GTX 460 or HD6870

Widz

New member
This is for my first build, now I know the 6870 is more expensive and better stock. But is it worth the extra money or should I save money and go for a GTX 460, I heard that it overclocked will beat a 6870 stock, but will a overclocked 6870 outperform it by alot?

I want to be able to play the latest games in high settings and was planning to crossfire the 6870 down the road before I seen the 460.

Ive never overclocked anything before but I would be willing to learn.
 
If you want to overclock go with the 460. if you want to leave it running at stock than the 6870 is the way to go. I would recommend, if you choose the 460, to get something with an after market heatsink (take a look at the GTX 460 Hawk and the likes.
 
Am not a fanboy of the ATI or Nvidia cards but from personal experience i would go with the 6870. I got one in my rig and trust me you wont have any trouble playing any games. My card runs crysis at very hight settings with 8x AA at 30+ FPS. Its a amazing card stock but if you get the XFX black like i have its even better. Am not slamming the GTX460 but go with a newer card be it a ATI or Nvidia.
 
480 and 570's are similar yet the 6970 is very close so i dont see a 6870 being as powerful as u think mate
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The GTX 560 is due to be released Jan 25th if the rumours are true. I think it will squeeze in between the performance of a Radeon 6870 and Radeon 6950 judging by the leaked specs and because that area of the performance spectrum looks a little too red if you know what I mean.

I don't know what the price of the new card will be. nVidia mentioned something about restoring competitiveness in the $250 dollar range or something of the sort. I'm sure you have noticed the price of GTX 460's dropping like crazy in anticipation. Either way, AMD and nVidia will provide you with a great card as long as your primary usage is gaming. I prefer nVidia because their video encoding quality is a lot better, they play nicer with non-gaming apps, and are, in my opinion, easier to tune. SLI is also vastly superior to Crossfire as you mentioned you might want to run 2 cards down the road. Last I read SLI gets up to a 90% performance gain while Crossfire only gets up to 62%. Crossfire also has higher occurances of issues with games (although they do get corrected with driver updates) and for years had to be disabled to watch DVDs (I do not know if they changed this). SLI however will currently lock you into the Intel camp and force you to pay a higher price for an nVidia "SLI certified" board.

AMD with give you excellent price/performance ratio, lower power consumption, and lower heat generation. The downside of AMD is that their drivers have a history of being really bad. nVidia has better drivers and in my experience carry out non-gaming tasks a lot better. The current Fermi architecture from nVidia does however generate more heat and have lower performance per watt when compared to their AMD counterpart.
 
Generally speaking in my experience Crossfire scales better than SLI, however with both there is a lot of hassle involved in order to be able to get the whole benefit to show up in games. At most times it is better to just buy the single best card you can afford and if you feel the need for more performance in the future just to sell your old one and buy a new one.
 
Generally speaking in my experience Crossfire scales better than SLI, however with both there is a lot of hassle involved in order to be able to get the whole benefit to show up in games. At most times it is better to just buy the single best card you can afford and if you feel the need for more performance in the future just to sell your old one and buy a new one.

I wish i never got a crossfire config so +1 to single card! buy the best you can afford at the time your buying it...simple. And if you still cant decide just go for somthing you like the look of
 
Totally agreed on a single card. That is why I got a single GTX 580 and called it a day. It runs my 1920x1200 monitor at its refresh rate in every game I play. That is practically all I am looking for. Just get a card that performs the best at the resolution you play at. I ran SLI once and providing power and dealing with the cooling of 2 cards is a hassle. I would rather just deal with one card.
 
I would go for the gtx 460, its the best card out on the market for the money and offers really good performance. Try the overclocked edition from MSI or the Palit Sonic 1GB version. Both are MORE than capable for "most" people and you don't need to mess around with overclocking, try aria.co.uk their prices at present seem to be the best!

On a side point Stick with Nvidia cards in general if your not sure as they seem to have less software and driver problems! (very few cards from ATI have issues but it happends more than Nvidia)
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Hi

With my experience in reading reviews, forums and watching vids the 6870 is the most stable of the crop of 6000's cards. On release I saw problems with it crossfired, thats's with old drivers. I don't know hoe it does today.

I haven't researched since this question though I know this:

NVIDIA 460 is nice and 2 Overclocked 460's, Look:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Xigmatek

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OGtersM_go

Without researching latest news my quick advice is if you need a motherboard and can get a 460 SLI ready rig get the 460 and a second at your convenience

good luck
 
I know...I just thought that going a little extra for a 5870 is also an option.

Actually I wouldn't buy a 5870 now, it is rather "old". If you are going to spend 5870 money there are better options to choose from, i.e. the 6950 and even the GTX560, which is great performance/price card.
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Actually I wouldn't buy a 5870 now, it is rather "old". If you are going to spend 5870 money there are better options to choose from, i.e. the 6950 and even the GTX560, which is great performance/price card.
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I'm just biased because I went and bought two 5870s because I'm inpatient and didn't want to wait for the 6950 (then I found out you can flash it to a 6970 -.-) Then again, the XFX 6950 is £30 more expensive; £50 more than the 6870.
 
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