I am looking at a GPU in the $500 range. I was originally going to get the PowerColor Red Dragon 6800XT, but saw that the Sapphire Pulse 7800XT is essentially the same price.
I know that the 7800XT is newer, but it only has two fans. I’ve also heard that the performance improvements in the 7000 series are minimal compared to the 6000 series.
Also this is minor but my local Micro Center does not have the 7800xt in stock, but I could get it from Newegg.
I use a 1440p monitor. Any opinions one which I should get?
Both are sufficient. The 7800XT is barely faster than the 6800XT, it could almost be considered negligible. If given the choice (all else being equal), I would go with the 7800XT, just for the fact that it’s newer and therefore comes with a slightly better feature set.
That being said, the 7800XT has worse energy efficiency than the 6800XT. I don’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but if you care about either energy efficiency or heat output, I would consider looking into that before you make a decision.I’ve heard that you can knock off like 50% of the energy usage for 20% less performance from the 7800XT, but then that brings up the issue that if you’re willing to do some performance tweaking on the 7800XT, you’re likely also willing to do performance tweaking on the 6800XT. So, your mileage may vary on that.Edit: I misremembered - 7800XT is more power efficient than 6800XT. There should be no reason to go for the 6800XT if they’re the same price
Sorry but where are you getting the energy efficiency figures here?
Bear in mind that NV2X doesn’t report TBP in software (it will report 255W total graphics power, which is not inclusive of VRM and other board power losses), whereas NV3X does. 68XT is a 300W GPU, and I think NV32 draws less (at least in terms of peak TBP)
You’re correct, I misremembered (I was thinking 6800 non-XT vs. 7800XT). I’ll edit my comment with a correction
Ah, no worries