Picking a GPU on par with the rest of my system?

[Jedi2016]

Here's my current specs:

Intel i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz (stock speed, but capable of OC)
Intel Z68 LGA1155 mobo
16GB DDR3
EVGA GTX-465 1GB
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

This system was sort of pieced together over time.. my old GPU burned out a couple years ago, and I bought the 465, then I upgraded the rest of the system last year, so now the 465 is the weak point. I can still play most everything at max settings, just not always with high frame rates (I was playing Just Cause 2 for the first time tonight, and, while playable, I was surprised to see my fps was only in the twenties (well hidden by the motion blur), that's what triggered this line of thought).

My original idea was to wait another year or so, until the next generation of console hardware hit the market, and we could discover what the benchmark will be for the next six years, and then upgrade my system around that. But I might end up upgrading my whole system by the time those consoles launch, so I might as well up the GPU now, and bring it up to snuff with the rest of the system.

What GPU would you guys expect would be "on par" with my current CPU? Should I go balls-out with a 680+, or something middle of the road like a 570 or 580?

 

[Brad Grenz]

That CPU is still good enough it won't really be holding you back, so spend as much as you're comfortable on a nice GPU. At least a 660 or 7850, but Black Friday deals should make the higher end more affordable this week.

 

[Arwin]

Yeah, you can take any GPU you like. Nothing in your system holding you back currently. Or learn to live with not always being able to max settings for all games. I can't either, have a humble 550Ti which seems on par with your card except with far lower power use and not really in a hurry to upgrade yet, will have al ook next year.

 

[almighty]

7950 is the best bang per buck GPU on the planet by a long way....

Stock it beats a GTX 670 with the 12.11 drivers and is faster then a stock GTX 680 with a slight overclock and completely butt rapes everything when overclocked to the max.

 

[Sulik]

I have the same config (2600K + GTX 460) -> I'd say a reasonable upgrade would be the GTX 660.

 

[Jedi2016]

Thanks guys.

Now I'm thinking there may just be something wrong on my end.. I'm running through some of my benchmarks, and the results are coming out a lot lower than they did the last time I ran them. I've gotten a new monitor now that's running at 1080p, higher than my old one at 1680x1050, but that's not enough to explain the differences I'm seeing.. even if I force them to lower resolutions than my old monitor, the numbers are still coming out a lot lower.

Now I enter troubleshooting mode.

That was odd.. apparently the card just got stuck on something, and decided it didn't want to do it's job anymore. Step 1: Turn it off and back on again, did the trick. Performance is back up to par, and the benchmarks are right where they should be. Just Cause 2 is about where it was before, though.. lol.

 

[Svensk Viking]

Thanks guys.

That was odd.. apparently the card just got stuck on something, and decided it didn't want to do it's job anymore. Step 1: Turn it off and back on again, did the trick. Performance is back up to par, and the benchmarks are right where they should be. Just Cause 2 is about where it was before, though.. lol.

That has happened to me alot when I've been alt-tabbing out of games to watch some youtube clips and "surf the web"

 

[Blazkowicz]

that 2600K can last for most of the decade if you really wanted, even Haswell would probably not be a very worthwile upgrade except e.g. some content creation and encoding stuff, you can wait for the socket that's out after Haswell's 1150 socket.

Unless it horrifies you, an upgrade to windows 8 pro is an option, you get a fresh install then put fresh drivers on it. It seems the updates to driver model and graphics rendering would reduce the problems with alt-tabbing, or running windowed stuff, or have multiple accelerated things running (including 2D accelerated browser, google earth, the desktop etc.).
Of course if you can sell this GTX 465 before everyone finds it too hot to run, why not change it.

 

[Billy Idol]

I have a brand new 670 and I love it!

 

[Jedi2016]

I'm leaning toward the 680, get a little extra oomph out of it.

And I always have the option of tapping into the OC on the chip. My motherboard is made for it, after all, it's ridiculously easy to set up. I just go into BIOS and say "Run at 4.0GHz" and it handles all the little adjustments automatically to make that happen.

Blazkowicz, the idea of Win8 does horrify me right now, actually. First, I find it completely unnecessary.. there's nothing I can't do with Win7, there's no reason to upgrade the OS. Second, I have some programs that don't yet run in Win8 that I'm aware of. New versions are on the horizon that may have compatibility, but then I'm back to the point of "why?" since it runs perfectly fine as it is right now. The rumors that DX11.1 will be Win8 exclusive actually pisses me off a bit.

I am going to update drivers anyway, though, I'm a few versions behind. And I do have a friend that wants to buy my 465, although the card itself is somewhat overkill for him.. I think it will be more powerful than the rest of his system combined.

