Hi, I've been holding off buying a graphics card for the past 4 months or so; wanting to see the entire-line up and the nvidia response to the AMD cards. I don't really want to spend more than about £300, so that rules out the GTX580 or the HD5970. My mobo only has one x16 pci-e so SLI/Crossfire is also out. Thus I'm a bit confused at what to do; my current ideas are a HD6950 modded to a 6970 (unfounded worry that any driver revisions/updates could cause problems later on, dunno how likely that is), an actual HD6970 or a GTX570. I game at 1920x1200, and have a dual monitor setup for when I'm just working, doubtful that will increase to 3 monitors anytime soon. What are people's thoughts? Any advice will be greatly appreciated!
I'm running a 28" at 1920x1200 and use a GTX580, and that's overkill on full settings. I would say you'll be fine with a 570 or maybe even the new 560 that's just released. The 560 got a sparkling review from Bit-Tech too.
Dont worry about driver updates or revisions buggering up a flashed card as it wont. Once the card is flashed the os see's it as the new card, always, no way for it to tell otherwise. Have had many different flashed cards. I game at 1920x1200 and use a 5870, which seems mostly fine at most games.
what is your current card? ati or nvidia? i'd sa go with gtx570, and use your current card to drive the 2nd non-gaming monitor.
Sorry, should have mentioned I'm currently using the integrated graphics on my i3 so I don't have an extra dedicated card. On that note the i3 only being dual-core, that won't cause any bottlenecking will it? I've overclocked it to 4.3GHz stable, and hopefully when I'm not using the onboard gpu I might be able to squeeze a little more out of it.
I was looking at the 6950 -> 6970 trick too, but the 560 seems to match the 6950 before overclocking, and beat the 6970 after overclocking (unless you are playing at higher than 1080p res), so I went for that and saved 20 quid. The 570 is probably the best shout if you want to spend more than that too. Nvidia all the way atm i seems.
the reason i asked about 2nd graphcis adaptor is because all graphics cards by ATI or nVidia does not return to slowest idle speed when running more than 1 monitor on it. they stay at full speed or half of full speed. to solve it, you can connect main gaming monitor to the graphics card, then connect the 2nd monitor to a 2nd graphics adaptor (in this case, your integrated) BUT, im not sure if this will work, whether you can use integrated together with dedicated. please someone confirm this.
Last time i checked, using a dedicated gpu will disable the integrated one, but a lot of rules have changed recently so don't quote me on that.
That's what I thought as well, as I don't know of any other way of 'disabling' the integrated graphics, my bios doesn't have any option to disable the iGPU just adjust the voltage across it. I presume it'll disable itself when I plug in a dedicated gpu. I'll certainly give it a go; see what happens and report back Otherwise seems the GTX570 might be the way to go then?
