Radeon HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi)

[Charlie LaVoy]

Hey everyone. I'm buying a new graphics card for my machine, and the motherboard limits me to PCI Express 2.0 x16. Of all the cards that fit that compatibility, I've narrowed it down to these two that seem to have about the same specs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127608
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202035

The main difference being the GPU. One has the Radeon HD 6970, on has the GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi). Any ideas on which is a better GPU?

The only other difference I could see is that one has a bunch of CUDA cores. I'm about to research that some more, but any thoughts here would be helpful.

Thanks guys!

 

[dangrousperson]

Hey everyone. I'm buying a new graphics card for my machine, and the motherboard limits me to PCI Express 2.0 x16. Of all the cards that fit that compatibility, I've narrowed it down to these two that seem to have about the same specs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127608
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202035

The main difference being the GPU. One has the Radeon HD 6970, on has the GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi). Any ideas on which is a better GPU?

The only other difference I could see is that one has a bunch of CUDA cores. I'm about to research that some more, but any thoughts here would be helpful.

Thanks guys!

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-6970-vs-GeForce-GTX-560-Ti

Between the two card: Go with the 6970.

But currently PCIe 2.0 will NOT bottleneck ANY Card available. This will most likely change in the future, but as of right now. ANY CARD WILL WORK.

You are not limited to only PCIe 2.0 cards.

 

[renz496]

6970 will be faster. the card perform as good as GTX570. CUDA cores is what we used to know as stream processor (SP). but you can't compare stream processor numbers and clock directly between geforce and radeon since both have different architecture

 

[Charlie LaVoy]

Ok, so Re: dangerousperson -

Does this mean I could use any PCI Express card as long is it is "x16", or is that number also irrelevant to compatibility?

 

[dangrousperson]

Ok, so Re: dangerousperson -

Does this mean I could use any PCI Express card as long is it is "x16", or is that number also irrelevant to compatibility?

That number is also irrelevant for compatibility.

All PCIe slots and cards are forwards and backwards compatible. Generally speaking, is 3.0 twice as fast as 2.0. means x16 2.0 = x8 3.0.
Even a PCIe 2 x8 slot will not bottleneck most cards in most games. PCIe x16 does not cause a bottleneck in any single GPU card or game. Only in crossfire/SLI it "might" cause a very slight bottleneck of about 5%.