JShank said:
BTW Mitch whats your opinion on the 6970 vs the 6990
IMO, a single 6970 is all the GPU you need. If you really want that much power, you’re much better off with a pair of 6970s than a single 6990. You’ll pay the same but get more performance for it. Dual GPUs are ALWAYS clocked lower than their single GPU counterparts and the overall card runs warmer. Not only that, but when they’re seperate you’ll get them to overclock better and if one fails you can ship just the single bad card off instead of not having a video card at all.
Don’t get me wrong AMD makes a great processor and I’d recommend them for most lower and mid-lower systems but they’ve been getting dominated in the high-end market for years. The new Sandy Bridge Core i5 wipes the floor with the Phenom II x6 and are priced nearly the same. AMD’s architecture is starting to show signs of weakness and if Intel were to ever price their CPUs competitively AMD wouldn’t stand a chance. Intel is consistently getting 15-17% faster clock-for-clock with each new generation and AMD just can’t compete with that. AMD is pulling an ATI and just throwing more MHz and cores at the problem hoping it’ll go away but no amount of bandaids is going to help in either of the markets they’re in. Intel processors are getting faster and cheaper, Nvidia’s GTX500 series matches ATI’s newest cards in both price and performance, and AMD’s response is to fire the CEO for keeping the company out of debt. AMD’s future has a fairly ominous storm cloud hovering over it and if they don’t get their act together soon they’re going to end up out of business.
On that note, check out the GTX570 and GTX590. They’re priced the same as the 6970 and 6990 and get considerably better performance in some games. But not in others. Check the benchmarks for the games you’re most interested in and buy accordingly. Personally, at the same price and similar power usage and noise levels, I’d pick the Nvidia card every time just from a driver and lifetime warranty standpoint but that’s just me. My 5770 GPU crashes almost every day due to sucky drivers and it’s a major turnoff 