This.
At similar price levels, the choice b/t a GTX 560 and a Radeon 5870 is an easy one, and Newegg knows it won't sell too many more 5870s except to buyers who have a strong AMD preference or to people who already own one or more 5870s, and that's a much smaller subset of the GPU market compared the amount of people looking to buy a new card.
When I heard plummet I was excited thinking you meant $150-180
They've been this price for awhile now =/
They're very sweet cards but i'm eventually going to throw them on the classifieds and pickup a 580. I've always wanted a 580. I just can't make myself pull the trigger on one.
But wouldn't a single 580 be slower?...
The two 5870s linked by the op do not have voltage control making them worthless if you plan on over clocking
My Vapor-x will still do about 950MHz, I cannot change the voltage... that is game stable, but Youtube/Flash vids crash. It will do 900Mhz completely stable.
Interesting. A number of us HD58xx users have been mentioning this problem on the forum lately. Flash videos cause driver crashes (not CTD or blue screens). I just rolled back to Catalyst 10.6 and loosened the timings on my desktop memory, which apparently has some connection to the driver crashes, according to XFX. You might try that to see if it's really your 950 core causing the problem. I'd bet that it's not, as a core that's too high would probably crash games as well.
My Vapor-x will still do about 950MHz, I cannot change the voltage... that is game stable, but Youtube/Flash vids crash. It will do 900Mhz completely stable.
But, this is a factory overclock to 870MHz, I read somewhere that they give it a nudge in voltage from the factory and of course the cooler is better.
But you are right in regards to the bigger overclocks we see on reference cards, we will not be seeing any 1GHz+ clock speeds on these non-reference cards.
I'm running my DDR2 4-4-4-12 at 5-5-5-15 and 2.1 volts, same problem. I know this because my memory defaults to those speeds and I never change it as I didn't notice any difference when I have tightened the timing up. Thanks for the suggestion though.
youtube crashes my 5850 all the time, usually its when i have a game going on and i alt tab to view a youtube vid someone msg'd me
Hold on a sec...your GPU shouldn't even be at 3d clocks when watching flash videos. It should be at 400/900 (that's what I was at when I'd experience driver crashes).
Verdict: NOT your overclock!!!
(Sorry the memory timing suggestion doesn't apply though...try older driver perhaps.)
You are right... but it seems to somehow be related to the overclock. In Afterburner I can move the slider to, say, 940MHz and games/furmark are fine. But watching a Youtube video may give me a few seconds of playback, then the display driver stops responding and recovers, then the video picks up from the point the display driver stopped responding but there is no video... just green where the video should be playing. If I back the overclock down to 870MHz I have none of these issues. So while it may not be that my card is not stable technically, I know backing down the overclock resolves my issues. What the true cause is behind the scenes, I wish I knew.
These are exactly the symptoms I had, including the green screen. I backed off my memory timings and rolled back the driver to 10.6 and it fixed the problem (so far as I was able to tell in one night of watching hulu videos).
I'm guessing AMD doesn't know what's going either behind the scenes, otherwise there'd be a solution to this that doesn't require the consumer to change all sorts of settings to watch 360p videos, for crying out loud.
Well, we've got similar systems (other than the CPU). Try an older driver and loosen the timings below what you think you need. The difference for you versus SlowSpyder is that your GPU might remain at 3d clocks when you switch over from a game - that might mean you have an unstable OC.
Interesting. A number of us HD58xx users have been mentioning this problem on the forum lately. Flash videos cause driver crashes (not CTD or blue screens). I just rolled back to Catalyst 10.6 and loosened the timings on my desktop memory, which apparently has some connection to the driver crashes, according to XFX. You might try that to see if it's really your 950 core causing the problem. I'd bet that it's not, as a core that's too high would probably crash games as well.
Thanks for the heads up on the 10.6 drivers. I have a 5870 in my not often used lan box but I want it to be as stable as possible.
As for the topic at hand I still think it's a toss up based on preferences (between the 560 and 5870). Assuming the 560 in that comparison graph is not running 1GHz (safe assumption since it's 15% slower than the 570 and it would not be at that clock) I would say the 560 would beat the 5870. However, this alone does not make it a good choice as the 5870 is $50-70 cheaper than the 1GHz versions (AR) so there is a price/performance issue. The second thing that could tilt in the 560 favor would be the known tessellation weakness of the 5 series cards. Does this mean much in todays games? No, not really. Even the infamous Hawx 2 is still very playable at just about any res with the 5870 though the fps is much lower. However, given the nature of progression we can expect many new games to use tessellation (to a greater or lesser extent) and eventually the 5870 my render games unplayable with this turned on.
All that being said the 560 was not available when I paid $300 for my 5870 (mid December) and had it been I still would have gone for the 5870 but only barely. Mainly because I don't care about tessellation on my lan box... that and I received a 1TB Seagate and a Corsair TX650 included in that $300 price tag
Do the 11.1 drivers offer tessellation control on the 5870? If so you can turn it down to manageable levels for the 5870. It's capable of rendering any tessellation levels you might need.
At this price unless you are in the market for a gtx 580 or 6970, this is the card to buy.
The two 5870s linked by the op do not have voltage control making them worthless if you plan on over clocking
Sub-200 and I may go tri-fire.
You can pencil mod to raise voltage. There is a page in italian showing exactly how to do it.
He got his 5870 over 1000 MHz, and suggests using 1.25V on the stock cooler, but get aftermarket cooling if you go over 1.25V.
Do you have the link?
Here is the link for using a pencil for a voltmod/pencil mod to increase the voltage on non-reference 5870 cards like the Sapphire on sale for under $200 (should also work on 5830 and 5850):
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?t=2187874
It's in italian, but if you use Chrome you can auto-translate.
The link has nice pictures for where you shade with the pencil (between the green and yellow - see website to identify where this uP6213 voltage control chip is located on the board). I saw another site where the guy penciled between the solder bumps on top of the resistor marked with only a yellow square - apparently it can work, but I think you get finer control going between the yellow/green markings.
Note: This pencil mod for 5870 cards works on the non-reference 5830 cards as well - I successfully got my Gigabyte 5830 over 1000 MHz GPU using this technique before I sold it and got my $200 non-reference Sapphire 5870. You just have to identify the voltage control chip, and find its feedback pin, then shade with a pencil between that feedback pin and ground. The more you shade the more voltage you'll get. If you shade too much you could force the card to throttle itself due to excessive heat, or even refuse to load windows if it's way way too much and overheats right at boot-up before the auto-fan can kick in. If so, just get the eraser and lighten the shading.
BTW at stock voltage, my card can run 900 GPU/1300 MEM and stays at ~70 degrees when on auto-fan control and using Furmark to really push the temp. So there is quite a bit of headroom on the stock cooler/auto-fan setting to work with increasing the voltage.
I think these non-reference boards are designed to have a convenient location where the feedback pin (yellow) and a ground pin (green) are right next to each other, because you would normally use those nodes to put a trimmer resistor for fine feedback adjustment, but instead of a resistor you use the graphite from a pencil. Easy to remove completely or reduce the conductivity if you shade too much - simply erase. Note - I had to use a mechanical pencil because my regular pencil was not sharp enough to fit between the two solder bumps - it's extremely small dimensions and the pic really blows things up huge for clarity.