Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 SLI vs. ATI Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire

I think the conclusion sums up the power consumption story pretty well. Yes the power consumption is high but guys looking to purchase two of the world’s fastest graphics cards probably don't care ;)
 
[-Steve-] said:
I think the conclusion sums up the power consumption story pretty well. Yes the power consumption is high but guys looking to purchase two of the world’s fastest graphics cards probably don't care ;)
Click to expand...

95% of the people that go on those rants don't buy the cards anyway. If you're willing to pay 800+usd for sli/crossfire. 2 more dollars on your energy bill shouldnt kill you too bad per month.
 
While I dont' go for the highest end cards anymore, I do spend $300 or so on one. I never cared about the power they took or the heat they put out. If the heat does not hurt my card, and I can get it out of my case so as not to harm my other components, heat is a non issue.

I run my A/C at 73 degrees in the summer months, 24x7, my computer room is always cold and a little more power doesnt' bother me for the cards. I do try to turn off my lights when not in use, but I am not so power conservative around the house to worry about an extra 300 watts of power 24x7.

Also, I leave my pc on 24x7, my son's and my wife's, including a HTPC. I assume those taht scream about the power and heat it takes/puts out, also shut their PC down after 15 minutes of non use, and leave the A/C in summer on 78 and heat in winter on 68, and always turn off home theater equipment when not using it etc...if they don't do all those things, they why complain about the power/heat they put out?

If you want the highest end you can get, power and cooling and price is a non issue, PERIOD.
 
Obviously AMD needs to work on Crossfire. If these are the results after a driver that was supposed to increase crossfire performance...

BTW, it would have been interesting to see how 2GB Radeon cards fare. I know they're not the norm, but again people who buy this kind of stuff would go for them if the extra memory makes a different, and I think it would in some cases.
 
I had been of the opinion that CrossFire scales better than SLI. This review seems to change that conception.
 
This is the most biased and flawed pro Nvidia article I have read for a while, thanks for the laugh.
 
The Asus P6T in the picture looks remarkably like a Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7....is this Asus' response to tougher competition?
 
Not a fanboy, but was on the ATI bandwagon for the single card review. Can't remember my password to login though...

Anyway, not for me anymore, but clearly Nvidia is the way to go if can/ want to fork over an extra $1500 for top performance (including a good PSU). 20% is my personal threshold to jump on improvements and that appears to be the bottom line here. Hat's off to Nvidia for top fuel crown.


Still, your talking 2 - 5% of total market. Nvidia has to come up with a better mainstream product or the dollars will shrink up soon.

ikenlob
 
Even though it makes sense that a person willing to spend this kind of money on video cards will likely have a 30" monitor I'd really love to see these benchies run at 1920 just for the sake of the numbers.
 
The performance gain is clearly there for the high-resolution extreme gamer who doesn't care about cost, power usage, heat and noise. That's great, no doubt about that. Question is, how much of a market is there for something like that? I'm having a hard time seeing the business sense in that. It must have cost a fortune to develop the fermi and it certainly isn't cheap to produce either, yet it's only really at the extreme that fermi shines. For the average gamer who is concerned about factors other than pure raw performance, ATI still seems like a better choice right now.
 
Nvidia Corporation probably isn't happy with the power consumption and heat of the
480 GTX, but their hardware and software engineers deserve credit for the sheer performance
of the card. Now they are in a comfortable position to consider their options. Maybe the big,
powerful style of GPU design has reached its limit. That's not something to be ashamed of.
 
SOMETHING IS FISHY ABOUT THIS ARTICLE. First of all, noone would use 2xHD5870, they would take HD5970, or even HD5970. You could show us the strongest GPU's of ATI and NVIDIA in a fight (GTX480x2 vs HD5970 x2), then it would be interesting.
 
Guest said:
SOMETHING IS FISHY ABOUT THIS ARTICLE. First of all, noone would use 2xHD5870, they would take HD5970, or even HD5970. You could show us the strongest GPU's of ATI and NVIDIA in a fight (GTX480x2 vs HD5970 x2), then it would be interesting.
Click to expand...

The challenge is between single-processor video cards. Woudn't be fair to compare Quad configuration vs Sli configuration.
 
Comparison of high-end video cards, I don't think so, as you should've tests the 480 -- or higher -- against the 5970; and no one ever seems willing to do so, but still states it's a battle of the high-end video cards!
 
What's the difference? You're not buying a GPU, you're buying a video card.
 
Cypress @ 850 MHz (vec5, TU, ROP)

vs

Fermi-480: GPC domain (+ TU inside) @ _1401 MHz_ and ROP @ 700 MHz

Think about it...
 
Wow...you don't often see a hands-down winner like this when comparing cards. Very interesting and a bit of a surprise.

So how many cases did you guys melt in doing this comparison? ;)
 
I hope all the PC guys who keeps knocking console graphics as super inferior to PC will get these cards for this setup. Otherwise....let only the extreme pc gamers knock us console users, they are the ones who truly are experiencing graphics as it ought to and frame rate as intended.

The next time any pc gamer other than the "extremist" is gonna rant about console graphics being inferior.... I say "STFU"!!! cause your setup is not the best either.

EXTREMIST.. FTW !!!! then consoles...lol
 
Guest said:
SOMETHING IS FISHY ABOUT THIS ARTICLE. First of all, noone would use 2xHD5870, they would take HD5970, or even HD5970. You could show us the strongest GPU's of ATI and NVIDIA in a fight (GTX480x2 vs HD5970 x2), then it would be interesting.
Click to expand...

How can you say noone(no one) would buy 2x HD 5870's?
I would buy 2x 5870's over a HD 5970.

Great review.
Thanx
 
Guest said:
This is the most biased and flawed pro Nvidia article I have read for a while, thanks for the laugh.
Click to expand...

This is the most biased and flawed pro ATI comment I have read for a while. Thanks for the laugh.
 
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