Was hoping some of you may be able to suggest a good card to upgrade to. I currently have two evga 8800 GTS 512MB cards in my rig. Pretty sure both are cooked due to some bad drivers that were released a while back. I'm getting REALLY bad stuttering during cut scenes in SCII that I'm sure I shouldn't be getting and Batman: AA can barely run at all, these cards used to have no problem running that game.
What I'm hoping to find is a single card that will outperform the two I have sli'd together at the moment with the intention of getting a 2nd one down the road.
Hoping for something in the $300-$350 range max. Cheaper would be great but can't justify going any higher than that on a single card unless it is really worth while.
The problems I'm having with my current card are as follows.
Bought SC2 the other day. Game runs fine but the cut scenes are TERRIBLE. Frame rate craters during cut scenes and a dialogue box pops up saying reducing settings should improve performance. I don't think the 2 8800 GTS 512MB cards should have any problem with this game.
Batman AA: Game ran beautifully before all hell broke lose. Re-installed the game last week. When I get to a playable part of the game, FPS seems to crater again.
Aion: Not sure how many of your are fimiliar with this game but if I run into or out of the crating area in Sanctum, my rig will hard lock 50% of the time. Got a BSOD last time
Monitor in Standby: If I set my rig to turn the monitors off after 30 mins, when I try to re-awaken them, my rig freezes.
I'm hoping all of this points to bad cards and if I replace them, I can have the rock solid rig I had before all this crap started to happen.
Last edited by GoinAllTheWay; 08-11-2010 at 11:12 AM.
Rest of my rig should be fine. I built a new one last summer but re-used my old card to save a few bucks. It's an i7 @ 2.66 Ghz. Solid guys, thanks a ton, pretty sure I'll be picking up that 460 on the way home, possibly two for that price.
Rest of my rig should be fine. I built a new one last summer but re-used my old card to save a few bucks. It's an i7 @ 2.66 Ghz. Solid guys, thanks a ton, pretty sure I'll be picking up that 460 on the way home, possibly two for that price.
Check into it. Usually 1 great card is better than 2 good cards
8800GTS and GTX series from that era are often dying at this point. I know of many RMAs and I see this problem on many forums. People often resort to baking them if their warranties are nolonger valid.
If you are going to go SLI again, I would recommend GTX 460s in SLI ($400).
Otherwise, I would not buy any Nvidia cards (GTX 470, GTX 480) due to heat and power consumption and they are not as good value for money.
What is your current PSU? You could also look at the crossfire 5770 route which would be cheaper in the $300-$350 range you asked for.
For a single card and if heat and power are issues for you, I would recommend either a 5850 or a 5870 however as they are cool and consume less power than their Nvidia counterparts. You can also run triple monitors off a single card if you go for ATI.
I'm pretty sure my PSU is an Antec TruePower 850Watt. That's off the top of my head but I recall spending some money on it as I like to have a good power supply.
Interesting comment on cards of that vintage dying. The problems I describe in my OP, does that sound like a dying card?
As for heat, I bought a Cool Master case that is supposed to be awesome for cooling. I do notice that the exhaust coming out the back is really quite hot but figured that would be normal considering the size of the cards.
That actually raises another question. Looking at my MOBO's PCIe slots. The first one says something along the lines of pcieX16, next ones down says pcie x8 and the last one says pcie x4 or something like that. When putting in cards in an sli configuration, should they be installed one right below the other or should they skip on pcie slot so there is a gap between the 2?
I'm pretty sure my PSU is an Antec TruePower 850Watt. That's off the top of my head but I recall spending some money on it as I like to have a good power supply.
Interesting comment on cards of that vintage dying. The problems I describe in my OP, does that sound like a dying card?
As for heat, I bought a Cool Master case that is supposed to be awesome for cooling. I do notice that the exhaust coming out the back is really quite hot but figured that would be normal considering the size of the cards.
That actually raises another question. Looking at my MOBO's PCIe slots. The first one says something along the lines of pcieX16, next ones down says pcie x8 and the last one says pcie x4 or something like that. When putting in cards in an sli configuration, should they be installed one right below the other or should they skip on pcie slot so there is a gap between the 2?
I have no real stats to back it up aside from noticing a lot of posts about dead or dying 8800 series cards (both G80 and G92) line dying in a lot of hardware forums that I visit. I personally had an 8800GTX die. One day it started benchmarking at about 50% of the performance that it used to have and it also started running about 30° C hotter than it used to and I always made sure the heatsinks were clean and clear. I also had two friends recently who had 8800GTs which constanty crashed in Starcraft 2 until I told them to try underclocking it as that is also a symptom, that it won't even work at factory speeds.
Because of these experiences, all with Nvidia cards dying, I expect the latest Fermi lineup to also die at some point so I am avoiding them for now and will stick with ATI.
