buying new pc under 60 -65 k

[V2IBH2V]

There's definitely NO NEED to go for an i7...
Invest in a HD 7970 instead!

There's definitely NO NEED to go for an i7...
Invest in a HD 7970 instead!

 

[vickybat]

Burt one thing, Nvidia's driver update can't improve is Compute Performance where HD 7950 is light years ahead of GTX 660 Ti. So even both the cards perform equally, my pick will be 7950 due to the Compute performance advantage. In my opinios, when Direct Compute based Gaming features will be more prominent in most games, 7950 will show some advantages due to its superior compute performance. Apart from couple of games like BF3, Civilizations, most of the DX11 features like FOV, DOF, AO etc are hybrid of Pixel shader and Direct Compute algorithms but in near future games will stress over the algorithm based on DirectCompute.

I don't think 7950 has a directcompute advantage over 660-ti or any kepler cards. I'm yet to see a game where GCN has any sort of advantage over kepler in directcompute tasks
that games utilize. Kepler has enough compute resources to harness directcompute api in games used for ambient occlusion and illumination features. far cry 3, hitman absolution are the latest games that use heavy directcompute features and i don't see GCN to have any advantage there.

Crysis 3 will also implement heavy AO using directcompute and i honestly don't think GCN cards will have an edge there. Game developers don't seem to force direct compute in game code to
harness the absolute compute potential of a gpu. This is still a long way to go when compute becomes norm.

GCN has MUCH better absolute compute potential than kepler in pure opencl based tasks but not in games where directcompute is used. Kepler doesn't have zero compute resources but has more than enough to harness directcompute api.

Here's a small example:

Spoiler

*i.imgur.com/ZVVEf.png

Drivers also seem to increase directcompute performance as seen here in case of 7950 around 10 fps.

Spoiler

*i.imgur.com/CdAuc.png

Here 660-ti is not miserabled by 7950 and besides , this is a synthetic benchmark. In realworld games, the implementation of DC is neutral
to take advantage of gpu's universally and not a particular architecture favoring absolute compute performance.

 

[d6bmg]

i5 3470 is not faster than i7 3770/3770k at stock.It might be a typo

Presence of HT doesn't help in case of gaming at all. And that's the reason.
Same happened between 2500K & 2600.

 

[gagan_kumar]

Ok I m seriously getting confused here....
HD 7950 or gtx 660 ti, have budget for both but some are saying that 7950 has no effective advantages over 660ti
also m thinking about i7 because I don't want to limit my self in terms of hardware performance as I have faced problems due to hardware limitations previously
also i7 will be better for other works that i have mentioned
and I think as new software and games are soon becoming multi threaded it will b advantage to go for it...
And ya finally i7 has more procc power than the rest...
So....

 

[The Incinerator]

Thanks for your help guys I m really concentrating on performance here ....
As I will update my desktop after like 8 years (its still operational) and I won't spend anything for at least 3-4 years..




please suggest a good alternative for 2tb hard disk as WD AV-GP 2 TB (WD20EURS) is primarily for security surveillance...

Well I did the math and the total with 3770 k is coming to 79k at the max..

well my question is if I go for this rig is the performance of 3770k rig with the worth 7-8k more than the 3770 rig

A security surveillance HDD lasts longer way longer than normal HDDs and it costs a bit more. It is a better alternative than the WD Green . Otherwise get a Seagate Barracuda or a Toshiba DT01ACA200

 

[vickybat]

With Nvidias new 310.70 driver update the gap has closed considerably in fact the GTX 660ti can also be safely recommended now. You wont go wrong with either cards.You never know as AMD can update their driver again and close that gap too.

Thanks for the review link buddy. Some new insights were unfolded in that link you gave speaking of which the smoothness of geforce gpu's other reviewers were speaking of were not false.
In fact they are completely true and also applicable to single gpu's too. Radeon cards seem to have a problem rendering frames in lesser time and this is where geforce seem to have a very strong advantage.

This conclusion says it all:

Spoiler

This certainly isn't the outcome we expected going into this little exercise. Given AMD's expanded involvement with game developers and a claimed across-the-board increase in driver performance, we expected the Radeon HD 7950 to assert itself as the best choice in its class. Instead, the Radeon's performance was hampered by delays in frame delivery across a number of games.

