# Nerd Opinnions Wanted



## Janglur (Jun 19, 2008)

Silly people will be Gygax'd.

Videocard question.  I'm comparing two VCs with identical GPU clockspeeds and capabilities.  Only difference is the ram.

512 MB of GDDR3 @ 1400 MHz (256-bit)
or 1 GB of GDDR2 @ 1050 MHz (256-bit)

Which is better?


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## Veedway (Jun 19, 2008)

I think that more efficient will be 1GB of ram.


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## Janglur (Jun 19, 2008)

Yeah.  I just am not sure..
I mean, faster RAM would make EVERYTHING faster.  But MORE RAM would make newer games designed/capable of using that much, faster still, but wouldn't help older games that can't use that much.

Hmm.


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## Veedway (Jun 19, 2008)

Remember - it's not the clocking that's always the most important.
1GB will last for much longer (in my opinion)


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## Xenofur (Jun 19, 2008)

Completely depends on what you want to play. For comparison: in Doom 3, 512 MB cards enabled you to activate the "insane" texture resolution. Most other games of that time however ran fine in 128 MB.


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## dietrc70 (Jun 19, 2008)

It's a good question.  Personally I'd with 512MB GDDR3, since the faster speed will help all the time, whereas many games won't make use of 1GB.


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## Pi (Jun 19, 2008)

Janglur said:


> 512 MB at 1400 MHz,
> or 1 GB at 1050 MHz?



You're not going to be able to feel a 350 mhz difference.


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## yak (Jun 19, 2008)

Janglur said:


> Silly people will be Gygax'd.
> Which is better?
> 512 MB at 1400 MHz,
> or 1 GB at 1050 MHz?


Memory speed is irrelevant if you start swapping. 
Besides, only quad-core level CPUs have the processing power enough to utilize the memory bandwidth provided, so you will not be able to notice a difference running 1400Mhz or 800Mhz RAM.




Janglur said:


> Videocard question.  I'm comparing two VCs with identical GPU clockspeeds and capabilities.  Only difference is the ram.
> 
> 512 MB of GDDR3 @ 1400 MHz (256-bit)
> or 1 GB of GDDR2 @ 1050 MHz (256-bit)



Video cards however greatly depend on memory clock speeds as they push an _enormous_ amount of data around.
However, 512 MB video RAM is already an overkill for the absolute most games of today. 1G RAM is a marketing gimmick for penis-measuring people.


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## nrr (Jun 19, 2008)

yak said:


> Memory speed is irrelevant if you start swapping.


I think those are the GPU's memory clocks, yak.  You may want to reconsider this notion of swapping for a second. :T



			
				yak said:
			
		

> 1G RAM is a marketing gimmick for penis-measuring people.


See also this VG Cats comic.


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## Hackfox (Jun 19, 2008)

Go with the 1gb my opinion though lol


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## yak (Jun 19, 2008)

nrr said:


> I think those are the GPU's memory clocks, yak.  You may want to reconsider this notion of swapping for a second. :T


Oh, right, sorry, the second part "now a video card question" of the post threw me off.

And video cards *do* actually swap in a similar way, back to regular RAM if the video RAM in not enough at the moment. The difference in performance is just as impact making as RAM swapping to disk - performance degrades massively. So the statement still holds true 

But since video RAM clock speed is lots more important then regular RAM clock speed, and hardly *anything* right now needs 1G video RAM for textures to render a series of frames for an ingame location, zone, cell, whatever - virtually no swapping will occur, and thus is why I think it is more sane to get something that will generally be working faster all the time (and _maybe_ sometimes have small unnoticeable frame rate drops due to texture prebuffering) then get something that will always run slower.


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## nrr (Jun 19, 2008)

yak said:


> Oh, right, sorry, the second part "now a video card question" of the post threw me off.
> 
> And video cards *do* actually swap in a similar way, back to regular RAM if the video RAM in not enough at the moment. The difference in performance is just as impact making as RAM swapping to disk - performance degrades massively. So the statement still holds true



... but you admitted that you were thinking of swapping RAM out to disk, so it's a moot point. 

