Help me getting a tempie card until Polaris.

[Inimigor]

Ok, I have 3 price brackets for now,

I sold my 7970's for a new GPU, either RX480-ish or green team's equivalent. So now, I'm rocking a 9600GSO I had for years only for outputing monitors, but since I live in Brazil, cards take a bit more time to be available here, so I allowed myself to buy an used, probably not so great of a deal card, to still game while I wait.

For reference on pricing, 1 US Dollar = 3,41 Reais
                                         1 Real = 0.29 US Dollars

Plus, mind you, the prices in Brazil for hardware are usually higher than in other countries.

I have 3 possible routes:

The "Cheapest thing that (hopefully) can handle newer titles".
This 5850 for R$ 220,00 (US$ 65)

Spoiler

The safer "mid-point" one:
This 2GB 6870, for R$350 (US$ 100)

Spoiler

 

The "Screw this, I'll get a good card and deal with this decision later":
This GTX 670 for R$550 reais (US$160... The price of a 2GB 750ti here)

Spoiler

PS: There's also this guy selling a 580 for R$500, with an waterblock, and I already have a custom loop, should I be considering it? LOL.

Spoiler

http://produto.mercadolivre.com.br/MLB-746965044-placa-de-video-evga-gtx-580-superclocked-watercooler-block-_JM

 

[Senzelian]

If you are able to buy a $160 card now and a $200 card later on, then why don't you just buy a GTX 1070 now? 

[alphaproject]

Dang, none of those are good options because you could have just hung on to the 7970 for a few more weeks. Unless you had to sell them now or risk losing more value, not sure...

 

The 670 is the lowest I'd want as a temp card... so I assume you would just sell it, or keep it as a backup card?  Then still buy the 480?

 

There is no 480 = on Nvidia's side except older Maxwell cards.

 

So by buying the 670, you could just buy a 970 used and be done with it now.

 

Look into used 970 or 980 cards because whatever those cost in Brazil is how much the 480 is worth. Supposedly the 480 is "as good" as the 980 but for $199 plus tax. Or $239 for the 8 Gb version.

[Inimigor]

34 minutes ago, alphaproject said:

Dang, none of those are good options because you could have just hung on to the 7970 for a few more weeks. Unless you had to sell them now or risk losing more value, not sure...

 

The 670 is the lowest I'd want as a temp card... so I assume you would just sell it, or keep it as a backup card?  Then still buy the 480?

 

There is no 480 = on Nvidia's side except older Maxwell cards.

 

So by buying the 670, you could just buy a 970 used and be done with it now.

 

Look into used 970 or 980 cards because whatever those cost in Brazil is how much the 480 is worth. Supposedly the 480 is "as good" as the 980 but for $199 plus tax. Or $239 for the 8 Gb version.

I sold a Crossfire, to a single person, he was like "Ok, I want, but I want to take it, like... now." I had them watercooled, and put them back on air in a few minutes.

And I know the 480 is not a new card, it's an older, I'm used to hardware from the 6800 XT era and on.

IF I get the de 670 I'd either sell it as soon as I get the RX 480, or put it in my HTPC.

The 970 used is still over R$1.000 so, not exactly a good deal, considering a brand new one is still ~R$ 1.300 lots of people are buying them used, to the price is still up.


 

[Inimigor]

39 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

If you are able to buy a $160 card now and a $200 card later on, then why don't you just buy a GTX 1070 now? 

Because the 200 dollars card will probably cost close to 500 dollars when it gets to brazil

[Imakuni]

@Inimigor Wrong place to ask. You should have made the question here rather than in the LTT forum. This community's advices tend to be rather... inappropriate for the Brazillian market.

 

At any rate, do you REALLY need to buy a GPU? Can't you just hold on to your potato one and cut out the gaming for a while? This is the best path to take, honestly. If you are that impacient and can't hold yourself, though, I guess you'll need the horsepower of the 670, so go for that.

[Inimigor]

7 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Would be great if you could help OP find a 1070 being sold for USD $360 in his country.

I'm sure it can be had for that price in the US, thus should cost the same in Brazil.

Yeah, the 1070 is still not available in brazil, and pricing is not known exactly, but the 1080 is priced on the "pre-order" on stores for R$3.800 ( U$ 1.100) So the 1070 is certainly going to be priced A LOT higher than 350-ish dollars.