Our first instinct upon seeing these results was to wonder if we hadn't somehow misconfigured our test systems or had some sort of failing hardware. We test Nvidia and AMD GPUs on separate but identical systems, so to confirm our numbers, we switched the cards between the systems and re-tested. The Radeons still exhibited the same patterns of frame latency, with no meaningful change in the results. We wondered about the possibility of a problem with our Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X card or its Boost BIOS causing the slowdowns, but swapping in an older, non-Boost Radeon HD 7950 card from MSI produced very similar results.

We're also quite confident the problem isn't confined to a single set of drivers. You see, this article has had a long and difficult history; it was initially conceived as an update comparing Catalyst 12.8 and 12.11 beta drivers. However, driver updates from AMD and Nvidia, along with some additional game releases, caused us to start testing over again last week. I can tell you that we've seen the same spiky frame time plots in most of these games from three separate revisions of AMD's drivers—and, yes, Catalyst 12.11 is an improvement over 12.8, all told, even if it doesn't resolve the latency issues.

In the end, we're left to confront the fact that the biggest change from our prior graphics reviews was the influx of new games and new test scenarios that stress the GPUs differently than before. (The transition to Windows 8 could play some role here, but we doubt it.) For whatever reason, AMD's combination of GPU hardware and driver software doesn't perform as well as Nvidia's does in this latest round of games, at least as we tested them. That's particularly true when you focus on gameplay smoothness, as our latency-focused metrics tend to do.

Speaking of which, we can show you the overall performance picture using our famous value scatter plots. The performance results come from all seven of the games we tested, averaged via a geometric mean to reduce the impact of outliers. The prices come from current listings at Newegg for the exact cards we tested. As always, the most desirable combinations of price and performance will be located closer to the top left corner of the plot.

Pop back and forth between the 99th percentile and average FPS plots, and you'll see two different stories being told. The FPS average suggests near-parity performance between the 7950 and the GTX 660 Ti, with a tiny edge to the GeForce. The 99th percentile frame time, though, captures the impact of the Radeon's frame latency issues and suggests the GTX 660 Ti is easily the superior performer. That fact won't be a surprise to anyone who's read this far.

Armed with that info, we can dispense with the talk about game bundles, rebates, and pricing shenanigans that might shift the value math in favor of one camp or another. Instead, we have a crystal clear recommendation of the GeForce GTX 660 Ti over the Radeon HD 7950 for this winter's crop of blockbuster games. Perhaps AMD will smooth out some of the rough patches in later driver releases, but the games we've tested are already on the market—and Nvidia undeniably delivers the better experience in them, overall.

Besides, this test was done on 310.54 drivers. 310.70 has improved performance especially in hitman , far cry 3, bf3 ,ac3 and others. It seems 6 series seem to have smoothness even in single gpu mode as one can see in those graphs. Radeons have too many spikes and erratic behavior in overall frametime.


Imo, for fullhd gameplay, 660-ti is the better buy. 7950 for resolutions more than 1080p.

 

[gagan_kumar]

And 7970 is way too much costly than 7950
and if 7950 gives good payable fps at fhd resolution at high settings then there is no use of going with 7970...

Please correct me if I m wrong ...
Thanks in advance to all...

 

[vickybat]

Ok I m seriously getting confused here....
HD 7950 or gtx 660 ti, have budget for both but some are saying that 7950 has no effective advantages over 660ti

Buddy i suggest the 660-ti. Read the spoiler i posted or perhaps read the entire review that incinerator posted.
I feel 660-ti delivers a better experience as said by the reviewer and i think his points are justified. For fullhd gaming, go for 660-ti.

This is the card tested in that review - ZOTAC NVIDIA GTX660 Ti 2GB AMP! Edition ( ZT-60804-10P) 2 GB DDR5 Graphics Card: Flipkart.com

If you can grab this at the same price of a sapphire 7950 vapor-x, then get it eyes closed.

Or consider this:

GIGABYTE GRAPHIC CARD GTX 660 TI 2GB DDR5

 

[gagan_kumar]

Buddy i suggest the 660-ti. Read the spoiler i posted or perhaps read the entire review that incinerator posted.
I feel 660-ti delivers a better experience as said by the reviewer and i think his points are justified. For fullhd gaming, go for 660-ti.

This is the card tested in that review - ZOTAC NVIDIA GTX660 Ti 2GB AMP! Edition ( ZT-60804-10P) 2 GB DDR5 Graphics Card: Flipkart.com

If you can grab this at the same price of a sapphire 7950 vapor-x, then get it eyes closed.

