7770 vs. 650ti

[opio]

So I've been on newegg comparing these two cards forever. I am on a bit of a budget but I want to know which one is better and if either would bottleneck my cpu, keep in mind that if I went with the 650ti it would be an evga and if I went with the 7770 ghz edition it would be a sapphire

idk what the hell motherboard I have because I hi jacked it from my dad to upgrade and whatnot, all I know is that the bios is locked and I can't overclock my cpu, which has been frustrating to deal with. Also keep in mind that when I have the money I plan on buying a new rig, the card I will be buying now I will only be using until sometime next year.

current system specs

550 PSU
core 2 quad q6600 (running at 2.4ghz
evga 9800gt (1gb edition)
8gb of g.skill ddr2 ram running at 1066mhz

lately I've been leaning towards the 7770 because if seem like a better bang for the buck, the only problem is is that I won't be able to use evga precision, but that's not too much of an issue i'm sure sapphire has a similar program

 

[Sakkura]

The GTX 650 Ti is faster. It does have limited memory bandwidth, so the 7770 catches up under certain circumstances (with more AA applied, for example).

 

[opio]

well I'm pretty much just going to be using the card for SC2, it just seems like that for what you get the 650ti is a little too much more than the 7770 not to mention the 7770 has 28nm architecture. Plus the bottlenecking issue I'm worried about, and as far as quality I've heard that sapphire is like the evga of nvidia cards.

 

[aneeque]

hd 7770 go for it l.. now with catalyst 13.4 drivers it performs even better than hd 6850 so.... i would go for it .... however 650ti is litt bit faster which is not very noticeable... if hd 7770 is not able to run a game ... then 650ti also would not be able to run it as well.... and it is also expensive .... if u have budget then go for hd 7850 ....

 

[opio]

do you know if sapphire has a program similar to precision x? And bottlenecking, will it be a problem with the cpu I have?

 

[Sakkura]

CPU-heavy games will bottleneck to some extent, but that's going to be difficult to avoid with an old CPU.

 

[opio]

true, but I mean it does have four cores at least, or does that matter? Idk I'm good with computers, know how to build one and whatnot but there are a lot of things that I'd rather ask you guys just to make sure

anybody else got an opinion?

radeon 7770 ghz edition or geforce 650ti

I also have a side question, I have been overclocking my 9800 with precision x but I've learned it needs to be done slowly. As I go higher should I tweak the voltage? The gpu clock is at 721mhz and the memory clock is at 1021mhz. I tried to go to 800 and 1100 but I notice lines and stuff, is this because the the card can't handle it or it isn't getting enough power? Cause I know it isn't cause it's too hot I'm in my basement and it stay pretty cold plus I have a bunch of fans blowing air in and exhausting out, the gpu rarely goes above 70 degrees C unless there's a lot of stuff going on in SC2 at which case it MAYBE goes to like 72 degrees C

Theoretically shouldn't I be able to OC it to the max precision will let me as long as it doesn't get too hot?

 

[Sakkura]

Yeah it does help that the CPU has four cores. Depending on how well each game is able to use the extra cores.

As for overclocking, you should do that in small steps and use a stress test (such as furmark) to check stability. If you see graphical artifacts or other problems, you may need to increase the voltage. Don't go too high though; high voltages and high temperatures are the two things that can hurt the GPU.

 

[opio]

well I'd love to raise the voltage but precision x won't let me