[A/C]

Nah man, just wait for 20 days or so. Play something that can run on that 9600, plenty of good indie titles and hl2 engine-based games around...

 

Don't waste your money on any of that crap, save it to invest in a better card in the end.

[Inimigor]

1 minute ago, huilun02 said:

I know what you should buy.

A one way flight out of Brazil

I only wish man. Just getting the documentation to go out of here would cost me ~5k dollars.

[Inimigor]

5 minutes ago, A/C said:

Nah man, just wait for 20 days or so. Play something that can run on that 9600, plenty of good indie titles and hl2 engine-based games around...

 

Don't waste your money on any of that crap, save it to invest in a better card in the end.

Yeah, I got in my vacation from work in the beggining of this month. Beat all the older games that used to run here. Played every game i had as "saving for when I has no GPU"
 

7 minutes ago, Imakuni said:

@Inimigor Wrong place to ask. You should have made the question here rather than in the LTT forum. This community's advices tend to be rather... inappropriate for the Brazillian market.

 

At any rate, do you REALLY need to buy a GPU? Can't you just hold on to your potato one and cut out the gaming for a while? This is the best path to take, honestly. If you are that impacient and can't hold yourself, though, I guess you'll need the horsepower of the 670, so go for that.

I just got the last achievement on Portal, nothing else to play D: I've been trying to make do with quake 3 and some seriously-impossible-to-play-online rocket league.

PS: @Imakuni I posted on another forum from Brazil, Adrenaline, but haven't got many responses so far hahaha, I'll try to post there too.

[Senzelian]

9 minutes ago, Inimigor said:

Because the 200 dollars card will probably cost close to 500 dollars when it gets to brazil

ouch... Same here in europe. Prices are terrible here. 

[Inimigor]

3 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Ya know, tell them its just a one week 'holiday trip'

If you need to spend $5k just for a flight that's just... unheard of 

Hahaha, yeah, the passport still costs $700, but I've just finished college, and I am looking for a college somewhere out of Brazil, maybe get some more schooling for a better chance in the market I've just graduated on System Analysis and Development, basically a S***load of Java & PHP programming, software planning and A LOT of "filler" classes.

[don_svetlio]

@Inimigor

As a former user of the 6850 (about 15% slower than the 6870 and on par with the 5850) - it should work fine for MOST games assuming you are good with 30fps low settings in games like Witcher 3. They will run but it won't be perfect. If it has 2GB of VRAM you could crank a few texture and filtering settings up a bit with ease. It's not the best but by far not the worst. Perfect for waiting though Polaris is due in 9 days and the GPUs are being stocked in a lot of stores. Your call.

670 is old and from what I've been seeing lately it is not being actively supported that much anymore so performance will be meh. Not that good in terms of value.

the RX 480's announced MSRP is 200$ and I imagine 230$ for the 8GB model. Seems like good value. RX 470 is also an option for 149.99$ and 970-like performance.

As to the Maxwell options - avoid them. Horrible DX12 performance due to the cut-down nature of the architecture and lackluster compute. Buying a 970 now, even used, is like shooting yourself in the foot big time. Not to mention that the 3.5GB/4GB cards are proving bothersome as some games like Quantum Break force lower settings so as to fit in that VRAM limit. If you try and use max settings, even though the GPU can run them, the VRAM gets overloaded and massive stuttering occurs.

[A/C]

Crap  then I can't decide either, definately not the 5850, either the 6870 or the 670. A friend still runs a gigabyte 6850 1gb card and it runs 90% of the games. Don't expect to play gta V and Witcher 3 'tho

 

But yeah I'd prolly go with the 6870 2gig as a tempie right now, if nothing then because of the good price/perf, and the fact you can sell it more easily later. If the 6870 "runs" all of the games you need to run, then there's no point in dropping 60$ more for a 670 IMHO. I know we all want the better option, It's in our nature, but bear in mind that this is just a tempie for you and that you shouldn't waste any more money than you need to. Also it's a lot easier to re-sell a 6870 for a 100$ than a 670 for 160$.

