ATI vs NVIDIA for Multiboxing

[Slats]

Hi all,

So my GTX 280 is having some problems. After about 8 months of use I'm starting to get pink/purple/blue/green flickering screens of death upon starting windows or entering a 3D game. It might run fine for a week, or it might crash 12 times in a row entering Windows.

I've tested my RAM, cleaned out my case, checked all my cooling and made adjustments. I do not overclock at all. I'm running a Asus P5Q Motherboard, 8GB RAM, Q9550 and a Creative PCI-E X-Fi.

Doing alot of googling and it seems alot of other people are having the same problems. I run two displays at 1920x1200 and when it works I totally love the card.

So I was looking at getting either a GTX 295 or one of the ATI Cards. However I've been out of the ATI game for a very very long time so know little about them. Looking at random 3D Mark Charts they seem to be a little behind the high GTX 200 Series cards but most of these tests are in FPS or 3D Mark not boxing 5x WoW on one machine.

So far the pros for ATI are that they are alot cheaper but I need to know whats comparable to what - is a HD 4890 the equivilent to a GTX 295? I'm thinking I should be looking at cards with alot of video memory so thats why these two in paticular interest me.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated - also I'm happy to wait a few months or just buy the ATI card for now if a whole new generation of stuff is coming really soon.

-Slats

[moog]

Those weird pink/green screens are usually video card component temperature related... if it has only recently started doing it and is getting worse then it could either mean that a component is starting to fail or that the GPU cooling is failing.

Have you pulled out the video card to check the fan/cooling ducts, as it's amazing how much dust gets sucked through there and they can clog up - I had a 7800 start to fail the same way a couple of years back and although the fan was still turning the ducts were completely full of dust - had to remove the cover and hoover it out.

My current 260GT is also starting to give me pink/green death screens and it's only a couple of months old. Using FurMark, I've determined that this is temperature related (75C and it goes). I had been using the EVGA tool to automatically control the fan speed but I've now swapped to RivaTuner and have the fan at 40% on boot and 100% as soon as I hit 70C. I'm limping along like this, for now, but will have to RMA the card when I get a chance.

[Whowantstoknow]

ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 should be out this week so you may want to hold off until you see some benches

[Ess]

ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 should be out this week so you may want to hold off until you see some benches

Here are some details... which should give an idea of their performance:

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/3200/57344827z.jpg

[jstanthr]

no matter what ive tried, ive always had bad luck out of ati cards, on my current motherboard, it may be because its using an nvidia chipset, i dunno. but imo nvidia all the way, the 300 class nvidia cards should be ready 1st quarter next year, their first trial batches were utter failures, but every time they do a die shrink thats common.

[Coltimar]

I have a 1GB 9600GT and an ATI 3850 512MB. I keep telling myself the 3850 is the best card but multiboxing but I haven't had time to try it out. Anyone use both of these cards?

[Dasana]

I gave up on ATI after I had an X1300 fail and then the 2nd one I'd get all these red pixels in WoW. Only got them in WoW though. Checked the forums and everyone said you have to run the old drivers, just keep going backwards till you find one that works.
Screw that, went and got an 8600GT. I was a die-hard ATI fan, I'm leary to go back now though.

[Otlecs]

I can't offer any empirical performance measurements, but I had an absolutel nightmare of a time with the drivers for the last (and only!) pair of ATI cards I used, and their support left me totally cold. I ended up using only one card and then eventually just threw them both away (close to €1000 worth of cards at the time) and bought nVidia instead.

I won't touch ATI with a barge-pole ever again, but that's entirely down to my personal experience with them.

[Slats]

Thanks for all your experiences with the various cards.

My card only has this problem starting up from a cold start. Once its been on awhile it runs perfectly fine. This leads me to suspect its nothing to do with the temp as it gets to like 70C boxing WoW and this seems acceptable for a GTX280 - I had alot of older cards that run alot hotter. (7800GTX in SLI ugggh).

[Altsoba]

Damn :/ it's even harder to decide now . Building a new machine and everything is settled except video card.

295GTX or 5870.... omg...

Anyone has a positive remark on ati? ^^