I picked up years ago the same directcu card of a 6950 for only $50 Canadian and did the unlock mod to get the full shaders. It was a pretty fast gpu still in games like gta 5. Flipped it later on
AMD came back hard with the 7000 series. I still have a 6870, 6970 and a 6990. Great video as always, really love the intro to each GPU you always give, the tear downs and the overall presentation :) At one point I had 3 CUII 6970’s (!) which I ran on a Crosshair 4 extreme. Crazy system.
Yeap, the 7000 series wiped the floor with Nvidia counterparts while being cheaper and way less power hungry. Still, GTX 600 series were still quite better than the 500 series as well
@@AncientGameplays I really wouldn't say they wiped the floor with NVIDIA back then. I remember them being fairly evenly matched. Now as years went on it's a totally different story thanks to Kepler aging like not so fine milk.
@@AncientGameplays that's some revisionist history; HD 7000 series beat GTX 600 series to the market by a couple of months, but the GTX 680 was generally faster, came at a lower MSRP, and was more power efficient when it launched in early 2012. That being said, the Kepler architecture hasn't aged as well, so the 7970 gradually became the faster part with time, but generally long after both options were woefully too slow to bother with anyway.
Got a couple for you you might be interested looking in: - Budget-Builds official - RandomGaminginHD - Tech YES City - Dawid Does Tech Stuff - LowSpecGamer And then obviously we have this channel here.
AH yeah! 2 GPUs that I looked at and once considered. In 2020, I wanted the GTX 580 because the dated reviews I found all said its very powerful and it was "cheaper" compared to modern cards ($60 due to the height of GPU scalping) however I didn't have the necessary PSU (520w) or a case with good enough airflow. My build would have been a Q6600/9550 and GTX 580,
When I upgraded from my Q6600/HD 4870 build in 2012/13 the 500 series cards were already old, the HD 7000 cards sucked too much power and the 600 cards were available, so I grabbed a 660 Ti, which was about as fast as a 580 but much more efficient. Ran that stuff overclocked for years on a 480W PSU without issues. I hope that Q9550 still lives on? I threw the 660 Ti together with a Xeon X5460 later on as secondary rig, and that also runs to this day. Those Core 2 Quad are still decent chips, if you still have one around.
I still have my old GTX 660 Ti, which was, at release, about as fast as the GTX 580. Now I wonder how the 580 has aged. Sure Kepler had more time to ripen afterwards, but the 580 has a 3 GB model with more bandwith. I'm surprised how cool the 580 runs. Shows that Asus did make a good cooler with the DirectCU design.
Thanks for sharing mate :) I might revisit the 3GB model, tried the GTX 770 2GB vs 4GB few weeks back and it would not be any quicker, which was a surprise to me :) It's huge, there is no other way around it :)
now I'm just waiting for the Keplar vs GCN battles. I want to pick up a gtx 780 for windows xp and am trying to consume as much content as possible to justify doing so.
Btw do u know where i can get those retention brackets? I bought a used HD 7970 but it came without the bracket and is unusuable due to extreme temperature and noise. Im sure its because the missing bracket and not enough pressure as result. But they are somehow not easy to find. Do u know a solution for this? (i want to keep the stock blower design - it looks lovely)
Love how you reach outside the standard benchmark games! I kinda knew how this one was going to go... and this is the point in the years where I start looking harder at Nvidia cards (just got a Titan Black, woot!). The 580 was definitely a beast - and I don't think the 6000 series really lived up to the 5000 series in some instances - it just wasn't that great a gain, whereas Nvidia fired some serious shots... for serious money... AMD for years has been the cheaper option - and somewhat maligned for it (amongst other things, I guess). Thanks and keep on rocking! :)
The HD 6000 were a bit of a refresh with better efficiency. Plus they changed the naming, before it was the x800 at the top, now the x900. And they still weren't that much faster.
