- ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT VS NVIDIA 1050 TI DRIVERS
- ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT VS NVIDIA 1050 TI PC
- ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT VS NVIDIA 1050 TI WINDOWS 8
Also, its 6.6 GT/s memory is 10% faster than most of its competitors, even though they cost as much as 350 bucks. In fact, the Zotac’s boost frequency is one of the highest among the GTX 660 Ti cards available. The GTX 660 Ti AMP! is currently going for $299.99, even though it’s a hot-clocked card. There’s something to be said for keeping costs down, though. The card is only 6.75″ long, giving it a distinctive miniature vibe we like to call “low BOM cost chic.” This baby sports Zotac’s charming “angry bumblebee” look but is scaled down massively from its GTX 670 and 680 brethren.
We’ve pitted the HD 7950 Vapor-X against our returning champ from the GeForce side, the Zotac GTX 660 Ti AMP. However, only a few other cards can match the Vapor-X’s 950MHz boost clock, and they all cost more than the Sapphire. Looking over the listings at Newegg, 7950 cards are going for as little as $299.99. If you buy two, AMD CEO Rory Read will come to your house and personally serenade you from outside of your window. There’s also a $20 mail-in rebate attached right now. The HD 7950 Vapor-X sells for $329.99 at Newegg and comes with a bunch of inducements to buy, including copies of Sleeping Dogs, Hitman: Absolution, and Far Cry 3, along with a 20%-off coupon for Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Although it sticks out maybe a quarter-inch beyond the 10.5″ length of the card itself, there’s no way that thing shows up on radar.
ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT VS NVIDIA 1050 TI PC
The shroud that covers the whole assembly may be the finest expression of the F-117 Stealth fighter look that has rampaged through the enthusiast PC hardware scene in recent years. Sapphire’s Vapor-X cooler sprouts quad heatpipes that snake into a large array of cooling fins situated beneath dual fans. The 7950 Vapor-X is our first look at a retail product with the new Boost BIOS, and it ups the ante by sporting a peak Boost clock of 950MHz, 25MHz above stock. Pictured above is the Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X, our representative from the Radeon camp for this little hoedown. Are we still at rough parity, or have AMD’s bold moves allowed it to push into the lead? We’ve deployed our infamous “inside the second” testing methods with a host of the latest games in order to find out.
ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT VS NVIDIA 1050 TI WINDOWS 8
What’s more, Windows 8 is out, and we’ve transitioned our test rigs to the new operating system.Īdd up all of these changes, and you have a recipe for realignment in ongoing battle for GPU supremacy. AMD tells us it has employed new insights in tuning its relatively young GCN architecture.
ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT VS NVIDIA 1050 TI DRIVERS
New drivers often bring performance gains for individual games, but general improvements of that magnitude are uncommon. Cramming that sort of gaming goodness into the box with a graphics card certainly changes the value equation.Īs if that weren’t enough, AMD has also released Catalyst 12.11 beta drivers that promise a roughly 15% across-the-board performance increase for its 7000-series Radeons. In fact, accentuating its stronger ties to game developers, AMD has taken to bundling a trio of these games with its Radeon HD 7950 cards. AMD’s newfound aggressiveness means many of these games are part of its Gaming Evolved program, so they should run very well on Radeon graphics cards-and maybe, you know, not so well on those pesky GeForces. Of course, we have a new crop of games for the holiday season, headlined by titles like Borderlands 2, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Assassin’s Creed III. We’re vaguely astonished by how much things have changed since then. The result was an incredibly slight win for the GTX 660 Ti on points, but in the end, we threw our hands up and said the differences mattered little. At the last minute, the Radeon team rolled out a new BIOS that added dynamic clock speeds to the 7950. AMD, however, has been unusually feisty lately, and it had other ideas.
Nvidia had the advantage going in, since it was facing off against an already established competitor it knew what the GTX 660 Ti had to do in order to win. That match-up ushered in a new generation of competition among ridiculously powerful video cards at around 300 bucks. Today, another chapter in the story unfolds.ĭoesn’t seem that long ago, back in August, when the GeForce GTX 660 Ti first hit the scene and squared off against the Radeon HD 7950. The skirmishes are ongoing, but the victor is never decided for long. Ah, it’s the eternal battle, the unending duopoly duel: GeForce versus Radeon, Radeon versus GeForce.