I was thinking of upgrading from my horrible integrated graphics (which can only run Skyrim on lowest quality at about 20FPS) to something a bit more... modern. Unfortunately I don't quite have the largest of budgets but at the same time I don't need a super awesome card. With this in mind, I was also considering doing an upgrade in a few months (after the Ivy bridge chips came out) and I was looking into some of the Intel boards. I was considering getting something like the Intel DP67BG (Soley because i get the employee discount) which would let me do SLI or Crossfire (I'd like to be able to use all 3 of my monitors on my desktop - one is currently connected to my laptop) which my impact my decision now when getting a new card as I'd probably want to take advantage of this when I get it. So I was wondering what people's opinions were on the current market cards that fall into the $100-150 range. Edit: I also found this, which has the Eyefinity, which i guess also suits my needs. Ideas? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190615415073
5870 is a solid card from the last gen of cards. Running eyefinity is a calculation of: what quality level you want to run, monitor resolution, and gpu with vram you have. 1080p eyefinity or higher seems to like the higher vram cards in the 2gb and up range. You said your budget is lower now. I think yoh also might be able to scoop up a gtx560 in that price range as well. If you have a hefty budget later my thought would be that you are just going to turf the card you have now whren ivy bridge comes out. Even current gpus dont stres out sandy brdige until you get into sli 580, cfx 6970 or above. So im assumin youll be lookig for a new gpu then to help tax the ivy bridge cpu. I just picked up a 6970 for $300 which ill hang onto while keppler come out and flog it for $150 and grab a gtx 780 or something.
Your shouldnt even think about eyefinity on your budget. Its only worth doing if you can afford good monitors, and since you cant even ford a high end graphics card you definitely cant afford 2 good monitors. The 5870 is a good card for $140. The 7970 will be out in a few days though for a limited run. Should drive the prices down a bit on the 6000 series cards. Might even make Nvidia drop their prices a little bit.
I actually have a rather nice monitor that Intel paid for and then i have a crappy 25" and a crappy 22" that I'd like to use too.. My resolutions are 1920x1200, 1920x1080, and 1680x1050 receptively and I intend to invest in a nice WQXGA monitor (which I'm pretty sure is unsupported by my integrated gfx) when I do my upgrade next year. Would only having that 1Gb vram inhibit my ability to use all 3 (eventually I'll replace the 22" with the 30" WQXGA) of these together?
Afaik for eyefinity your resolutions have to match each other spanning the three screeens. Eyefinity at 1920x1080 require 2gb or higher of vram if you want to run any decent settings in anything recent. 6970's and 3gb gtx 580's are popular choices. My guess Is the 7970's are goinna be $500-$600+, when I drop tha coin its gonna be ona nvidia card when the Keplers arrive mid spring unless the AMD cards are anihilating Nvidia.
Ya having 1GB of vram will not be anywhere close to enough to run a game at 5760x1080 resolution. Also I dont think you can mix resolutions like that. It *may* be possible but would look funny and would probably have big black bar areas on the larger resolution screen. You need to not only have enough raw power to render a game in such a massive resolution, but that also takes a lot of memory to go that high, on top of that you still want your textures and all that too look good so that adds quite a bit more too. Pretty much to span 3 monitors on a card you want 2GB of vram minimum. Basically dont think about eyefinity on a $150 budget, just get the best card you can afford and play it in good quality on your primary monitor. The Spring 2012 launch is for low end stuff, based on current gen and with the 28nm die shrink. Kepler has been said to not only perform less than expected, but has been redone multiple times now and no launch date is know, just "sometime 2012". Id be waiting for Nvidia too with Kepler as I expect it will be quite good when it launches, but I dont feel like waiting sometime between 4-8 months for a card that Nvidia hasnt even hammered out final specs on yet. When Nvidia gets its shit together again maybe Ill buy one of their cards come next year Also, Nvidia already knows they are having problems with the architecture and Kepler's successor has already been pushed to a 2014 launch instead of 2013.
Oh, i wasn't planning on gaming with more than one screen, i just wanted to do basic stuff on the other two screens, like be able to have a web browser open in one screen, a spec sheet open in another and my coding IDE in another.
Get an nvida 560 on sale. Yes, it can be done. Or, if you cant find it/cant wait. I have plenty of friends that rock the 550 ti and love them. Its gonna be a huge improvement over your stuff, and thay can easily be found at the low end of your budget! A have both. I love both. Quite, very powerful and surprisingly affordable- all things considered. Get one of these and you wont be disappointed. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130625
Thats why i grabbed a cheap 6970. If you can wait a few weeks, or posssibly end of January, the AMD 7000's should be out driving down th cost on 6000 series, however it will be limited ad could be late jan or early feb before its mainstream and price drop happen. I couldnt wait and needed something now for swtor. If you can wait a month your bang for your buck will be higher. As for Keppler, either way, if they launch in the spring or later 2012 thats fine. Everything is very wishy washy and rumored or leaked from them anywas as far as information goes.
Actually a rather good bet. In the long run it's not quite going to be what you want though because of the 3 monitors until you add another for Crossfire mode. That being the plan, you should probably get one really powerful card now and not do Crossfire at all =P
The 5870 is substantially better than a 550Ti. It has 25% better pixel fill rate, more than double the texel performance, 50% more memory bandwidth, and more shader processors.
Shader Processors: 5870: 1600 total (320 units, with multiple shaders per unit) 550Ti: 192 Texture Mapping Units: 5870: 80 550Ti: 32 Color Raster Operation Pipelines: 5870: 32 550Ti: 24 Z/Stencil Raster Operation Pipelines: 5870: 128 550Ti: dont know Core Clock: 5870: 850MHz 550Ti: 900MHz Shader Clock: 5870: 850MHz (synchronized with core) 550Ti: 1800MHz (double core's speed) Memory clock: 5870: 1200MHz 550Ti: 1026MHz Memory bus width: 5870: 256-bit 550Ti: 192-bit Memory Bandwidth: 5870: 153.6 GB/s 550Ti: 98.5 GB/s Pixel Fill rate: 5870: 27.2 GPixels/s 550Ti: 21.6 GPixels/s Texel fill rate: 5870: 68.0 GTexels/s 550Ti: 28.8 GTexels/s
I guess the 5870 isn't a bad grab while its still in stock then. I was kinda leaning towards it after I found it but I wanted a few other opinions.
It appears there is indeed a material gap in the hardware specs! Also, I looked up the card. I was at work and on my droid when I wrote the previous comment, and i see that my memory failed me. I was thinking we were talking about the 5770 not the 5870 - mostly because we were talking about looking for a decent (yet affordable) video card in the $100 to $150 range. Isnt this, at minimum, twice as expensive as the maximum of his budget?
thoughts: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121418 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150561 I need a new card soonish, maybe after x-mas
Yes the 5870 is no longer made as it is last generations model and about to be 2 generations old now. The 5870 is also much better than the 6870 In the 5000 series and under, the top end single card was the "#870". With the top integrated crossfire card (2 GPUs on 1 board) being either a "#890" or "#950". However, when the 6000 series rolled around the top end card was moved to 6970, thus the 5870 is more in the place of the 6970 for equality. The 68## series is the upper midrange of the 6000's, and the 67## is the lower midrange. The 66## is low end, and anything below in the 65## range and under is all integrated stuff in CPUs or motherboard chipsets. With 65## being the high end integrated, etc etc. If you wait till after Christmas, the 7000 series card will be out very soon after.
Yah, having a hard time finding a reputable dealer selling the 5870. Not a big fan of e-bay, buy all my PC stuff from newegg or if I am hard pressed tigerdirect.