Legit Reviews

Ok, I just spent the last five years of my life working full-time and going to night school and am ready to dump my 7 year old Athlon XP 2500+ powerhouse of a PC. I want to get back to playing some good games as I haven’t really played anything worth playing in the past three years or so…

I’m in a bit of a quandary though. I have been out it for a while and really don’t know just what to get for a video card. I want to go with an ATI product, just not sure about which one to get at this point in time.

Ultimately I would love to get a 5870 Vapor-X by Sapphire (because of the better cooling/silence) but they are going for a real premium right now. I have the cash for one but would just hate to see them drop in price next month when Firmi comes out.

Was thinking about s 5850 but when I changed my mind about what motherboard to get, I ended up with an extra $140 spend, thus my want for a 5870.

I’ve been hearing/reading about running 5770/5750 in xfire and mixed xfire gets you results similar to, give or take a little, to a 5870. I’ve heard about stuttering in the past and was wondering if any of you know how it is with these cards.

I also saw this little nugget and was thinking about running an Nvidia 9800 or something for with what ever I get for physics but was wondering just how great Physx is and if it was worth it. I hear it’s not in a lot of games. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17525/1/

So far I, the parts I have or are on the way are;
Mushkin 6 GB DDR3 1600 7-9-7-24
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R
Core i7 920 D0
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB drive (will be getting an SSD this summer or sooner)
Samsung 2493 26” LDC (1920x1200 resolution)


So, W.W.L.R.D? (What Would Legit Reviewers Do)

yea 5750's are around a 5870 based on some of the reviews here, i'd imagine 5770's would beat it across the board!

i think if you go that route, i heard you wanna go with the batman coolers as the non-standard coolers get blocked a bit in Xfire and would run hot, guess it depends on the PCIe slot spacing though

i use a GT 240 for "physX" but i dont use physX lol, i just have it to Fold

FeRaL wrote:I also saw this little nugget and was thinking about running an Nvidia 9800 or something for with what ever I get for physics but was wondering just how great Physx is and if it was worth it. I hear it’s not in a lot of games. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17525/1/

NVIDIA blocked the ability to do that with their most recent drivers, so not sure how well half a year old drivers will end up doing a year from now.

As for the video card... if you have the money available and want to spend it then buy the best core you can get!

I bit the bullet and bought the Vapor-X. I'm VERY happy with it. It runs cool and quiet (especially quiet after the 4870 it replaced!), runs everything I've thrown at it at high reso without a hiccup.
Now that you can actually find them to buy, I think you'd be happy you spent at bit more for the quality.

Chuck

Physx is really quite good in the few mainstream games that support it (and really use it). I was all for getting a dedicated physx card full time till I looked up just how few games I currently play actually support it.

I don't think the 5870 will really drop in price to be honest (and if it does, it probably wont be much), as even if nvidia beats it in performance, the fermi cards are going to cost nvidia a lot to make, so they won't be able to get close enough to ATI's pricing for ATI to need to drop their price.

From what my mate (who is running 5870 crossfire) has told me, most of his games scale really well with crossfire (around 95% from the second card), but I'd personally still rather fall back on one fast single card if the game doesn't work well with crossfire, than have two mid range cards. As with how many games out there, there's still bound to be lots with issues with crossfire.

Apoptosis wrote:

FeRaL wrote:I also saw this little nugget and was thinking about running an Nvidia 9800 or something for with what ever I get for physics but was wondering just how great Physx is and if it was worth it. I hear it’s not in a lot of games. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17525/1/

NVIDIA blocked the ability to do that with their most recent drivers, so not sure how well half a year old drivers will end up doing a year from now.

As for the video card... if you have the money available and want to spend it then buy the best core you can get!

Is this a new block from Nvidia? Because some guys made a hack around the original one.

Dan

so I can run a 5870 as my primary card with a geforce card for PhysX with 196.34 drivers? Cool, if you can... Didn't know you could.

You can find the workaround patch here:

http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/1622 ... #post82837

Dan

so, what brand of cards are you guys using? Thinking about actually not getting the Vapor-X card and getting just a normal 5870 and saving $40. Actually will save even more as Tigerdirect/compusa/circuitcity has 10% BCB... Looking at XFX...

you really can't go wrong with any brand. It really comes down to pricing and warranty.

personally... the lowest priced one out there looks good to me.

Apoptosis wrote:you really can't go wrong with any brand. It really comes down to pricing and warranty.

personally... the lowest priced one out there looks good to me.

Yeah I ended buying an XFX 5870 from TigerDirect.com... Chose them because Cali has a 10% sales tax and I got 10% Bing cash back. All in all I ended up saving roughly $120 by getting an XFX from Tiger instead of getting a Sapphire VaporX from Newegg...