Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
EQ2 when you crank up all the settings eats a sizeable amount of video capacity.
A couple things going on here. Your card you started out with was an EVGA "superclocked" model, which is their fancy way of saying "we overclocked the sh*t out of it, put a bigger than normal heat sync on it, and added faster than reference GDDR5 Ram" So your baseline card started out faster than a typical stock 460 GTX. Your new asus 570 GTX card is also designed to be overclocked, but ships at factory default voltages. Thats why they include that massive 3 decker fan contraption, but unless ou have already overclocked it, they are likely expecting you to adjust those settings. Be advised, that it is possible to melt a video card if you overclock it too high, though most of the newer ones have a failure mode that just resets it back to factory voltage and locks your computer up if you do go too high. The card itself should have came with some sort of overclocking / voltage tweak utility, though if you are like me you probably ignored it and grabbed the regular driver direct from nvidia.
The other thing that is going on, is the 570 GTX isn't that much faster of a card than the 460 GTX. It's mainly a smaller nanometer variant of the same CPU, which allowed them to take it up faster due to better heat dissipation, along with some improvements to the baseboard chipset, and much more and faster ram. They also did some firmware tweaks to the Fermi engine, which EQ2 doesn't fully leverage. It's hard to see where the model divides are anymore. The 570GTX is basically a slightly faster 560 GTX with more ram, the 560 GTX is basically a slightly faster 460 GTX, with more ram.
It's certainly not a bad card, though a little big for most setups. It will make getting a second one in your case for SLI problematic. And I think when you overclock it up a few percentage, you will see the improvement you are looking for. Just watcht he temperatures under load. You might want to install the video card monitor gadget from addgadget.com to get a feel for the temperatures and utilization and see how far you can safely take it.
Good luck!
Edited, Jan 27th 2012 3:46pm by Kaolian
Thank you,
Yeah I ignored the drivers that came with it, I normally just got straight to nVidia and download the newest drivers (have the 290.53 beta right now). I then downloaded the 2.2.0 beta MSi Afterburner program. For some reason the Smart Doctor that ASUS gives with the card will not let me adjust the voltage. Not sure why.
I'm trying to get a feel for overclocking it to a stable speed with the correct voltage on it. Think so far I have got 800/1600/2000 with 1.085v stable. Tried 850/1700/2000 with 1.088v but when I ran Mark 3D it froze, then reverted the card back to default. So, it's a work in progress. I don't have water cooling so makes it kinda hard to get to the speeds I see others adjust to.
Yeah, I was amazed at how massive the card was, made my 460 look tiny. And it takes a 6 pin PCI-E and 8 pin PCI-E. Luckily my PSU has both, so I didn't have to use the plugs that came with it.
In your opinion, is it worth it to keep the 570 over the 460 and keep working with it? Or should I RMA the 570 and get my $330 back, since it's not to big of a leap forward from the 460?
Thanks for all the help.