 

 

[Inimigor]

2 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

@Inimigor

As a former user of the 6850 (about 15% slower than the 6870 and on par with the 5850) - it should work fine for MOST games assuming you are good with 30fps low settings in games like Witcher 3. They will run but it won't be perfect. If it has 2GB of VRAM you could crank a few texture and filtering settings up a bit with ease. It's not the best but by far not the worst. Perfect for waiting though Polaris is due in 9 days and the GPUs are being stocked in a lot of stores. Your call.

670 is old and from what I've been seeing is not being actively support that much anymore so performance will be meh. Not that good in terms of value.

the RX 480's announced MSRP is 200$ and I imagine 230$ for the 8GB model. Seems like good value. RX 470 is also an option for 149.99$ and 970-like performance.

As to the Maxwell options - avoid them. Horrible DX12 performance due to the cut-down nature of the architecture and lackluster compute. Buying a 970 now, even used, is like shooting yourself in the foot big time. Not to mention that the 3.5GB/4GB cards are proving bothersome as some games like Quantum Break force lower settings so as to fit in that VRAM limit. If you try and use max settings, even though the GPU can run them, the VRAM gets overloaded and massive stuttering occurs.

was not aware of all those issues with maxwell, wasn't planing on buying them anyway, but now I'm definitely not buying them.

[don_svetlio]

2 minutes ago, A/C said:

Crap  then I can't decide either, definately not the 5850, either the 6870 or the 670. A friend still runs a gigabyte 6850 1gb card and it runs 90% of the games. Don't expect to play gta V and Witcher 3 'tho

 

But yeah I'd prolly go with the 6870 2gig as a tempie right now, if nothing then because of the good price/perf, and the fact you can sell it more easily later. If the 6870 "runs" all of the games you need to run, then there's no point in dropping 60$ more for a 670 IMHO. I know we all want the better option, It's in our nature, but bear in mind that this is just a tempie for you and that you shouldn't waste any more money than you need to. Also it's a lot easier to re-sell a 6870 for a 100$ than a 670 for 160$.

 

 

I can run Witcher 3 on a 6850 1GB assuming I drop the res to 1600x900 - that keeps me above 30fps at all times. It's not that bad but not great either.

[A/C]

2 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

I can run Witcher 3 on a 6850 1GB assuming I drop the res to 1600x900 - that keeps me above 30fps at all times. It's not that bad but not great either.

Yeah of course it's possible, but I don't consider that to be an enjoiable experience. I say rather play through an older title, like witcher 1 EE or 2 EE in 1080p and then go over to withcher 3 when you upgrade.

[don_svetlio]

2 minutes ago, Inimigor said:

was not aware of all those issues with maxwell, wasn't planing on buying them anyway, but now I'm definitely not buying them.

Maxwell is a lot of smoke and mirrors in order to achieve that power draw at that manufacturing process. The scheduler on the chips is too weak to handle hardware-based A-sync shaders and they tried to mimic it via drivers but couldn't achieve satisfactory results. The end result being Maxwell chips performing the same under DX12 or slightly worse whereas Hawaii/Fiji/Tonga gain a good 30% under DX12 due to the 64+1 A-sync compute pipelines. Pascal is a modded version of Maxwell that handles software-based A-sync better but still nowhere near as well as the hardware-level support of GCN. Do remember, this particular feature of DX12 has been used by AMD before in Mantle (AMD's creation) and since the consoles are now their territory it is making it's way to 2/3 of the DX12 games coming out.

[Inimigor]

1 minute ago, don_svetlio said:

I can run Witcher 3 on a 6850 1GB assuming I drop the res to 1600x900 - that keeps me above 30fps at all times. It's not that bad but not great either.

 

3 minutes ago, A/C said:

Crap  then I can't decide either, definately not the 5850, either the 6870 or the 670. A friend still runs a gigabyte 6850 1gb card and it runs 90% of the games. Don't expect to play gta V and Witcher 3 'tho

 

But yeah I'd prolly go with the 6870 2gig as a tempie right now, if nothing then because of the good price/perf, and the fact you can sell it more easily later. If the 6870 "runs" all of the games you need to run, then there's no point in dropping 60$ more for a 670 IMHO. I know we all want the better option, It's in our nature, but bear in mind that this is just a tempie for you and that you shouldn't waste any more money than you need to. Also it's a lot easier to re-sell a 6870 for a 100$ than a 670 for 160$.

