I am between 2 GPU cards, please help pick the right one (the best for

[Thor.]

I look at reviews and benchmarks versus reviews and personal opinions of users before i buy a video card, if its amd or Nvidia it doesn't matter as long it suits my needs. this time around its going to be nvidia because they run cool, and thats what i was looking fro to begin with and power and performance fro a single gpu setup. Now when it comes to cpu's i am a amd fanboy :teehee:

[Werne]

I'm actually different, I go for budget cards since I care little about how good the game looks, the only requirement is for the games I play to run at 30FPS (I limit them to 30 anyway). On the CPU side, I go with multi-threading since I use my CPU mostly to compile software (like compiling mainline Linux kernel, building distribution-specific packages, etc.) and do a ton on stuff at once.

 

AMD won this time due to better CPU multi-threading, overclocking capability (my FX 8320 overclocks like crazy, I just need a better cooler) and memory-intensive task processing (like software compiling), but mostly it was the fact that FX 8320 was 1/2 the price of i5-3570K which I bought on discount and which got fried by the mobo (I got a refund instead of new CPU and price went up). In the graphics department, Radeon 7770 was about 20$ cheaper than GTX 650 Ti, otherwise I would've gone with Nvidia.

 

Power consumption? Pfff... 50W more CPU draw means little, the light bulbs currently hanging above my head use more power than that.

[FMod]

It also burned me 2 psu's. 1 mobo and 1 cpu... Because I used a 850watt psu, but the card was faulty, it sucked more power than it should be. So the psu couldn't give that power to the whole system and stop working, or the cpu cooler stop working! That's how I lost 1 cpu q6600...

I'm sorry to say, but this doesn't make any sense. For someone who knows how it works, this is basically comical.

 

 

* An overloaded PSU does not selectively turn off the CPU cooler. It can not do that. It can't selectively switch off a device. (1)

* Not to mention that your CPU cooler is normally powered from your motherboard, not the PSU directly. (1)

 

* If it lost voltage in response to overload, everything else in your PC would have stopped working long before the cooler's fan does. Normal 12V voltage is 12V and below 10V stuff goes black. CPU coolers work fine at 7V, it's how many people run them full time. Even a fan that doesn't start at 7V (all I've seen do), once started it will even keep spinning at 5V. (2)

 

* If one card was drawing so much power that it would overload a real 850W PSU, it would have to dissipate that power. That power would be dissipated as lots of smoke and a burnt out card. (3)

 

* Q6600 is a Core 2 era CPU, which will not burn out if overheated. Core 2 CPU automatically throttle and then shutdown if things get hot. You can literally rip the whole cooler off and they just shut down. If you simply stop the fan, the CPU won't even have to shut down, it will only throttle down. (4)

 

 

 

2900XT dates all the way back to 2007. High quality PSU were rare back then and only a few high quality ATX (non server) PSU could pull 850W without deficiencies.

Considering that you didn't name the brand of your PSU, it's likely to have been the cause of your troubles.

 

That said, even a bad PSU wouldn't stop a cooler, that was dust accumulating inside of the fan's motor and jamming it so it wouldn't restart. Your motherboard could have had a faulty VRM, responsible for killing the CPU, but a bad PSU spiking higher voltages than allowed can do that too.

 

None of your troubles were something expansion cards even can do, and none of them (except for driver bugs) are something that has been noticed with 2900XT by the many thousands of its other users.

[ermacos]

The gpu (2900xt) sucked more power than intended, I didnt knew that in the begining and after a small period of time, the psu's start behaving funny, the voltage of the psu dropped, because it was under stress all the time, as a result to change 2 psus (850watt both) and the last time, the cpu fan stop working!!!! So it burned my cpu also. The cpu fan worked fine without the graphics card!!!!

 

After I lost some hardware , I made a research, to find out WHY this is happening... and it proved to be the graphics card.

 

The graphics card worked fine, but when I loaded games, after some time, the screen was turning blank without signal!! And it turned to be power problem. I send the card in, to check the voltage, and it proved to be a hungry gpu! It needed more than 850w!!!

 

strange but real.

 

i was changing psus like biscuits, the last psu it destroyed was a corsair tx850w.... but thank god, corsair gave me a brand new one. After I changed the graphics card, everything was fine.

 

It took me about 1.2 years to find out whats wrong, because I thought its all about faulty psu's...

 

the victims of my 2900xt : intel q6600, 2 x corsair 850w, 1x gigabyte motherboard and me.

Edited November 6, 2013 by ermacos

[Werne]

The gpu (2900xt) sucked more power than intended, I didnt knew that in the begining and after a small period of time, the psu start behaving funny, the voltage of the psu dropped, because it was under stress all the time, as a result to change 2 psus (850watt both) and the last time, the cpu fan sto working!!!!

