CPU Multithreading please.

[TonyD]

Hi Ned

I’ve used Ati cards for my own machines since the 8500, and have always been satisfied with them. I have had a fair amount of experience with nVidia cards as well in various builds for others, and to be honest, there’s not a lot of difference between the two. I’ve always preferred Ati because of their more efficient approach (which typically results in better pricing), but few users would be aware or even care about the architecture of whatever card they may have, as long as it works OK. In the end it boils down to personal preference, and it’s usually easier to decide on a product that’s familiar. Being an AMD fan as well makes the choice somewhat easier for me since they acquired Ati, but you are right about the 990 chipset – my board supports Sli too, so you are no longer forced to buy Intel if you want to go this route.

As far as the 6970 goes, its performance generally falls between the GeForce 570 and 580, and locally it’s priced a fair bit cheaper than the 570, so a no-brainer in my case. My son has a MSI HD5870 Lightning I’ve used for comparison, and it is slightly faster than his in DX9 games (which are most modern games), but does allow higher detail settings in CloD due to the additional memory, which is what I was interested in. It is a fair bit longer than the 5870 (and my previous 5850), which required me to mod my case in order for it to fit, but at least the power requirement isn’t any greater.

In my opinion, you won’t really experience a huge increase in frame rates over your 470 in CloD, although you will probably be able to turn some detail up without suffering any loss (probably not what you wanted to hear if you were intending buying a new card ) I replaced my 5850 because my daughter needed a new card (her 512MB 3870 was getting a bit long in the tooth), rather than wanting more performance. If I had done it for solely for more speed I’d have been disappointed, but that is always the case when replacing a high end card with a newer model.

I hope this has been somewhat helpful.

[NedLynch]

Very helpful, thanks .

The 6970 looks really intersting right about now, bang for the buck.
Increase in framerates is one thing, maybe I won't be getting much over my 470, but the big thing is that more and more games are quite vram hungry, so a reason to buy a new card would be mostly more available vram.

Two other things that concern me are:

Would it pose any problem to switch from nvidia to amd, any driver issues, uninstalling necessary or operating system wise?

There is a new standard for pcie x16 coming, 3.0, so far I have only seen intel mobo's with future support for that (when Ivybridge comes out). Have you seen anything from amd regarding this?

[TonyD]

Switching to a different chipset graphics card? – I would use DriverCleaner to completely remove any trace of the previous drivers before installing the new ones. I had to do this when changing from my 5850 to the 6970 due to Win7 intelligently (!) deciding to keep the previous clock profiles.

PCI-ex 3.0? – this is apparently due on mainboards towards the end of the year, and AMD 7xxx cards are rumoured to be compliant (which should be out around December this year) as is Intel’s IvyBridge (which is rumoured to be out Q2 2012). This will allow a greater band width than is currently available, but is this a huge issue? – it’s not as if the current version 2.0 has reached saturation. And the new standard is apparently backwardly compatible with version 2.0 so there shouldn’t be any hardware conflicts. The trouble is if you decide to wait for the next rumoured hardware standard, you will never purchase, as there is always something bigger-better-faster-more on the way.

[NedLynch]

I know, you wait and as soon as you think you made up your mind about a purchase something else comes popping up.

With the pcie x16 3.0 I meant more if you maybe came across any info about amd mobos. Eventually they will have to implement it, but as of right now I can only find intel mobos with a future 3.0 compatibility.

I think though that at this point, since I can run things very nicely with my current comp, waiting may be an option due to a lot of new things coming out. At least waiting until the end of the year.