Which DX11 video card meets the best price/performance/power efficiency?

Cool! Weird how that didn't work for that other guy but what didn't work you for you worked for him.

Anyway, congratulations on following the link and solving your issuing.

 

@Shtal: depends on what you want.

If you mainly listen to music, Asus Xonar series of sound cards are better (not by a lot, but they are). I particularly don't like the non-linear response of the Creative cards.

For movies & games it doesn't really matter. Also it appears that in Vista /Win7, Creative's traditional strength - EAX - is done now in software so it's no longer an advantage over other cards.

LE: And of course, depends on the speakers you have/want to have, right?

 

If you have an audio receiver with HDMI inputs, you can also just use the built-in HDMI audio on your graphics card. I haven't used a dedicated sound card in well over a year, perhaps closer to three years. Once I removed the Creative SB X-Fi from my system and just used the Radeon HD4870 HDMI Audio quite a few of my headaches went away.

 

And if you're going to go for an X-Fi, unless you're an audiophile and doing much more than music and games, the X-Fi Gamer is enough for you and much cheaper. (DON'T get an X-Fi XtremeAudio, they aren't a true X-FI!)

 

Auzentech and ASUS sound cards are better than Creative's. (Especially drivers)

 

Will they do surround in games though? Or just pass through premixed from video and stereo? That is obviously no good. If you had something like dolby live, or sound storm an hdmi it would be best IMO.

 

The HDMI audio on ATI cards will do 5.1 or 7.1 surround. At worst you'll get dolby digital live (realtime encoding of multichannel dolby digital). So yes, in games and everything you'll get multichannel surround sound.

It basically has similar capability of the Realtek ALC 889 chipset, except without the ability to manually configure everything, and obviously no analog out.

Regards,
SB

 

No reason to expect it would be much higher than the 5970, as the 6970 isn't much higher than than the 5870. Just a matter of where they settle on the clocks.

 

Powertune will keep it at 300W throttling clocks appropiately when needed.

 

HD6970 and GTX580 consuming the same amount of power?

 

Of course. With throttling engaged.

 

So it's furmark, not actual real life situation where one should measure these.
(And even with throttling enabled, IIRC the limiter hits first on 6970 unless you turn the "+20% switch" on)

 

My 5570 low-profile with 1GB DDR3 apparently uses only about 40W ... not bad. That's 40% of the lowest idle score in that table. From the table, you get the impression that DDR5 uses a LOT more energy than DDR3? Looking at the 5570 in there, that seems so much higher ...

 

Remember that's total system power not just the graphics card. Then again a 5570 alone should use less than 20 watts at idle so maybe 40 watts is your total power consumption. If so that's fantastic.

Regards,
SB