Archive for January 6th, 2009

systems and graphics cards suverys and overviews

Posted by mark on January 6, 2009 under Technology

impression-of-steam-hardware-survey

Worth a bookmark is Steam’s hardware survey, by which you can compare your system to other’s gaming Valve games. Very handy in case you are going to buy a new graphics card, what recently I did.

ATi has disappointed many customers buying a 4850, 4870 and other cards which sucked 70 watts in idle mode alone. In my case that was more than my entire system (w/o the graphics card) consumed alone.
Having sold it I bought a HIS ATi HD 3450 for its low power demand. Unfortunately, that was not a good pick because this card was only sufficient for working but far too slow for occasional gaming (e.g., Audiosurf) or even Photoshop CS4’s OpenGL feature.

Given my problems with ATi’s drivers I decided to go for something from nVidia. Despite that and after much research about performance and power consumption (excellent post, indeed) I ended up with a Sapphire ATi HD 4670 (review, recommendation). It was the best at performance for energy ratio (my Vergleich Grafikkarten) with as low as 9 watts in idle. (BTW, see this power supply calculator.)
Its cooling is hearable in my rather silent machine, but mounting Accelero S1 rev 2 solved that.