Hd 5970 or HD 6950 2gb

biggoomer

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I'm stuck in a bit of a stalemate here. I've been meaning to upgrade my 460's for awhile, but I've just recently started to seriously consider my options. I recently started using softth for triple monitor gaming and so far it's worked great. I'm using a 21.5" 1920x1080 monitor with two 17" 1280x1024 monitors flanking it.

My 460's, however, don't work very well with softth because sli disables the second cards ports. Because of this, the only way I am only able to use soffth is with one of my 460's which, with only 768mb of memory, is not sufficient enough to render the rather high resolution that I need it to. My motherboard has only two PCI-E slots.

Because of those things I have opted for a single card setup. At the moment I could get the 2gb 6950 new for around $250. While searching around ebay I found that the 2gb 5970's are going for around $250 used. Power consumption might be a problem aswell because my PSU is only 650w. For softth I will need to use another card to render the third monitor. I have an old fanless hd 4350 laying around so I was thinking about using that.

My current specs:

I5 750 @ 3.8ghz
MSI P55-Gd65
8gb DDR3 ram
768mb GTX 460 x2
XFX 650w PSU
Silverstone Raven RV02
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Any help is greatly appreciated,
Biggoomer
 
Solution
a single HD 6950 can handle up to 4 monitors, 3 monitors with nvidia called 3d surround or something like that and supported by 2 GPUs in SLI mode, you can google it for further info

and 3 monitors via GTX 460 is also possible, you connect 2 monitors via the DVI in the primary card, and the third monitor in the secondary GTX 460 DVI port, and you should be fine....

sorry, i didn't notice the monitors thing... i just was curious about the 5970 ...LOL
i'm surprised to hear that HD 5970 is being sold out "used" by $250, i shopped ebay and all the 5970s were sold from $400 to $500...
anyway the HD 5970 is not comparable with HD 6950 the HD 5970 is doing as fine as a GTX 580..
and you'll need a greater power supply than 650W... a good quality branded 750W will run it and the whole system fine without any lag.

are you sure you're talking about the HD 5970 ? the dual GPU ?
 

biggoomer

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Yessir. I suppose that $250 was a bit of a stretch. It looks like I might be able to snatch one up for more around $300-330. Any suggestions on power supplies? I was hoping to get one for under $120...

Thanks for the help
 
thermaltake toughpower XT 775W, it's more than great and the best i recommend @ $119
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153127&Tpk=toughpower%20775
but it's out of stock, see if you can afford it .
Also the Antec HCG 750W @ $100, but you would sacrifice the cable management
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371049&Tpk=HCG%20750w

you would spend more $20 and get one of those
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139010&Tpk=Corsair%20HX%20750
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817116011&Tpk=NZXT%20750w
 

biggoomer

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Thanks for the replies!

Unfortunately I've more or less set my budget to $300 for this entire upgrade. That doesn't really include the 460's (I figure I could probably get between $140-180 for the pair), but I obviously won't be selling them until I upgrade. You seem to be a pretty knowledgeable fellow so what do you think would be the best thing to do with my budget? I figure the best thing to do would get the best card I can (under/around $300) that will run fine on my current 650w PSU. With all the new games coming out I figured now was the time to upgrade...
 
you can get another 460 and SLI this would help you beat all the upcoming games until you upgrade the whole thing when the AMD 7K series come out, the new XDR2 rambus memory will be twice faster than GDDR5 besides 28nm process = less heat, less power consumption and the 1 GHz frequency...

or just stick with the single GTX 460 it's not bad at all you still can play at high settings
 

biggoomer

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I actually have two 460's right now. I wanted to move to a powerful single card resolution because they don't support the triple monitor software that I'm using. There isn't really any other way for me to do triple monitors without softth, unfortunately.

Thanks for the help.
 
a single HD 6950 can handle up to 4 monitors, 3 monitors with nvidia called 3d surround or something like that and supported by 2 GPUs in SLI mode, you can google it for further info

and 3 monitors via GTX 460 is also possible, you connect 2 monitors via the DVI in the primary card, and the third monitor in the secondary GTX 460 DVI port, and you should be fine....

sorry, i didn't notice the monitors thing... i just was curious about the 5970 ...LOL
 
Solution

biggoomer

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I think I'll go with the 6950. In case you were wondering the problem I was having had to do with not having enough slots to run 3 cards which I would need with soffth.

Thanks for the help!