8800GT died, need a new video card

[Karnak]

On the afternoon of Thursday, April 29th my eVGA 8800GT suffered a "stroke" and afterward would only produce low resolution, 2D images with a lot of corruption.  After trying without success to improve the situation I pulled the plug Friday evening.  It was three years old.  I am now running on its 7800GT predecessor which I still had in my filing cabinet.  Needless to say, there has been a performance hit.

I am not terribly keen on buying a video card that will have to be replaced in short order.  Due to that I am looking at either an eVGA GeForce GTX 470 for about $360 or a BFG GeForce GTX 275 for about $250.  Money is not a non-issue, but can be dealt with, probably by giving up some days off to work overtime.  The 470 is a Direct X 11 part whereas the 275 is a Direct X 10 part, so the 470 is a bit faster and potentially more useful down the road.  I was planning on starting an upgrade project soon, but it seems I am being forced into it a bit earlier than I had planned on.  I was going to start with my video card to see if that would allow me to push the motherboard/CPU/memory upgrades off for awhile.

I am, however, open to other people's opinions as to which way to look and what their experiences might have been with these cards.  I do recognize that the 470 and 480 were only released in April.

[Spikes]

Don't get the fermi's unless you need a backup space heater.

Look at the 5770 and 5870.

[Karnak]

Why ATI?  After my experiences with them I have avoided them like the plague.

[Spikes]

Because the HD5770 is the best bang for the buck card on the market currently. A single one runs AH great (I ran a single for ~4 months before buying my second).

What experiences have you had?

[Mar]

Karnak, just in case you haven't already, I'd advise you to read through this thread for info on the 470/480.

[Krusty]

Karnak, ATI is leading the pack these days. They've had major hits on their hands with 4800 and 5800 series compared to nVidia's latest flops. At least for another year until nVidia overcomes the mistakes it made recently, ATI will be the way to go.

[Karnak]

Spikes,

Horrible incompatibility, no driver support and poor performance are the things I associate with the ATI label.

Did they do better on Crossfire than nVidia did on SLI?  Every SLI setup I have seen running has had rendering issues where it seemed the cards weren't 100% in sync.

As to the HD5770, is that a budget part?  I see it is only $150, but generally when you do that you are basically throwing away the $150 as you shortly need to replace it with their actual "real" card, in my experience.

[Ack-Ack]

Spikes,

Horrible incompatibility, no driver support and poor performance are the things I associate with the ATI label.

Did they do better on Crossfire than nVidia did on SLI?  Every SLI setup I have seen running has had rendering issues where it seemed the cards weren't 100% in sync.

As to the HD5770, is that a budget part?  I see it is only $150, but generally when you do that you are basically throwing away the $150 as you shortly need to replace it with their actual "real" card, in my experience.

The problems with ATI drivers is largely a thing in the past and are far more stable than the recent Nvidia drivers.  With the 5xxx series, ATI is ahead of Nvidia in both quality of the card and software.


ack-ack

[Karnak]

Looking at the 5770 benchmarks on Firing Squad it seems like a pretty poor performer by current standards.  What about the 5850?  Spikes didn't mention that one, is there a problem with it?

[Spikes]

As to the HD5770, is that a budget part?  I see it is only $150, but generally when you do that you are basically throwing away the $150 as you shortly need to replace it with their actual "real" card, in my experience.

IIRC currently Crossfire is a step up frmo SLI.

I can't tell you from experience that the HD5770s are long lasting...but I've had mine since October with zero issues...bought my second one a month or two ago.

I mentioned not the 5850 but the 5870...

Anything up from the 4870s, 4890s (two 4890s actually outperform two 5770s). Two 5770s outperform a 5870. The 5850 is just like the 5750...they are both great cards, but each has a slightly different clock and stream processor count, etc than it's newer brother.

If you want later tonight I can disable my second card and try a single in Crysis Warhead.

[Chalenge]

Word is that the opinions about heat and power consumption are inflated opinions. I have been looking for the new cards and cant find one so that might curb your appetite. If you look hard you will see that the GTX 480s in SLI are a 100% performance gain over a single card (crossfire is not) which is probably why they are getting bought up as quickly as they are made available. These cards are overkill for AH. The reviewers I trust have said that the card runs a little hotter than the 8800 you had and they will consume more power under a load. Somehow I dont think AH is going to be much of a load compared to the DX11 over-tesellation tests these guys ran to pump the load up but you want to make sure your PSU is up to it.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

"which is probably why they are getting bought up as quickly as they are made available." LOL been reading up on fanboy sites eh?

Nivida stock is plummeting down with 20% yield rates on fermi wafers. This means Nvidia can not supply more than a fraction of the cards because most of them come straight out of the product line faulty! They would want to pump out multiple times more cards and even then they end up costing high figures. I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of the 20% would also fail prematurely.

Nvidia has always been over hyped and over priced IMO.

[Tigger29]

3 years ago (heck even 12 months ago) I would have not have even CONSIDERED an ATI card, due to bad experiences with ATI in the past (over 10 years ago but still).  Since then I have been using Nvidia with no problems... BUT the more I hear about ATI's newest generation of cards (57XX/58XX) the more I'm considering going that route when I DO upgrade.  Apparently they are very good performers, use less power than you'd expect, and compatibility issues are as much of a non-issue now as the Nvidia cards.

For the record I currently run a Nvidia 9800GTX2+.

I've heard of too many issues with the newest generation of Nvidia (Fermi) cards for me to even justify even close to that kind of money for one (although the performance tests seem much better than expected), but then again I'm not the type of person who would spend that kind of money on a video card period.. regardless of how well it were to perform...

I would crossfire two $150 cards LONG BEFORE I spent $450-500+ one a single one...

[BoilerDown]

I'm not a big fan of buying two cards and running crossfire or SLI... what you save in money to get the performance of a higher end card you give back in the cost of electricity, for both the video cards and for air conditioning for the computer room. 

I am however a fan of going with whichever card best meets the price/performance that I'm looking for, regardless of the brand of GPU.  Nvidia and ATI have swapped places as the "leader" and "best value" many times since I bought my first 3d graphics card, and I'm sure they'll do it again many times in the future.  Its not a good idea to be overly brand-loyal when it comes to video cards.

So all that said, if I were you, I'd figure out what the best single video card is for the performance you want, and buy that.  It is going to be an ATI GPU, because they are the leader at the moment in both performance and value at pretty much every pricepoint.

[Chalenge]

...Nvidia has always been over hyped and over priced IMO.

Yes and I noticed the price of Ati cards on Amazon are going through the roof.

http://www.amazon.com/PowerColor-Radeon-HD5970-GDDDR5-Displayport/dp/B002XT7LR6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1272750169&sr=8-2