Or consider this:

GIGABYTE GRAPHIC CARD GTX 660 TI 2GB DDR5

Well i have already read the whole review( i only posted it) but people told me 7950 has high vram and greater memory bandwidth so amd might release driver update and can close the hap b/w the two cards....

 

[d6bmg]

Ok I m seriously getting confused here....
HD 7950 or gtx 660 ti, have budget for both but some are saying that 7950 has no effective advantages over 660ti

Whichever you can get at cheaper price.

 

[Myth]

Well i have already read the whole review( i only posted it) but people told me 7950 has high vram and greater memory bandwidth so amd might release driver update and can close the hap b/w the two cards....

For your setup and needs, there may not be much of a noticeable difference.
So pick any.

 

[vickybat]

Well i have already read the whole review( i only posted it) but people told me 7950 has high vram and greater memory bandwidth so amd might release driver update and can close the hap b/w the two cards....

Oh my bad buddy. I thought it was incinerator.
Anyway, i don't think amd has any sort of driver advantage now and they are equal. Driver updates will be from both camps and the gap will always stay the same.
7950 having higher vram is true. It also has a wider bus, which is again true. But more bandwidth always producing better performance is not true. In fact kepler has a better memory transfer rate measuring 6.6GT/s for 660-ti. For 7950, its 5 GT/s.

In earlier reviews, most reviewers had spoken about the efficient memory management unit of kepler and how despite the gtx 680 having lower bus and vram than 7970 offers same AA performance even in resolutions higher than 1080p. Sometimes even better. So vram and buswidth matter but not always.

If you are gaming at 1080p , you will never miss the additional bus width and those tests you saw didn't benefit from 7950's 384bit bus at 1080p either.
Besides, there are new AA techniques like TXAA which don't depend on memory bus like MSAA. Crysis 3 will throw more light on this coz its the first shader heavy game to implement TXAA. Comparisons with MSAA in that game with TXAA will give a decisive conclusion about TXAA.

Finally, 2gb vram that 660-ti offers is more than enough for 1080p gameplay. If you can get a 660-ti below 20k, then grab it.

 

[gagan_kumar]

Ok I'll go with 7950 as I think that huge looking card at current technology must have some juice in it and amd will release some new drivers which i think will remove any difference b/w two...
As it is mentioned in the review that amd was also shocked to learn about the problem of hd 7950 and they are working on it...
Also because of its higher vram and mem bandwith it might have higher potential In near future with new drivers....
While I think the 660 has reached its limit in performance wid the new driver update....

any one from Bangalore please suggest me some
good shops around here (near SP road) as i m
new in Bangalore........

 

[Cilus]

Vicky, in evey post you're just referring two games Far Cry 3 and Hitman absolution. how can only two games be measure of performance anyway? the developers of Far Cry 3 has already admitted the fact about several bugs at the games resulting lower performance in AMD cards and they have released several updates to resolve it.
Consider other games like Crysis 2, BF3 or old Metro 2033 and even sleeping Dogs which also offer several DirectX 11 features and you will find HD 7950 still has performance edge.

 

[vkl]

Go for hd7950.Those spikes in frames are not that frequent with hd7950.These can be ironed out with a driver update.
HD7950 does let you play some titles with better image quality in games.
Even if we check two of the new games viz. Far cry 3 and Hitman absolution then also hd7950 makes sense.
In Far cry3 hd7950 was step above gtx660ti in image quality.

Spoiler

Quote by hardocp
Even though the GTX 660 Ti has the same clock speeds as the GTX 670, and the same CUDA core count, its lesser memory bandwidth and ROP count means we had to back off on Alpha to Coverage. We found that we could have 2X MSAA enabled at 1080p, but we had to turn off Alpha to Coverage completely. In doing so this allowed 2X MSAA to be playable. Otherwise, with Enhanced Alpha to Coverage it was not playable at 2X MSAA. Therefore, the aliasing quality is slightly less than the GTX 670 and HD 7950, but still higher than the 7870 as you will see below.

Also check Hitman Absolution:Hitman Absolution Performance comparison:1080p:highest playable settings

Spoiler

Quote by Hardocp
The AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost performed better at 1080p than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 did. It was 8.3% faster and averaged 45.8 FPS. When comparing these two video cards that normally provide equal performance, the advantage again goes to the AMD video card. The AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition was nearly playable by our standards at 1080p with 8X MSAA enabled. It averaged 37.1 FPS. The slowest video card at 1080p was the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti which averaged 31.7 FPS. We did not have an enjoyable time with the GeForce GTX 660 Ti at these settings, and found it extremely hard to maneuver through the entire mission. We don't recommend trying to run a GeForce GTX 660 Ti with 8X MSAA at 1080p.

