I'm building my first ever Gaming PC and this may be a stupid question but I'm torn between two GPUs the Radeon HD 7950 and the Radeon HD 7870 Overclocked.
Although the 7950 seems like the obvious choice of the two, as i noticed it has a lower clock speed I was wondering which would be better for gaming and wether it would be by a considerable amount?
People need to stop focusing on clock speeds....
Would you rather have a Pentium 4 at 3.2Ghz or a Core i5 at 2.4Ghz? The answer should be obvious. Get the 7950, and if you're really worried about clock speeds, then overclock it yourself.
A 7950 or a 7870 XT would be a better competition, From my understanding the XT is a 7870 with a 7950 processor on it or somthing like that. But yeah, either a great choices for the cash, so throw down on whichever you feel like. But yeah, 7950 will always be better and have higher overclocking headroom.
The 7950 is the better card, over XT and normal 7870's.
the 7870 XT is like a crippled 7970 or 7950, it uses the tahiti LE chip (a 79xx series chip), so the 7870XT should really be called a 7930
the only real difference between the XT and the 7950 is the 7950 has 3GB of Vram vs the XT's 2GB and the memory bandwidth 240GB/s on the 7950 vs the XT with 192 GB/s
I'd go with the 7950 because it does have better overclocking head room like CaptainPip said.
NOTE: more and more games are utilizing MORE and MORE Vram so to future proof your build better take 3GB over 2GB otherwise FPS might hit a brick wall on some games
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Southern_Islands_.28HD_7xxx.29_series
"2GB otherwise FPS might hit a brick wall on some games"
Not at 1080p..
Not even 1536MB is fully saturated at 2560x1600 (i own a GTX 480 + Dell u3011)
I don't know about that. Games are starting to use more VRAM, but at 1080p you really only need 2GB at this point. I'm running two 3GB cards on a resolution of 2560x1440 and everything still runs like warm butter.
I agree with the first part of your statement, but I would imagine that Battlefield 3 probably uses more than 1536MB at that resolution on Ultra settings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cweLN_aOkrE
MSAA is off, but post AA is on full.
The game does not fully saturate 1536MB at 2560x1600.
I can enable 2xMSAA, but the minimum FPS was pretty harsh in some parts whilst recording..
Add 5-10fps due to recording.
I said "future proof" because we all know gaming requirements go up, (look at crysis)
i said "on some games" what games are you playing?, and you never know, you might have the want and money sometime to add more monitors, where thus, more Vram is useful.
2560x1440 and 4K res AVP maxed out with full AA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aQCQIUYvOs
Single monitor gaming needs a maximum of 2GB, unless all you masturbate over is extremely modded Skyrim....
That is it...
Ive seen my BF3 use up 1500MB of Vram at 1080P when i play it maxed out, and thats a game from 2011, so id say that 2GB for 1080p will soon be a limiting factor for graphics cards.
Thank you.
"will soon"
Does no one want to future proof their stuff?
When games use more than 1536mb at 1080p, we will have hit a whole new era of GPU's.... that is why it really is a small issue.
Thanks for all the responses i'm gonna go with the 7950, not just because its the better card but because on the website I'm looking at it comes with a code for crysis 3 and bioshock infinite and after selling that code I will end up having spent less money on a better card.
I'm also new to this site and am astonished by how helpful everyone is thankyou to everyone who commented :)