Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreamsickle  Not exactly sure how to read what it is you're saying here, if you could explain in another way that would be great. Also,
I've found several sites finding that HD 5870's in CrossFireX beat out HD 6870's in CrossFireX in not only DX11 but across the board. What I can't tell though is if the 5870's they use in the tests are the 1GB or 2GB versions, which have a rather significant price difference. I thought the entire enticement of the 6870's was that they were a close comparison to the 5870's at a lower price.
My major problem is that you can't ever find a review that compares all the cards you're considering.  |
When I use the " > " sign that means that we're stepping down in performance (i.e. 580 > 570 means that the 580 is more powerful than everything after the > sign). Then when I use an " = " sign, that means that all items perform about the same level (i.e. GTX 470 = HD 6870 = HD 5850 means that all 3 of these cards offer about the same performance).
If you notice, I've listed the 5870 as a more powerful card than the 6870 as it offers more raw power, but isn't as optimized for dx 11 features like tessellation as well as AA. I didn't price compare the 5870 or 5850s as I was never interested in those cards due to the weaker optimization. Also, (maybe new drivers changed this) the 5870 never used to scale, in crossfire, as well as nvidia cards and the 6800 cards when they came out. The 6870s, as I have specified, are supposed to be a match for the 5850s.
You will find that many reviews will compare similar games with similar systems and you can use that to link the different cards to each other (as best as possible).
As for your thoughts on PCIe lanes bandwith, you won't need more than 8x per card unless your doing (at a minimum) a GTX 480 or HD 6950. A GTX 480 @ 700Mhz will usually lose less than 5% fps by going from 16x to 8x, that's almost nothing. The only reason to buy for x16 lanes is for GPUs that come out at the end of 2011 or start of 2012. Even then, it's hard to say how important 8x vs 16x will be on anything other than the 'top end' cards.
Also the P/H67 chipset only supports x16 PCIe lanes for bandwith, so any mobo that offers 16x/16x slots is using technology such as a NF200 chip which 'mirrors' repeatable data to both lanes. What does this mean? It means that NF200 x16 lanes will never be as fast as real x16 lanes and in rare cases will not be any faster than 8x lanes IF there is no data that can be duplicated!
January 20, 2011, 08:57 AM
I'm going to wait until January 25th when the GTX 560 comes out and see how it performs in SLI since the price point will probably be around $200-250 each.
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