Even hd7870 was better than gtx660-ti in it.HD7950 was well above gtx660-ti and provided the same-gameplay as gtx670 while getting a bit better frame-rates.
HD7950 makes more sense simply because of image quality levels that can be pushed with it while getting playable frames which would get more demanding with newer games.
The thing is with hd7950 one would be able to get higher frame-rates for a certain AA levels which maybe quite less in case of gtx660ti to be as playable/smooth
as hd7950.
In majority of games hd7950 is ahead of gtx660ti.

 

[vickybat]

Vicky, in evey post you're just referring two games Far Cry 3 and Hitman absolution. how can only two games be measure of performance anyway? the developers of Far Cry 3 has already admitted the fact about several bugs at the games resulting lower performance in AMD cards and they have released several updates to resolve it.
Consider other games like Crysis 2, BF3 or old Metro 2033 and even sleeping Dogs which also offer several DirectX 11 features and you will find HD 7950 still has performance edge.

No i did not. In fact that review had so many games including borderlands 2, medal of honour warfighter ( better than BF3 lookwise) , and lot others. Farcry 3 was not even tested in that review.

Go for hd7950.Those spikes in frames are not that frequent in single GPU configs.These can be ironed out with a driver update.
HD7950 does let you play some titles with better image quality in games.
Even if we check two of the new games viz. Far cry 3 and Hitman absolution then also hd7950 makes sense.
In Far cry3 hd7950 was step above gtx660ti in image quality.

Spoiler

Quote by hardocp
Even though the GTX 660 Ti has the same clock speeds as the GTX 670, and the same CUDA core count, its lesser memory bandwidth and ROP count means we had to back off on Alpha to Coverage. We found that we could have 2X MSAA enabled at 1080p, but we had to turn off Alpha to Coverage completely. In doing so this allowed 2X MSAA to be playable. Otherwise, with Enhanced Alpha to Coverage it was not playable at 2X MSAA. Therefore, the aliasing quality is slightly less than the GTX 670 and HD 7950, but still higher than the 7870 as you will see below.

Also check Hitman Absolution:Hitman Absolution Performance comparison:1080p:highest playable settings

Spoiler

Quote by Hardocp
The AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost performed better at 1080p than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 did. It was 8.3% faster and averaged 45.8 FPS. When comparing these two video cards that normally provide equal performance, the advantage again goes to the AMD video card. The AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition was nearly playable by our standards at 1080p with 8X MSAA enabled. It averaged 37.1 FPS. The slowest video card at 1080p was the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti which averaged 31.7 FPS. We did not have an enjoyable time with the GeForce GTX 660 Ti at these settings, and found it extremely hard to maneuver through the entire mission. We don't recommend trying to run a GeForce GTX 660 Ti with 8X MSAA at 1080p.

Even hd7870 was better than gtx660-ti in it.HD7950 was well above gtx660-ti and provided the same-gameplay as gtx670 while getting a bit better frame-rates.
HD7950 makes more sense simply because of image quality levels that can be pushed with it while getting playable frames which would get more demanding with newer games.
The thing is with hd7950 one would be able to get higher frame-rates for a certain AA levels which maybe quite less in case of gtx660ti to be as playable/smooth
as hd7950.
In majority of games hd7950 is ahead of gtx660ti.

Buddy that is the reference GPU. The link that op provided had two custom gpu's and that zotac card had significant higher clocks, a good cooler and an ideal form factor.
Hardocp compares reference 660-ti with 7950-boost and thus it has an edge. Factory overclocked 660-ti's like the zotac will have good AA performance at 1080p as we had seen in several custom 680 and 670 gpu's in many hardocp reviews.

The link that op provided compared an equal match coz both were custom gpu's and the best to come out of their respective stables. 7950 has better AA performance at high resolutions but not that an advantage in 1080p. Besides that smoothness factor is hindering my decision to favour 7950.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Smoother Than AMD Radeon HD 7950 – Video

This thing is posted everywhere. Radeons seem to have a much lower frametime which hampers its smoothness. How can frametime be increased by driver updates??
Geforce and not only 660-ti seem to have a big lead here and this also results in lower stuttering in sli and not only adaptive v-sync. I'm waiting for more reviewers to do a thorough comparison.