On your motherboard you want your cards in the 16x and 8x lanes (16x and 8x are almost the same performance). Putting a card in the 4x slot will cause too large a performance hit even though it may seem that there would be more room for cooling in that way, many motherboards were seemingly not designed for that in mind.
In the future, whatever card you buy, I recommend you stick with a manufacturer that offers a lifetime warranty (EVGA for Nvidia, XFX for ATI) so if you have these issues again, you can RMA them.
Solid advice, looks like the card I'm after does come with the lifetime warranty. Thank you for your help!
Reading your description of dying cards running at 50% of their original performance and the higher temp sure sounds like my situation. Think I'll finally have this licked.
That's surprising. What did you have and what were you doing that you needed to upgrade?
Certain games really love quad cores these days...mostly the expansive sandbox city games that require a lot of CPU power like GTA IV.
The Mafia II demo just came out on steam and the recommended requirements are a Q6600.
Anyone still stuck on a single core or first generation dual core is going to find themselves quite bottlenecked as well. When I was on my S939 CPU the bottleneck was definetely my CPU as overclocking my videocard resulted in no better performance at all.
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Certain games really love quad cores these days...mostly the expansive sandbox city games that require a lot of CPU power like GTA IV.
The Mafia II demo just came out on steam and the recommended requirements are a Q6600.
Anyone still stuck on a single core or first generation dual core is going to find themselves quite bottlenecked as well. When I was on my S939 CPU the bottleneck was definetely my CPU as overclocking my videocard resulted in no better performance at all.
Cool, so when I picked the Q6600 over the E8400 because I figured the extra cores had more upside than extra clock speed, I made the right decision. Yay!
I'm fairly certain that CPU is the last thing I'll need to upgrade, mainly because the things that are CPU limited often don't have a minimum speed requirement. The only thing that might have needed more is 3D 1080p video playback. I've been GPU limited for games (especially since my card is 512 MB) and HDD limited for video recording (I think). I can see myself putting a new GPU into my current mobo... can't see myself upgrading the CPU without building a new machine.
New cards are in, working like a charm. All the above issues I described in my OP are gone now. Pretty damn happy with them. Run nice and cool and quiet. ME was on backorder for some time as these cards are apparently pretty popular. I'd recommend them to anyone who was in the same position as myself.
Nice, I got one GTX 460 with the intention of putting in another at some point, and pretty happy with it so far. Got the Gigabyte one with the massive heat sink so it's pretty much silent.
Though the 5850 went on sale today from NCIX for $30 more than I paid, and if I'd known that I probably would have chosen it instead.
Nice, I got one GTX 460 with the intention of putting in another at some point, and pretty happy with it so far. Got the Gigabyte one with the massive heat sink so it's pretty much silent.
Though the 5850 went on sale today from NCIX for $30 more than I paid, and if I'd known that I probably would have chosen it instead.
I would not recommend anybody buy a 5xxx series cards right now. AMD's (ATI name is officially dropped) 6xxx series is going to be released before the end of the year and therefore prices will go down for the 5xxx's or people might want to pick up a 6xxx series card which boosts tesselation performance.
The 460 for future SLI was a good choice Photon. 2x GTX460s > 2x 5870s @ 50% of the price.
Yeah that was part of the equation too, I considered waiting but there's just too many games that my 8800GT couldn't handle now, so upgraded now.
Also waiting to upgrade to an SSD and there's been some pretty good sales recently, but Intel has been making their 25nm flash for a while and SSDs based on it are supposed to be out this year.. last time Intel did a die shrink prices dropped by a lot (or capacities basically doubled), so trying VERY hard to wait
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
I wonder if I got a lemon, I've been trying to do a little overclocking but I haven't been able to get anywhere. I'm getting spontaneous reboots even at stock speeds while running Furmark. Temperature looks ok, levels out at 70 which seems to be the temp the automatic fan tries to hold.. sits there level, no artifacting for a few minutes then just reboots. All other temps look ok too.
I wonder if my PS is poor, it's a Corsair 650W so it well over enough for one of these cards, but maybe it's not giving good power.
Or maybe the card is defective.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
I would contact the manufacturer and start the RMA process.
I had a brand new defective GTX260 that had the exact same issue. It always seemed to reboot once the card reached 70, which is obviously well below the limit.
I went through quite a run around with EVGA though, they thought my power supply wasn't giving enough voltage on the 12V rail. I tested it at 11.8V and they tried to tell me that it needed to be above 12V (which is bs as 11.8 is within operating parameters). I eventually had to pay to have it tested as I don't know anyone who runs a system that could support the card. I had to send them the tech's report that they replicated the issue before EVGA would RMA it.
Last edited by Hanni; 09-09-2010 at 07:09 PM.
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Yet another vid card thread