The odd thing about what the card was doing (and part of what was telling me "something's wrong") is that it wasn't heating up. I could run Stone Giant, for example, at around 8fps (*shudder*), and the card stayed stone cold at around 40C, which is what it's at right now (sitting idle). After rebooting, SG runs at the expected 45fps or so, and the card quickly ramps up to around 65C or so (which is where it usually sits when I'm gaming).

I did tweak the settings on JC2 a bit, to the "recommended" settings on NVidia's site, and now I'm getting around 45fps. I had to do that manually, the game didn't seem to recognize what it needed. Whenever I tell it to auto-detect, it sets everything to maximum, and I was only getting around 25fps. Still playable (the motion blur helps hide it surprisingly well), but not nearly as smooth as it is now.

 

[almighty]

680 is mega overpriced and gets bashed by the cheaper 7970.

The only reason for going with the current Nvidia cards over AMD ones is if you're a fan boy

 

[Arwin]

Unless you really like 3D Vision perhaps?



As for Windows 8, I wouldn't really upgrade to that yet either. But I've just added an SSD to my system, and installed Windows 8 to dual boot, using that drive.



I don't know if I can fool 3D Vision to work with my screen as easily on Win 8 as I did on Win 7, nor do I know whether stuff like Rocksmith hardware works, or the Playstation Mobile development environment, etc. (though I think the 1.0 version mentioned support), and from my line of work (technical consultant and programmer) it's nicer to be able to test multiple platforms anyway.



Posting this from some Tapatalk compatible Win 8 app, by the way, just for the heck of it.

Sent from my Windows 8 device using Board Express

 

[Jedi2016]

I do use 3D Vision quite a lot, actually. I've even made some posts over the last few months about 3D PC gaming. There are other reasons for going NVidia, but I'm not turning this into a discussion over which is "better", so that's the end of it.

 

[almighty]

3D support is the same on both.... the advantage of better drivers has not been the case now for a few years.

The AMD cards are cheaper, the AMD cards are faster and the AMD cards scale better....... As I said, you would have to be an Nvibot to choose Nvidia over AMD.

 

[Jedi2016]

What part of "that's the end of it" did you not understand?

 

[almighty]

What part of "that's the end of it" did you not understand?

The end of it is you're a bit of a fan boy, there's absolutely no reason at all to buy a slowly, more expensive 680 unless you're married to Nvidia.

Any enthusiast worth his salt goes with the best and you your self in this thread asked what GPU is on par with your CPU and that's a 7970.

If you don't like the answers then don't ask the questions.

 

[Arwin]

Almighty, please ...

 

[Billy Idol]

680 is mega overpriced and gets bashed by the cheaper 7970.

The only reason for going with the current Nvidia cards over AMD ones is if you're a fan boy

Isn't support for NVidia better overall in games? I remember the Rage debacle for instance. PhysX is better with NVidia if I see it correctly? Borderlands 2 has super cool physics...what about AMD in this case? Just wondering, no offence intended, as I asked myself which GPU to go some weeks ago and decided for a NVidia because of all the troubles I heard.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I
Blazkowicz, the idea of Win8 does horrify me right now, actually. First, I find it completely unnecessary.. there's nothing I can't do with Win7, there's no reason to upgrade the OS. Second, I have some programs that don't yet run in Win8 that I'm aware of. New versions are on the horizon that may have compatibility, but then I'm back to the point of "why?" since it runs perfectly fine as it is right now.

I'm influenced by how things go in the linux world, with upgrading actually fixing old bugs and almost all software versions tied to the OS. i.e. going from ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 fixed a lot of things, better drivers etc., 10.04 to 12.04 gives you more recent versions of stuff (feel free to ignore the 3D desktop, you can install another edition or an ubuntu derivate)

MS fixes and upgrades stuff in a given line too, from windows 2000, to XP, to SP1, 2003 and XP SP2.
or 95, 98, 98SE, that got better too.. sadly ending in Windows ME
That said, sure, you don't need to bother that much, for games you're probably well set with 7 SP1 + security updates and upgrading from WHQL graphics driver to WHQL graphics driver (well.. sometimes a WHQL can have a bug that's fixed in a beta version that comes right after it.)

 

[Blazkowicz]

3D support is the same on both.... the advantage of better drivers has not been the case now for a few years.

If you like long term drivers support and support for many OS, well there's quite an advantage for the green side. I have a 7600GT with a linux driver from october 2012 (a rock solid one with same codebase as the windows ones) and it works from windows 98 all the way up to 8 64bit. I can even try to switch to FreeBSD.

With the red team, they just drop your chip after a few years, maybe they'll change that with GCN, or with GCN v2.0 GPUs and APUs or even their radeon 6000 based APUs but they don't announce anything.
Geforce 7 series was launched in 2005 and is supported on linux till 2017 (as a legacy branch of the proprietary driver, but no one else does this). That's 12 years, or even 13 years for geforce 6.

That little old card is better supported than Radeon 4000 series (even though it's still sold in new hardware, it's the stuff in the 880G chipset).