 

 

For now no need to max anything out, I think I'll go with the 6870, can deal with 30FPS and lower details & res, managed to run Orcs Must Die! here with 1024x768, lower settings and frequent dips below 30FPS, it was another game that I had no intention of playing anymore, but was one of borderline to run that I still had achievements to get hahaha. 

[don_svetlio]

2 minutes ago, A/C said:

Yeah of course it's possible, but I don't consider that to be an enjoiable experience. I say rather play through an older title, like witcher 1 EE or 2 EE in 1080p and then go over to withcher 3 when you upgrade.

30fps is perfectly playable. It's about the game, not the arbitrary number in the corner of the screen - 30fps is enough for it to feel smooth enough and not have irritating lag.

[Inimigor]

2 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

Maxwell is a lot of smoke and mirrors in order to achieve that power draw at that manufacturing process. The scheduler on the chips is too weak to handle hardware-based A-sync shaders and they tried to mimic it via drivers but couldn't achieve satisfactory results. The end result being Maxwell chips performing the same under DX12 or slightly worse whereas Hawaii/Fiji/Tonga gain a good 30% under DX12 due to the 64+1 A-sync compute pipelines. Pascal is a modded version of Maxwell that handles software-based A-sync better but still nowhere near as well as the hardware-level support of GCN. Do remember, this particular feature of DX12 has been used by AMD before in Mantle (AMD's creation) and since the consoles are now their territory it is making it's way to 2/3 of the DX12 games coming out.

Damn, that is a lot worse than I thought, considered buying a used 980 and call it a day (and use the remaining money to escape brazil :P) but, sweet baby jesus, that is some shady stuff!

[don_svetlio]

1 minute ago, Inimigor said:

Damn, that is a lot worse than I thought, considered buying a used 980 and call it a day (and use the remaining money to escape brazil :P) but, sweet baby jesus, that is some shady stuff!

It's fine for DX11, 10 and 9 but DX12 changes up the playing field quite a bit. Not to mention the RX 480's rumoured power draw is around 125W compared to the 180W of the 980 and 8GB of VRAM vs 4GB (4GB is quickly becoming the bare minimum for 1080p)

[Inimigor]

2 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

30fps is perfectly playable. It's about the game, not the arbitrary number in the corner of the screen - 30fps is enough for it to feel smooth enough and not have irritating lag.

Yeah, I have no marker of frames, but i could feel the dips when some kind of sudden load happened, such as explosions, too many orcs or traps. Still managed to make it to the last levels hahaha.

[A/C]

2 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

30fps is perfectly playable. It's about the game, not the arbitrary number in the corner of the screen - 30fps is enough for it to feel smooth enough and not have irritating lag.

 

You sound suspiciously like one of them console folk, we don't appreciate that kind around here

 

If it was like that I'd suggest OP sell his rig and buy a console  

 

But srsly, If you're gonna play Witcher 3, and you're buying the 480 why would you waste time playing it now in 1600x900 low when you can play it 1080 ultra in a couple of days?

 

You CAN, doesn't mean you should. 

 

It's a different situation than that you're in, it makes sense for you to play it because you're not upgrading as soon as he is (I'm guessing here, of course).

[don_svetlio]

1 minute ago, Inimigor said:

Yeah, I have no marker of frames, but i could feel the dips when some kind of sudden load happened, such as explosions, too many orcs or traps. Still managed to make it to the last levels hahaha.

That's caused by V-sync usually. When it drops bellow 60 on a 60Hz monitor V-sync cuts it in half and feels like jagged 30.

2 minutes ago, A/C said:

 

You sound suspiciously like one of them console folk, we don't appreciate that kind around here

 

If it was like that I'd suggest OP sell his rig and buy a console  

 

But srsly, If you're gonna play Witcher 3, and you're buying the 480 why would you waste time playing it now in 1600x900 low when you can play it 1080 ultra in a couple of days?

 

You CAN, doesn't mean you should. 

 

It's a different situation than that you're in, it makes sense for you to play it because you're not upgrading as soon as he is (I'm guessing here, of course).

I grew up on 10-15fps on an 800x600 screen. Believe me when I say this but 30fps at 1600x900 is absolutely fine by me. Not being able to afford a lot of hardware growing up (and even now) I don't mind low settings as long as I can play the game above 30fps. As I like to say, to each their own