The Gaming PC Building/Upgrade Thread

[Garcian Smith]

Twistedpixel said:

 

It also says 'discontinued' in the description on Cnet.com when I looked it up. Besides this, whether or not something has a 1 year, a 3 year or a 5 year warranty does not make it crap or good quality. The Xbox 360 comes with a 3 year warranty. It also didn't stop you from recomending the cheapest motherboard and graphics card you could find. 

those 80mm fans aren't going to kill anyone, especially if they are attached to the motherboard fan controls. The cases are listed as having 120mm fans as well btw.

80mm Fans	1 x 80mm Side Blue LED Fan 1 x 80mm Side Cooling Fan
120mm Fans	1 x 120mm Front Intake Fan 1 x 120mm Rear Exhaust Fan

The assertion that an HD5750 can't take advantage of 1GB is false. There are several games. and these are increasing with time where 1GB shows a clear advantage over 512MB.

The assertion that the HD 5750 cannot take advantage of Direct X 11 is also false. Compute shaders are more efficient at running advanced shader programs. These shaders will also run on the HD 4850 but at higher computational cost. The 4850 will have to emulate DX11 whereas the 5750 will have native support. Direct X 11 games run faster on Direct X 11 hardware.

What are the advantages of the card I listed?

1. Fan control, the one you listed just goes one speed. (You mentioned noise)

2. Card quality.

3. Lower power consumption, lower (system) noise.

4. Supports advanced features like Direct X 11

5. Has twice as much ram, so therefore is future proofed.

6. Overclocks extremely well if someone so chose.

 

Mobos and graphics cards are not nearly as manufacturer-dependant as power supplies. The best PSU manufacturers will place a 5-year warranty on their PSUs because they know they're making a quality product. The worst will only provide a one-year death sentence warranty. This is a well-documented fact.

Graphics cards, on the other hand, are built to manufacturer (and that means ATI and NVidia's) specs. The only difference is the cooling unit and the number of video-out ports.

I don't recommend cheap cases with multiple 80mm fans because cheap 80mm fans are WAY more likely to be noisy than cheap 120mm fans. It's not devastating, but it can make a lot of difference.

As for the 5750: A quick Google search led me to some benchmarks that rate it at 20.6 average FPS on Stalker: Call of Pripyat at 1680x1050 w/4x AA and an average of 32.7 FPS on DIRT 2 at 1680x1050 with no AA (turning on AA, it's assumed, would drop it from "just playable" into unplayable framerates.) That's two out of the three currently released DirectX 11 games out there. While it's true that DX11 games probably won't be fully optimized for the standard for another year or more, that's all the more reason to just buy DX10 now and upgrade later down the line.

As for the rest of your points...

RAM: Even a 256-bit card like the 4850 does not have enough bandwidth to fully access 1 GB of GDDR3 memory most of the time. The 5750 is only a 128-bit card, but its GDDR5 memory means that it can better utilize that extra 512. (Not that you can find a 512MB 5750 anymore in the first place) Either way, the extra 512 doesn't matter for a 4850.

Fan Noise: This chart shows that there's no significant difference in noise between any of ATI's video cards (scroll down the page a bit).

Power consumption: Unless you have special needs, this doesn't matter.

Overclocking: Both do so extremely well. You might be able to get a little more juice out of the 5750 with stock cooling, though.

That's not to say that the 5750 is a bad card, of course. In fact, it's a very good one for 1680x1050 and lower resolutions. It just doesn't capture the price:performance "sweet spot" nearly as well as the 4850 does.