Also, yes, this phenomenon occurs, but it's a lot less noticeable (at least in my experience...) because of the amount of bandwidth your system RAM can handle.  FWIW, my dual Opteron 240 handles 2.2GB/s across the RAM, and that's DDR333.



			
				yak said:
			
		

> But since video RAM clock speed is lots more important then regular RAM clock speed, and hardly *anything* right now needs 1G video RAM for textures to render a series of frames for an ingame location, zone, cell, whatever - virtually no swapping will occur, and thus is why I think it is more sane to get something that will generally be working faster all the time (and _maybe_ sometimes have small unnoticeable frame rate drops due to texture prebuffering) then get something that will always run slower.


I agree with this comment.  Pick the one with the higher GPU memory clock.


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## LonelyFox (Jun 19, 2008)

1 gig its twice as much, with only a lil difference in speed, it easily makes up for it


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## Janglur (Jun 22, 2008)

A reminder, the GPU are the SAME SPEED.

It's strictly a question of VRAM SPEED over VRAM SIZE!  They have the same EVERYTHING, just different RAM.


Also, I have 4 GB of PC2-6400 (800 MHz) dual channel, and a dual core 2.6 GHz (2 GHz H/T) CPU.

If that helps any.


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## Anonymous1157 (Jun 22, 2008)

You never mentioned exactly which GPU you're buying. If you're getting a GeForce 9-series or whatever the ATi equivalent is, prepare for the future and get the gigger. (Seriously, nothing out there really uses all of a 9800GT except Crysis, so why not create a record-breaking rig while you're at it?)

If you really can't decide after all that has been said, just get the cheaper one.


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## Drakkenmensch (Jun 26, 2008)

More RAM means you will get a much higher framerate in graphics-heavy games like Crysis. Personally, I would go with the 1 gig card.


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## Janglur (Jun 26, 2008)

The 1 GB is only $19 more.

Also, the GPU is I beleive an HD2650.  I gotta dig it up again and I don't have it on this PC.  Been distracted by other things.  Both are ATI.

Basically they're the same GPU and have the same everything but one's Powercolor and the other's Sapphire.  Sapphire's 512 MB and faster but Powercolor's 1 GB and slower.


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## Xenofur (Jun 26, 2008)

Drakkenmensch said:


> More RAM means you will get a much higher framerate in graphics-heavy games like Crysis.


No.


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## Phoenixwildfire (Jun 26, 2008)

I would suggest always going with the most ram you can get  it makes things so much better in the long run.


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## Dragon-Commando (Jul 5, 2008)

Don't listen to these people telling you that more ram will be faster.

As a comparison I had 2 cards a long time ago.

A Number 9 Tech SR9 Savage 8mb AGP4X card, vs. a Radeon 7000 32mb AGP4X card.

In actual games the SR9 outperforms the Radeon 7000 by almost 20 frames in the original Half-life. Simply because the card uses the memory it has well, instead of having ass loads of memory. I even ran the HD pack on the 8mb, and never ran below 35fps, where even without the HD pack the 32mb would regularly go below 20.

Now if you compare the architecture, with 512 mbs it WILL be different than the card with 1gb, even if the cards are named the same. And more than likely, the 512 card will use 512mbs better than the 1gb card will use 512mb of memory. Thats where it counts, not how much, not how fast, but how well the architecture is built to interface with the ram.

Just because it has 1gb of memory doesn't mean the architecture is optimized for it, generaly the graphics card will be optimized for the lowest amount of ram it will be running, because it wouldn't be logical to optimize for the most, and only the changes needed will be made to interface with more ram.


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## Runefox (Jul 6, 2008)

Get the 512MB version. The GDDR revision is thigher (more efficient per clock), the memory clock is higher, and nothing saturates 512MB right now. If it's an HD2650, you're going to be upgrading again later down the road anyway, so grab it and go for now. Don't bother with the 1GB variant - It WILL be slower, and by all means, in most benchmarks I've seen between otherwise identical cards but for capacity, the 512MB variant almost always wins.


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## Azusis (Jul 7, 2008)

If you plan on gaming at resolutions at 1680 x 1050 and under, opt for 512mb. You wont be able to saturate that memory at those resolutions, and the faster memory will help out a lot!

If you will be playing at resolutions higher than that such as 1920 x 1200 and over, opt for 1gb. The extra memory will actually make a difference at these super-high resolutions.


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## darkdoomer (Jul 8, 2008)

8800gt w/512 > any radeon crap with 1gb of slower ram.


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