Looking at new graphics cards

[Domestic_Ginger]

Inspired by the Moose and foolishly selling my BTCs at a low price; I managed to price gouge on my 5850. I'm looking at a card with a budget of about 150 and don't mind selling the bundled games to drop the price below this bracket.

So I suppose it boils down to a 7870 tahiti (180 down to 150). the XFX has differing reports on the DD cooler; they will I'm sure be voltage locked as all the later DDs are; one report of a modded bios but with the newer radeons the bios flashes are not meant to be reliable. The others; powercolour etc have a loud cooler and can be voltage controlled.

Or a 660 (145 down to 125) (these are after selling the bundled games) with stock blower. If I could get F2P bundle and metro it would be great.

Anyone have any ideas or decent linkies? Or thinking of upgrading either as second hand is fine; the problem with bundled games is that thye have almost killed the second hand card market.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I looked on Ebay and the secondhand HD7850,HD7870,HD7870LE/XT and GTX660 cards are not that cheap,considering you get no warranty and no free games.

One of the reasons I got the GTX660 is because I wanted Metro:Last Light,which I was willing to pay £15 to £20 anyway,so it made the card a cheap upgrade.

Here are a few pictures of the card:

http://forums.hexus.net/graphics-car...ml#post2898701

Here are some 3DMark scores for the card:

http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware/...thread-14.html

Overclocking is not that great,but seems about par for most GTX660 cards,in terms of OC headroom.

The HD7870LE/XT cards would be the best choice but I have a tiny case,so they would not fit anyway.

Pixmania do sell HD7870 OEM cards for around £150,but I am not sure I would trust their CS TBH and they are located in France too which complicates things in this regard too.

[Domestic_Ginger]

The second hand market is pants atm; I know what you mean.

Your 3dmark score seems to be a third improvement; I think this may have something to do with how good the 5850 still is! The 660s appear to do about 5000 so 3550 to 5000 is going to be 41%; i'm assuming that you can run your 660 at the limits specified by the benchers on 3dmark. I think the 660 oems are not in a seperate catagory hence the 6000 scores.

The 7870 xt should give about 6000@1200 give or take; 69% improvement.
5440@975(or there abouts) 53%

Running a 660 flatout compared to a 7870 xt flatout is very a different proposition though! so its 12% performance difference for £30ish.

I think being stuck with onboard (HD3000) is going to suck. Although I have so much stuff to do that it may actually be a blessing.

EDIT:- The 7870 le is getting good reviews; I then found this one:- http://www.hardcoreware.net/sapphire...-le-review/12/. They are not so impressed wit hits power consumption.

In terms of frame times it seems to me that tahiti>kepler>pitcairn this was the opinion I formed on another site.

[Sprite]

I recently bought the Powercolor Myst 7870 Tahiti LE and it seems to run fairly hot and loud and uses more power than I expected. I 've also got a HD 7850 and a Maplin energy monitor so I can see what the power difference is between the two if you want?

[Domestic_Ginger]

Very kind of you to offer; the comparison has been done on loads of review sites. Have you tried undervolting?

What I am really interested in knowing is whether undervolting the tahiti le and then doing a power consumption test. Does the energy monitor do kW/h? I think this is missing from alot of benchmarks; a power consumption per 3dmark run would be a great statistic as it fluctuates through the run. alot to ask!

AB should allow this; a couple of data points would be great for comparison as people are reporting they can significantly undervolt. There have been reports of voltage spikes though.

[jigger]

Performance per £ the Tahiti LE based cards are the best cards I've found. For performance per watt your looking for then the a HD7790.

[Sprite]

Very kind of you to offer; the comparison has been done on loads of review sites. Have you tried undervolting?

What I am really interested in knowing is whether undervolting the tahiti le and then doing a power consumption test. Does the energy monitor do kW/h? I think this is missing from alot of benchmarks; a power consumption per 3dmark run would be a great statistic as it fluctuates through the run. alot to ask!

AB should allow this; a couple of data points would be great for comparison as people are reporting they can significantly undervolt. There have been reports of voltage spikes though.

Yep it's got a KWH button, I'll have a look over the weekend.

