then with the new mobo you can SLI if you really want.

As we discussed via PM before you created the thread, you have no worries with a PCIe3 card in a PCIe2 slot. The 7950 does NOT saturate PCIe2 16x bandwidth...and is backwards compatible to PCIe2.

Ah, I see. I must have misread.

Anyway, I don't think I can SLi with the chip that I have... When I was building I did some research and the general consensus was that AMD+Nvidia SLi = . So, single 7950, good times yes?

A quick scan shows this board does NOT support SLI. So if you choose to purchase an Nvidia card, you would be limited to one, correct. You really have a tough call to be honest. I would do more research on the applications you use and see what it does accelerate if using an Nvidia card. It would cut back on render and encoding times significantly. If that isnt a deal breaker for you, then grab that 7950.