Right, after the HD4870 in my Galileo rig has become faulty (again - this is my third card!) I'm considering scrapping the whole rig (it's a Q6600 so it's fairly old). My main question is on GPUs - with so many around, I'm slightly confused about which to chose as I've been out of the market for so long. What I'm after: No more than £300 (ideally around £250) Game at a decent FPS (mainly Starcraft II, Flight Sim X over multiple screens) Triple-head setup (currently dual, 1 x 1920x1080 and 1 x 1600x900) Ideally nVidia (Linux drivers for AMD cards have been very poor lately) but would consider AMD if performance/price was decent enough I do realise that I can find reviews of the cards on the 'net but I'd be interested to hear people's opinions too Cheers, Craig
If you want triple screen gaming with nVidia you need atleast two cards in SLI but if you go for AMD you would need a single 6970.
At that price point you'd be looking at either the GTX 570 or the AMD 6970..Personal choice would be the GTX 570
As above for triple screen then either an AMD 6970 or SLI otherwise nvidia don't offer support The only option for SLI that fits in your budget is (last gen) 2*460 but that would be limited by only 1gb of VRAM if your using such a high resolution.
I can comment on the ati drivers in linux.. nvidia does have better drivers but if your willing to put in the time, ati does work.. the sdk takes a couple of tricks to setup right for opencl (I did this in kde 64 bit) and I noticed for some reason you do lose performance in 2d- like if you do work in the terminal and use opencl.. I don't know if this is a bug or it legitimately needs those cycles leaning towards bug.. but if you ssh into the server instead, you can get the full grunt of the card for opencl.. overclocking works fine from the driver and fan control works (no ramp but can set it static like 70%, 100%)- once you get it all down it's really nice.. but that's the thing- a lot of people can't xD so they go nvidia.. to be honest they actually take the time to make things friendly but then your dealing with a card that can't do half as much as the ati on the crunching end.. even overclocking isn't supported in the nvidia linux driver that I seen.. but the driver is plug and play or plug and be gay (happy)
Thanks guys - looks like a 6970 is the way to go, and from researching, it seems like ATi's Catalyist (closed source) drivers support Eyefinity on Linux. My main peeve with ATi is that for a Fedora user, the drivers have always been horribly broken (to the point where you can have 3D acceleration, or Xinerama, but not both). Though having said that, I'm converting to Ubuntu, so if this is fixed, I'm all for getting a 6970
