Out of Pod Experience

The last rig I built, I initally bought a 2GB Sapphire 5870. It was nothing but trouble. Overheating, driver issues, messed up flash support in with the drivers too., completely useless.

I swapped out to two 3GB Palit GTX580s and they've been perfect since they were installed.

I'll never bother with an ATI card again.

If you want to stay away from ATI for now and go NVIDIA, just get a 1GB GTS 450, they're quite affordable now (starting at about 105$), it's sort of enough for most games that came out recently and it should be a big improvement over what you have now anyway.
If you don't mind ATI, get a 6670 for even as little as 80$. I haven't heard many complaints about it so far, so it must at least not suck. Oh, and it can power itself from just the PCI-E slot, no need for additional power couplings (under the 75W max of PCI-E slot limits, allegedly only 66W or so).
Heck, probably even an uber-budget 1GB GT 440 (starting at about 75$) will just about do it too. That's also under the 75W limit (allegedly around 65W).


Why those borderline pathetic ones and not something more beefy ?


First off, because if you could survive so long with Intel HD on-chip graphics, you're already going to get a significant jump with those cards (even the cheapest one mentioned should be the very least a 3-fold increase in FPS and even more in terms of visual quality), and it's not really worth spending a lot more money on what it will basically be either a temporary (if you can or want to sell it on) or an emergency backup video card (if you just keep it - and it doesn't hurt to have one such backup "just in case").

That, and because this next spring the latest, both NVIDIA and ATI are coming up with their new series of cards, and you could probably wait a few more months to get a last-gen video card until then.
If you are to believe the hype, they're allegedly significantly better in terms of performance/watt compared to the current generations and will most likely also feature PCI-E 3.0 support.


P.S. NVIDIA is rumoured to start the 600 series of cards with a "budget-to-enthusiast" release schedule - meaning, they're shelling out the lower numbers first in early spring 2012 (stuff like 630 and 640) with the higher numbers only later on, early summer of even late summer 2012 (stuff like 670 and 680).
That's pretty much the exact opposite of what they have done with many of their previous graphics card series, where the top of the line cards came out earlier and the budget ones later.

I have a 6870. Very easy to apply a mild overclock without even messing with voltage settings. Never seems to get hot. I can run games like shogun 2/Deus Ex HR and the like with everything maxed. It even ran 2x captains quarters simultaneously on the two separate screens without issue. However I reckon a third would make it chug.

Fairly affordable and while I not had it long enough to give you a long term viewpoint (about a month) I have to say I am happy enough thus far. You won't need much better unless you want to run lots of multi screen shenanigans.

Looking forward to BF3 though being one of those lucky peeps from the UK I have to wait an extra three days for some sodding reason.

Hope that helps.

nVidia has multimonitor support.

I have a ATI 6750, pretty good card, haven't have any problems with it.

I've worked with both Eyefinity and Nvidia Surround and I have to say that Nvidia's version is far better.

While you do have to have two cards to run more than two displays, it's worth the investment for the stability and performance it provides.

ATI's software and drivers are slow, clunky, bugridden and prone to crashing horribly if you even look at them the wrong way.

tbh it's a hit-or-miss on the ATI drivers.

I, for example, had actually more problems with NV drivers than ATI.

atm my sapphire 6770 vapor-x runs smoothly and problem-free, and quite less noisy than the 8800 GT I had before.

the cooler could be better designed tbh. it should've had it on the edge so that it pulls air on one direction and not smack dabbed on the middle where it spread the air to the front and back of the card.

it does run quite cool tho, considering the crammed space inside my case (something I intend to upgrade in the near future).

I'm having similar problems with ATI drivers on my laptop, which runs eve pretty well. I think I'll go with the gtx 560ti. It's a bit better than the 6870 and can deliver better fps in most games...and no unforeseen driver problems. Thx for the advice.

Check out Tom's Q3 round-up: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card-gaming-performance,3042.html

6870 is not really comparable to the 560Ti! The 560Ti's cost £200. You can get a HD6950 for £180!