A graphics card can't stop the CPU fan, as FMod already pointed out. The only way for the CPU fan to actually stop is to physically stop it (due to a fan malfunction or by sticking a finger in it), to stop it with software (PWM), or if the fan controller dies (defective mobo). And even if the fan stops, the CPU will first throttle (drop voltage and frequency in order to cool itself down, aka enter the lowest power state) and then shut down completely if that doesn't work, it will not burn out due to a fan malfunction, it's a safety feature built into the Core 2 era CPUs, I had a C2D which I overclocked on a stock cooler, so I was aware of that.

 

A malfunctioning graphics card can draw more power, but not enough to bog down an 850W PSU, which implies that your PSU likely couldn't give 850W, I still have a cheap 450W piece of crap PSU around that can only give some 250W and it will be fried if I draw more than that. Combine a crappy PSU with power hungry components that drive it to the limit and you have destabilized rails that can make a clusterf*** out of a PC, as you learned the hard way.

[ermacos]

my story is real, nothing to lie about... It destroyed 2 corsairs 850w and the service also told me, that it sucked allot of power. At the same time if we google 2900xt, its one of the worst gpus in the history of mankind... It was strong, but it had lots of problems and I didnt knew that.

 

thats the gpu I had.. Anyway, this is an old story.... http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/9309-asus-vs-asus-geforce-8800-ultra-vs-radeon-hd-2900-xt/?page=2

 

ps: for a reason the forum in times it gets extremely slow, with lots of errors loading, I dont know why...

Edited November 6, 2013 by ermacos

[Thor.]

The gtx780ti is a titan kller and runs circles around the r290x.

 

http://videocardz.com/47719/nvidia-launches-geforce-gtx-780-ti

I can't wait for custom coolers like gigabyte and the rest to come out, i may have to wait until the new year to get me one, I'm patient.

Edited November 7, 2013 by Thor.

[Werne]

...and runs circles around the r290x...

For 150$ more, it better. Although, I don't see no benchmarks (by that I mean in-game benchmarks, screw synthetic ones, those are just pissing contests), so I'd still wait to see those first if I were you. Knowing Nvidia, that 150$ may not deliver 150$ worth of performance and instead you could be paying for a few % performance increase and a bragging premium.

[Miguelr23]

 

...and runs circles around the r290x...

For 150$ more, it better. Although, I don't see no benchmarks (by that I mean in-game benchmarks, screw synthetic ones, those are just pissing contests), so I'd still wait to see those first if I were you. Knowing Nvidia, that 150$ may not deliver 150$ worth of performance and instead you could be paying for a few % performance increase and a bragging premium.

 

well from the benchmarks i saw the 780 ti its not that much better than a 290x but overclocked is another story look

still 3gb of vram for such card is going to be a bottleneck

Edited November 7, 2013 by Miguelr23

[Werne]

Okay, so the card performs about 10-15% better overall than R9 290X. However, if you look at the benchmarks, it shows that for both R9 290X and 780 Ti, the averages for most games at 1080p are above 60FPS. So when VSync comes into play, you basically have 60FPS vs 60FPS with a 150$ premium (or 250$ if we're talking about R9 290 which is damn close to 290X).

Overclocking... questionable. If you've seen the 290 series benchmarks, you may recall that the 290 series still use the reference cooler, the temperatures are high and that doesn't allow fiddling with voltages without an aftermarket cooler or liquid cooling. GTX 780 Ti has a better cooler for now, which allows you to raise the voltage. Once 290 series get a decent cooler, like the XFX Double Dissipation, they may overclock like crazy too. But that remains to be seen.

All in all, I say if you got money to burn, go for 780 Ti, it's faster, apparently it overclocks like crazy too, and it has all of that extra crap they mentioned there which I see no use for what so ever (someone might find it useful though, I don't). But if not, R9 290 will do nearly as good of a job as 780 Ti for 1/3 the price. Average uncapped framerate means little when you have VSync since you'll never get that high and the "performance battle" becomes 60FPS vs 60FPS (yes, I know, I'm repeating myself).

 

 

 

Personal opinion? It's an ugly card. I'm very much interested in aesthetics when it comes to graphics cards and red on black looks better than green on gray to me. The colors and the entire contours of the red stripes on the R9 290 look powerful (although that's still crap), the colors and their shapes on 780 Ti are too basic and simple so it just looks bland. The cooler shape and general idea is pretty much the same but the color scheme is god awful. I wish Nvidia and AMD would look back in time and see how the old cards looked like, there were guns and fire and pictures and lots of colors and great-looking feature ads, they looked awesome! So what the hell is this then, where did the awesome go?!?!