I did a quick Burn in Test with Furmark @ 1680x1050 no AA:

Stock (925 core/1500 mem/1.256v in Trixx, 1.201v in GPU-Z) - power consumption for the whole system was around 290w, temps around 75 degrees
Undervolted (925 core/1500 mem/1.0v in Trixx, 0.961v in GPU-Z) - power consumption was around 215w, temps around 66 degrees

[Domestic_Ginger]

Thats a huge power saving; is it quieter?

[Sprite]

Yeah a little bit, hard to tell without a direct comparison at the same time though. I'll run some more tests later as the power difference does seem a lot haha.

EDIT - Running a bitcoin miner on the card gave strange results, undervolting from 1.2v to 1.0v only saw a drop of 5w. I'll download 3DMark later and see what that gives me.

[kompukare]

I recently bought the Powercolor Myst 7870 Tahiti LE and it seems to run fairly hot and loud and uses more power than I expected.

I was going to mention that. My take away from the reviews is that Tahiti LE are power hungry parts. It's like the extra shaders have been disabled but the card still draws more than a 7950. Thinking out loud: does that mean a unlocking BIOS flash like 6950/6970 is a possibility?

This TPU review certainly has the 7870LE using a lot more than a 7950:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/V..._Black/26.html

Out of interest, what are the default voltages for your Powercolor and for that matter what is the ASIC quality rating (you can find out GPU-Z with obscure right click... somewhere)?

EDIT: hm, though I'd read the whole thread before replying - most of that has already been answered.

[kalniel]

Yeah it makes sense - the tahiti LE parts are parts that aren't as high quality so need additional voltage together with reduced shaders to be stable. But they're parts that would otherwise be chucked, hence low selling prices.

[Domestic_Ginger]

Pixmania do sell HD7870 OEM cards for around £150,but I am not sure I would trust their CS TBH and they are located in France too which complicates things in this regard too.

I had a look at this and it looks a really good deal. I got in touch with them to see if they could alleviate my concerns. (this is not the origional message; can't find it)

Which model exactly do you supply as customers have received a variety models. Do you still have game codes in stock as these are subject to availability.

and they reply:-

Thank you for contacting Pixmania regarding our products.

The model reference of the mentioned product is 7870 OEM. This item is offered with the codes for the fre games tat comes with the product. These codes along with the activation link will be sent to you within1 week after purchase.

Thank you for your interest in Pixmania. Should you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Well thats has cleared that up then.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The main issue is since Pixmania is located in France,that UK consumer law does not apply to them.

I was actually really tempted getting that HD7870. Its the reference model which is used in reviews.

[Willzzz]

The 7870 Tahiti is top notch in terms of price/performance but certainly not top-notch in overall quality.

I've heard of quite a few people having problems with the card, although usually this seems to be linked to lower quality PSUs.

[Bagnaj97]

I got an XFX 7870 Tahiti from Aria yesterday and I'm not impressed. It runs very hot (~50 idle, 80 gaming, 90 degrees bitcoin) and whilst the core is factory OCd to 1GHz boost (from 975), the memory is set to 1250 rather than the stock 1500! With the ram at 1500 it's stable so I don't know what they were thinking!

Being a geek I decided to re-paste the heatsink in hopes of improving things, despite the stickers on the heatsink screws saying warranty void if removed. So now I can't even return it. It doesn't appear to be an airflow issue either because if I take my pc out from under my desk and remove the side panels it only drops the temps by about 2 degrees.

After doing some further reading it just seems that all 7870 Tahitis are hot cards (although mine's worse than most!) Don't get me wrong, they're decent performing cards, but I personally wouldn't recommend them.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well that XFX you are using has 6+8 pin PCI-E power connectors!! Plus it seems they have lopped off one of the heatpipes when it came to the cooler. The TUL HD7870XT/LE does use less power,as it uses 6+6 PCI-E power connectors,but only has a single radial fan,which means it can run hot too,but does sadly look more of an even design overall.

I would probably look at chucking an Accelero Xtreme 7970 on the XFX card at some point down the line,since the warranty is kaput now.

Regarding my GTX660,it does seem Nvidia has artifically gimped it with regards to power limits,so it does seem to hit a brickwall when it comes to overclocking.