HD6870 Crossfire vs GTX560 SLI

[Dominicvs]

So, I'm deciding between these:

-Gigabyte Radeon HD6870 OC Crossfired
-MSI GTX560 Twin Frozr II SLI (Non-TI)

I've already checked the benchmarks myself and they are pretty much identical in performance, but for TW games, what do you guys think? Colour, performance, visuals, et cetera...

[Darkpriest667]

Ive got 6850s at stock and im pretty pleased with them. I bet the 6870s would do even better. The question is which two cards are cheaper?

[Dominicvs]

exactly the same price

[Devilmaypoop]

The 6870 easily. They are already slightly more powerful, but add in the fact that AMD crossfire scaling is near 99%-100%, they win easily. Sli scaling? Not so good.

[snuggans]

The 6870 easily. They are already slightly more powerful, but add in the fact that AMD crossfire scaling is near 99%-100%, they win easily. Sli scaling? Not so good.

he already said he checked the performance charts and apparently they were equal, and you're saying something different. perhaps we should start posting our sources.

off the top of my head, i would warn against graphical glitches that only occur in SLI/crossfire setups; i have an SLI setup of 560 Ti's and i had serious interface glitches in Shogun 2 where half of the menus were unreadable, and it was only until the recent release of the 280 drivers that these glitches disappeared. see my thread here. each setup has its own different quirks with different games, you might not experience any at all, but in that case i would just deem you lucky.

recent nvidia cards handle tessellation better than ati cards, but as it's exclusively a direct x11 technology, it's not a common sight. in games where it IS used, it is not used too heavily. examples include Shogun 2 which uses it very very lightly and Metro 2033 which uses it a bit more.

if the performances are equal for your favored games as you say, i would then check temperatures and power consumption. temperatures can vary between manufacturer and their custom heatsinks (unless you're buying nvidia stock)

i would also do some research into driver quality and dependability. nvidia received a lot of flak for that one buggy driver that unintentionally disabled the fan on the cards, leading to many fried cards. on the other side, ati has been commended for being on the ball when it comes to quickly fixing issues. i believe they are both equal in this field.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

he already said he checked the performance charts and apparently they were equal, and you're saying something different. perhaps we should start posting our sources.

off the top of my head, i would warn against graphical glitches that only occur in SLI/crossfire setups; i have an SLI setup of 560 Ti's and i had serious interface glitches in Shogun 2 where half of the menus were unreadable, and it was only until the recent release of the 280 drivers that these glitches disappeared. see my thread here. each setup has its own different quirks with different games, you might not experience any at all, but in that case i would just deem you lucky.

recent nvidia cards handle tessellation better than ati cards, but as it's exclusively a direct x11 technology, it's not a common sight. in games where it IS used, it is not used too heavily. examples include Shogun 2 which uses it very very lightly and Metro 2033 which uses it a bit more.

if the performances are equal for your favored games as you say, i would then check temperatures and power consumption. temperatures can vary between manufacturer and their custom heatsinks (unless you're buying nvidia stock)

i would also do some research into driver quality and dependability. nvidia received a lot of flak for that one buggy driver that unintentionally disabled the fan on the cards, leading to many fried cards. on the other side, ati has been commended for being on the ball when it comes to quickly fixing issues. i believe they are both equal in this field.

yea there getting even more flak after the Event where Battlefield 3 was released and they were using a new driver the new driver provided by Nvidia also had 0 fan control causing nearly 20% of the PCs at the event to up and die lol ati has overall more isues with drivers but there easily ironed out, Nvidia driver problems when they do happen tend to brick and or kill the GPU

[Top-Tier-Tech]

I like Nvidia cards for various reasons but between those two particular choices I'd go with the 6870's in crossfire.