 

[gagan_kumar]

Any one from bangalore?? please reply

 

[vickybat]

Send a pm to forum member "d3p". He's from bangalore and can guide you to various shops. I think you should contact golcha computers at sp road. I had been to sp road before when i lived in bangalore but can't guide you to any specific shops.

 

[gagan_kumar]

Thanks all for ur time and good suggestions.

Send a pm to forum member
"d3p". He's from bangalore and can guide you to various shops. I think you should contact golcha computers at sp road. I had been to sp road before when i lived in bangalore but can't guide you to any specific shops.

thanks man that is really helpful..

 

[vkl]

No i did not. In fact that review had so many games including borderlands 2, medal of honour warfighter ( better than BF3 lookwise) , and lot others. Farcry 3 was not even tested in that review.



Buddy that is the reference GPU. The link that op provided had two custom gpu's and that zotac card had significant higher clocks, a good cooler and an ideal form factor.
Hardocp compares reference 660-ti with 7950-boost and thus it has an edge. Factory overclocked 660-ti's like the zotac will have good AA performance at 1080p as we had seen in several custom 680 and 670 gpu's in many hardocp reviews.

The link that op provided compared an equal match coz both were custom gpu's and the best to come out of their respective stables. 7950 has better AA performance at high resolutions but not that an advantage in 1080p. Besides that smoothness factor is hindering my decision to favour 7950.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Smoother Than AMD Radeon HD 7950 – Video

This thing is posted everywhere. Radeons seem to have a much lower frametime which hampers its smoothness. How can frametime be increased by driver updates??
Geforce and not only 660-ti seem to have a big lead here and this also results in lower stuttering in sli and not only adaptive v-sync. I'm waiting for more reviewers to do a thorough comparison.

Mate,the boost is available for all reference hd7950s.A reference gtx660ti was compared to a normal hd7950 not a factory overclocked one.I don't see any unfair comparison here.
A sapphire vapor-x hd7950 can be found for ~22k which can also give the other custom gtx660Ti a run for there money.

Now,the gameplay with Hitman Absolution was quite good with hd7950 but was not good with gtx660ti.Nowhere did they report of bad game play experience with hd7950.
HD7950 was smoother in Hitman absolution,you can't override that fact.Another thing that ~50% deficit in fps to hd7950 at highest playable settings can't be compensated by a custom card by much.
If gtx660ti can be overclocked so can be an hd7950.
In Far Cry3 also nothing dramatically wrong with hd7950 was reported by hardocp.


Talking about the latency spikes that are seen in case of hd7950.First of all they are not that frequent in all titles.
Even in the test by techreport that can be seen in some games that it is not that frequent in every game.
In the games in that article you will notice that the latency for hd7950 were different in windows7 and windows8 often lower in windows8.
Check this
You can see with different catalyst drivers the average latency was different.This issue can be worked upon by drivers.

AMD has admitted to this issue and has said it would work upon it.

Spoiler

Quote from techreport from the article ""Does the Radeon HD 7950 stumble in Windows 8"
AMD spokesman Antal Tungler told us that our article had "raised some alarms" internally at the company, and he said they hoped to have some answers for us "before the holiday." He also noted that AMD is continually working to improve its drivers and that the 7950 does perform well in FPS-based benchmarks

Quote from techreport from the article "Radeon HD 7950 vs. GeForce GTX 660 Ti revisited"
We're also quite confident the problem isn't confined to a single set of drivers. You see, this article has had a long and difficult history; it was initially conceived as an update comparing Catalyst 12.8 and 12.11 beta drivers. However, driver updates from AMD and Nvidia, along with some additional game releases, caused us to start testing over again last week. I can tell you that we've seen the same spiky frame time plots in most of these games from three separate revisions of AMD's drivers—and, yes, Catalyst 12.11 is an improvement over 12.8, all told, even if it doesn't resolve the latency issues.

Quote from techreport from the article "Radeon HD 7950 vs. GeForce GTX 660 Ti revisited"
Perhaps AMD will smooth out some of the rough patches in later driver releases

We have to see all aspects of the card and image quality level is also one of them and can't be overlooked.
HD7950 clearly maintains the lead in outright performance and image quality levels.
Smoothness is subjective.
"With hd7950 one would be able to get higher frame-rates for a certain AA levels which maybe quite less in case of gtx660ti to be as playable/smooth as hd7950".
For games like Far Cry3 radeon was better as it could go a step up in image quality.
In Hitman Absolution without doubt HD7950 was smoother than gtx660ti at 1080p with highest im-game settings.It was more playable.