Hardware review site

[IslandBoy77]

Hi all

I found this useful website today:

http://www.techpowerup.com/

Of special interest was reviews and comparisons for video cards. Unfortunately, they don't use FSX as one of their benchmarks, but a fair picture can still be had from the results - at least to some degree.

I found 2 of the conclusion criteria of note: Performance per watt (of power) and Performance per $. The review that particularly sparked my interest was this one: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powerco...PCS_Plus/1.html Near the bottom of the page is a drop-down menu that allows one to select one of the 33 web pages included in the review of this card.

[Ian Warren]

Interesting to see how cheap many of the G/cards have drop into peoples price range , it is a pity FSX is not used to test benchmarks

[IslandBoy77]

QUOTE (Ian Warren @ Nov 10 2010, 01:47 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interesting to see how cheap many of the G/cards have drop into peoples price range , it is a pity FSX is not used to test benchmarks

Bear in mind that all the prices they quote as USD, so one needs to at least double those for $NZD. When FSX was "younger", it featured in the benchmarking. But it's so long in the tooth now and well off the bulk of people's radars that I can understand why it doesn't get benchmarked.

[Ian Warren]

Exactly Pete , my 1.8 gig card was 4/500 $NZ over , a 2.0 gig now only a thousand , not needed but puts the 1.0igig into everyone,s price range which with good CPU and RAM .

[dbcunnz]

Hi Peter how does this compare with other Video cards http://www.geforce.com/#/Hardware/GPUs/geforce-gtx-580

Doug

[IslandBoy77]

Hey Doug. If you look at the comparisons you can see a good spread of different cards there. I'm not overly fussed with the 6850 per se - the 5850 & 5870 are generally faster, as are the 470 & 480. My main reason for mentioning this particular card is because it's one of the first of the 6800 series, is not overly expensive, and has an extremely good "$ for performance" rating (esp at 1680x1050 or 1920x1200). Also, the comparisons for other cards show roughly where most of the current popular ones sit.

If you check out this link http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/, the first 2 cards on the page (as of a few mins ago) are both flavours of 580 - that should get you started.

Here's the final quick-read conclusion:
Positive
* Substantial performance improvement over GTX 480
* Large reduction in power consumption vs. GTX 480
* Quieter than other cards in this performance class
* Native HDMI output
* Software voltage control
* Support for DirectX 11
* Support for CUDA / PhysX

Negative
* Still not as power efficient as AMD's designs
* Power draw limiter could complicate advanced overclocking
* Still limited to two active display outputs per card
* High price
* DirectX 11 relevance limited at this time