Hardware PC Hardware Buyer's Guide November 2010

The GTX 460 need two 6 pin PCI-E connector while the 6850 only need one. And the CX 400 only have one.

 

waiting on the new cards at the moment
1x gtx580 or 2xgtx480's.... or 2xgtx470's mmmmm

 

On your first point, there is definitely a real-world performance between Intel and AMD. Load up a CPU-heavy game such as ARMA 2 or Starcraft 2, or try something like video encoding or ray-trace rendering. These specs, and indeed this website, are not aimed at someone who primarily does office work.

On your second point, SATA 6Gbps hard drives are a scam, since no hard drive is capable of even saturating a SATA 3Gbps link, never mind 6Gbps. Only SSDs are relevant for 6Gbps.

 

Going from experience even a GTX460 clocked to 925/1850/4300 cannot keep up with a stock clocked HD5870 is anything bar heavily Nvidia biased games or heaven. It keeps up with a mildly clocked HD5850 though.

I concur with the GTX460 SLI review request. Hexus recently compared HD6850 to GTX460 SLI and found (average) scaling in all games tested to be around 90%.

Whilst there will always be situations where you don't get any scaling (Just cause 2 with the Cuda water on for example) they are far less frequent than they used to be.

If anything we need a GTX460 SLI review due to the pricing. Two 768mb models can be picked up for ~ £240 or in other words not much more than a single GTX470 / HD6870. Do these cards scale well or do they run out of memory before GPU grunt?

 

It's true that some games prefer Nvidia or AMD. Going by the benchmarks here the 460 1GB OC is better or equal to the stock 5870 in 7 out of the 12 games tested @ 1920x1200 and the 5870 was better in the other 5 games. But when the 5870 was better it really pulled ahead in performance. There's no denying the 5870 is a better card, and when OCd would be even better, but it obviously costs a lot more whereas the 460 is a budget powerhouse.

And as you can see from the 460SLi tests on that link it's a performance monster in SLi!

 

Asus Sabertooth X58 review please!!

 

A GTX460 cannot be held in the same height as a 5870, with the 5870 being ATi's flagship single card. It was never sold as or marketed to do so, given it's £100 and sometimes £150 cheaper price. However, the GTX460 hammered everything else at stock and overclocked. Even more so once you turned AA on, which any self respecting gamer would do! It didn't just "keep up" with a 5850, it was "mildly" ahead by some margin.

Try this for a proper review and conclusion:-

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/07/12/nvidia-geforce-gtx-460-graphics-card-review/12

 

Are you saying you can overclock the GTX 460 to be faster than a 6850 at stock speeds or are you saying the 6850 doesn't overclock as well as the GTX 460?

If the latter, do you have any benchmarks for an overclocked 6850? I haven't seen them myself so I'd be interested.

 

A stock GTX 460 tends to be beaten by the 6850 JUST but that's at only 4 anti-aliasing, i use 16 on battlefield! an overclocked GTX 460 (mine's at 800MHz core) beats a 6850 hands down and at x16 anti-aliasing it'll be no where near my 460! I've found another comparison of the GTX 460 oc'd vs both the 6850 and 6870 here:

http://hbeevers.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-im-not-sore-about-buying-gtx-460.html

Basically with 8 AA @ x1200 in bad company 2 the GTX 460's minimum fps beats a 6870 and 6850 as well as average fps beating the 6850.

 

Agree why is the GA-P55M-UD2 being shown as a suitable board in particular in the two ranges that most people will be building from gaming workhorse/Euthusiast overclocker ?

When the major suppliers now have discontinued stocking it with most of the major sites stating this product has been "discontinued and no longer for sale"- Overclockers, Scan, Ebuyer and AWD-It no longer stock it?

The only one i could see was for £96 via amazon/via a 3rd party company who likely had it sitting on the shelf because it was overpriced compared to normal suppliers..

 

Just Curious:

Why would a budget build value eyefinity (requiring more monitors) than physx (requiring physx enabled games like mafia 2, mirror's edge, etc)? I think 6850 is good choice for enthusiast, with eyefinity but gtx 460 (especially 786mb version if you're into budget oc) is a better choice for an affordable build.

 

Nice to see the 6850 included, overclocking the GPU shouldn't be a factor when choosing because not many people risk it; not everyone overclocks their CPU either but the i5-760 is still a good choice. I found an error in the article though "As a result we’ve included the beautifully elegantFractal Design Define R3 in its place" you listed the RV02 in the table.

 

It's always nice to see overclocked benchmarks too vs stock speeds, but that link is pointless unless we also see overclocked scores for the 6 series cards against the 460 OC scores.

 

Um check my sig, I own GTX460 in SLI (1GB) and often run one of my cards at 925/1850/4300. I used to own a single HD5870 clocked to 1000/5200 (to be fair I didn't state this). Hence why in my post I said from experience rather than 'in this review'.

It is true (as you suggest) that in raw number terms a heavily clocked 460 can at least get within spitting distance of a (stock) HD5870, however, in game I never found this to be the case (at least in the games I play). The 5870 simply felt smoother and more consistant not to mention ran cooler and quieter. I am actually annoyed that I sold the 5870 when I did but I was planning on going triple monitors and wasn't impressed with how poorly the 5870's seem to scale at eyefinity resolutions when running in CF.

Still, you are right though, GTX460 in sli (especially clocked) is fantastic. Easily faster than a HD5970 (due to better scaling - HD5850CF used as a proxy) and actually fits in my case. The 6970 and GTX580 will have to be something special to beat these in the performance per £ stakes.

 

I was not comparing the HD5870 and GTX460 in terms of price vs performance as I am well aware of the price difference. I was merely commenting on my own experiences of having owned a HD5870 and now owning GTX460's in SLI.

Hence why in my post (you quoted and as I stated above) I was using my own experiences (my own FRAPS run through comparisons) rather than raw numbers in a benchmark.

 

That's the problem though, i can't find anywhere a comparison of an oc'd 6850 vs an oc'd gtx 460. I seem to remember somewhere saying they'd managed a 10 - 15% overclock but that was with a 6870, if that's the limit for the 6850 in terms of overclocking then an overclocked gtx 460 will beat a oc'd 6850. The gtx 460 1gb in SLI nearly beats the 5870 in crossfire at higher res and cleanly beats a 5850 crossfire though so the 6850 had better be good.

 

Don't like mixing the i7 950 with the P6X58D-E. My professional recommendation is to stick with the 930 (if you can) as they consistently OC better than the i7 950 which while good on paper doesn't cut the mustard over 3.8GHz.

@BentoKing: I've had a play with the Sabertooth X58, it's basically a P6X58D-E minus Express-Gate + ceramic coated heatsinks.

Here's a glam shot of it running CF 6870s

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1431/5101808439_506427258b_b.jpg

 

Its in the Lab and tested, just needs to be written up to the site.

 

Yeah, we should have mentioned this in the copy - the RV02 is still listed for our US readers as the Define R3 isnt available in the states yet. Booooo.

 

The previously used VapourX 5870 Rev1 has also diappeared from the market, that probably helped.

The Rev.2 it's been replaced by hasn't been tested (here...elsewhere it overclocked poorly)

No need to up it for the GTX470?
Was it overpowered before?