ATI graphics cards


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I am interested in going fully ATI/AMD on my system. I currently have the Nvidia 260, what would the ATI equivalent be to this card? Also what is the newest ATI card on the market now?

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newest are the 79xx series. stupid fast, stupid expensive but the best you can get. the 260 was the card to get almost 4 years ago and was one of the best at the time. right now for arouund 300 bucks you can get a 6950 for around 250ish now and those are really good cards.

also, why straight up ATI/AMD? i effin hate ATI's drivers and like an idiot I keep going back ATI cause their price/performance ratio is always better than nvidia's (i bought my 5850 for 125 bucks a year ago...)

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I'm not sure if I am going to do it, but I have heard that there is a performance increase when running the chipset and gpu the same company. Again, this is only what I have been told in the past, I do not 100% believe it.

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I have an AMD Bulldozer FX-8 8120 3.1GHz and a Sapphire 6770, cost me about ?200 all together and I can play most games at their highest settings, never see any programs lag and I've done a lot of video editing/encoding for my college course which runs a lot faster than it did with the same graphics card and an Intel Core i5 650 3.20GHz.

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I'm not sure if I am going to do it, but I have heard that there is a performance increase when running the chipset and gpu the same company. Again, this is only what I have been told in the past, I do not 100% believe it.

You've been mislead. At this point there is pretty much no point in even considering an AMD processor, Intel is just that far ahead. So even if you did get some extra performance by using an AMD GPU (you don't) - It wouldn't be enough to compensate for that.

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The AMD processors are so subpar that they're not worth getting. An i3 pretty much performs better in single or two-threaded applications (so this is games, basically) than some of the high end AMD's.

AMD have nothing on the market at the moment that will match an i5-2400 within ?100.

ATi cards on the other hand is a much different story.

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You've been mislead. At this point there is pretty much no point in even considering an AMD processor, Intel is just that far ahead. So even if you did get some extra performance by using an AMD GPU (you don't) - It wouldn't be enough to compensate for that.

For everything you just said its reason to go with AMD. Not that I know what the prices are like right this minute but do you really want to pay $1000 plus for the top of the line cpu? We need AMD.
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For everything you just said its reason to go with AMD. Not that I know what the prices are like right this minute but do you really want to pay $1000 plus for the top of the line cpu? We need AMD.

No, we need for Intel to have real competition. If AMD wants people's money they need to step it up and made good processors again. When they start actually competing with Intel again then I'll consider buying one of their processors. Until then, I refuse to waste my money and advise everyone else to do the same. It's not like we're just talking about a small difference, Intel is leaps and bounds ahead of AMD and we're not even just talking about Intel's flagship processors here. :/

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yeah, from what I heard the Bulldozer Series was a complete train wreck and can barely keep up with the i-series in most cases

back on topic though if you want to go with an AMD gpu go with the 6950 or 6970, you'll get a good quality gpu for a decent price. I have the 6970 and I'm able to run most games on high with it

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we had an AMD rep come to work explain the bulldozer/cpu situation with them. they don't care about the i7 series, they know they can't compete with it. they are just gunning for the mid range and low range markets. the "i7" market they have no real equivalent to and won't. AMD is now focusing everything towards their APU solution and trying to sell that to the mid-range, low end and enterprise markets because they are actually pretty good for what AMD is aiming them to do.

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You can go cheaper and get a 6850 (or 6850OC, like I have from Gigabyte) that has a lot of easy overclocking potential, can also run most games at high in full HD.

we had an AMD rep come to work explain the bulldozer/cpu situation with them. they don't care about the i7 series, they know they can't compete with it. they are just gunning for the mid range and low range markets. the "i7" market they have no real equivalent to and won't. AMD is now focusing everything towards their APU solution and trying to sell that to the mid-range, low end and enterprise markets because they are actually pretty good for what AMD is aiming them to do.

Except that they can't compete with the i3 series, let alone i5.

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You can't really go wrong with a 6950.

And yeah, it's not just the i7's, AMD isn't competing with the i5s either. Not sure about the i3 series but I'll take Wakers word for it.

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Except that they can't compete with the i3 series, let alone i5.

that's not true. the a6 and a8's are pretty good, benchmark similar to the i3 and i5 we have here at work already (hp gave us a bunch of AMD demo units and we tested/benchmarked them against our dell's that we use). one of our benchmarks was running call go duty mw3 and the a6 did better than the i3 laptop we had (similar specced but 300-400 cheaper) and the a8 did better than the i5 we have (and 500-600 cheaper). To me it seems that AMD is finally figuring out their boundaries and working with them.

the problem is that people use raw benchmarks on anandtech or tom's hardware or whatever as straight reference points and not actually real world usage. actual real world usage, AMD is fine.

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OK, thanks for the responses, I do not wish this thread to take on the whole Intel/AMD debate, I asked a question, and most of you have given me good feedback. Now if I understand what is being said is that a decent ATI card would be the 6950 series, I checked newegg and they do not have any, and tigerdirect has one. I am not going to go and buy a new video card at this time, I was asking a question about what I had been told (or misinformed) about the whole thing, the person who is telling me all this stuff is someone whom I have quit listening to, because everything he has said is nothing but BS.

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yes stop listening to this person.

also, if youre going to upgrade, spend the extra money and get the newest generation 7XXX series. they have many models out now spanning many price points.

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that's not true. the a6 and a8's are pretty good, benchmark similar to the i3 and i5 we have here at work already (hp gave us a bunch of AMD demo units and we tested/benchmarked them against our dell's that we use). one of our benchmarks was running call go duty mw3 and the a6 did better than the i3 laptop we had (similar specced but 300-400 cheaper) and the a8 did better than the i5 we have (and 500-600 cheaper). To me it seems that AMD is finally figuring out their boundaries and working with them.

the problem is that people use raw benchmarks on anandtech or tom's hardware or whatever as straight reference points and not actually real world usage. actual real world usage, AMD is fine.

I should have been a bit more specific I think - they struggle against the i3's for single or dual threaded work, so gaming for instance - the i3's are much better value for money than the new AMDs.

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I should have been a bit more specific I think - they struggle against the i3's for single or dual threaded work, so gaming for instance - the i3's are much better value for money than the new AMDs.

The new FX-6200 looks like it might beat intel in price/performance, but I'm still waiting for more benchmarks, so far all I can find is a Passmark benchmark. It benchmarks slightly slower than the i5-2500k, but costs about $50 less.

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Their APU stuff is great - i've got an A8 system for the missus and it's a really nice solution - quad core, good graphics and just one cpu fan. Perfect. Don't rule AMD out completely, remember that the high end market is low volume. Problem is, with the halo effect of the i7 intel are considered the only solution by most - I just wanted a low-ish power solution that was very quiet for a PC that's on most of the time - in that AMD delivered.

For reference i've got an i7 main rig too.

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