I thought both NVIDIA's 500 series and AMDs 6000 series were pretty underwhelming. The gtx 580 also wasn't that big of an improvement compared to the gtx 480. Overall that generation of GPUs was the smallest generational performance jump we've seen since then.
the HD6970 Never had a chance against the full Fermi IF the HD6970 would have been on the Planed 32nm things would have been Much different The HD6970 wasnt worth buying at all , the HD5870 it was just a bit slower but cheaper and cooler
1. The hd 6970 cost was on gtx 570 level, but in some games like metro 2033 it had the same fps as a gtx 580. 2. True. 3. Actual power consuption of hd 6970 is about 200Wt and reach 250Wt only in the heaviest benchmarks.
The 6970 was an impressive card at the time, and remained broadly compatible for quite a while afterward with quite decent performance on newer games. It was a bit hot, though, and reference versions were loud.
i had a 6950. it was one of the best gpus i've ever owned. I kept it for 4 years and in that time it hadn't gotten slow at all. It still handled everything perfectly fine. but to be fair, i haven't owned many gpus i didn't like. i guess the exceptions would be: the gtx 970 (not only because of the 3.5gb conundrum, but because mine was defective and i had to underclock it severely to get any semblance of stability), the geforce 4 ti4400 (it was just plain shit, the only plain bad card i've ever owned) and my current 6900xt (it coil whines way too much, completely unacceptable. as a result, i have to underclock it to get rid of the noise and i don't like having to underclock my card to use it).
Unfortunately coil whine is pretty much the name of the game with new cards. About the only way to be sure you don't have loud coil whine is to go with a sapphire nitro+, XFX is also pretty good about coil whine, but powercolor is terrible about it. Lots of reports of 4090s and 3090s having a lot of coil whine too, it's just a matter of how much power they draw. You can however disassemble the card and put a drop of nail polish around the base of the chokes which will dampen the sound or eliminate it entirely.
Not a big surprise here Fermi 2.0 was better 12 years ago and it's even more so now. AMD move by pulling driver support out after less than 4 years for couple 6000 series cards didn't help much too Got to use single 6970 for a week, tbh it was a lot worse than my 570, and somehow it did couple things worse than 5000 series. Overclocking too was rather meh, 60mhz on core while 570 does over 300 on air (sure golden chip etc etc but there is 0 6950/6970 doing these kinds of OC on HWBOT) Great vid as always
@@wakesake the 570 was more like 480 with all the improvements, 580 on the other hamd quite bit more than that. Just look how close it came to beating 5970 vs the 480
The GTX 580 was a very impressive card and despite being Fermi it was much better than the 480. I have never owned a Fermi card though. Not yet anyway.
Not yet anyway! hahah! Love that! They are not too bad! I remember buying GTX 570 as I could not justify the full fat 580! Agreed, I was very happy and it was perfect for 1080p back in the day!
I find it interesting how well the GTX 580 has aged, it seems to have aged much better than the 6970. I have one of the 3GB models laying around, it's an MSI Lightning model. I wonder how much that would change the performance compared to the 1.5GB model.
Just better driver support for games till 2018 nothing special. I was using 5970 and 6990 for mining had gtx460 and 580 just for fun, Fermi cards were unusable for mining amd killed rulled so they had to rid off bunch of Amd cards from miners that were unloading cards. Amd shamefuly stoped driver support back with 15.1 drivers for terascale, same now with 7970-390 8gb cards.
@@nikolakarovic5964 It's sad they dropped support for the 7000 series cards already. I have a 7970 that's still quite capable if you turn down settings a bit. Especially considering they dropped support during the worst time in history to buy a new GPU.
EVGA had some neat looking cards. Okay, maybe not their GTX 580, but their 600 cards were slick. And that MSI 580 already has all the asthetics of their later cards, but without trying to be "edgy gamer" in design.
You have to set the HD 6970 to x8 tessellation max in adrenaline settings. You can't turn heaven benchmark to ultra against an amd card, tessellation will kill it. Put it on normal. Heaven was specifically made to overdo tessellation.
@@nexus_tech Nope I reanimated them with reball but 1 of them again died after 2 years so I just keep them now in collection, same with 5970 and 6990 all in box for memories ( 6990 was mining 10$ per day Ltc in its prime). Fermi had high failure rate, gtx600 serie is better in every way, same for hd7970 amd cards.
JESUS H CHRIST!!! I forgot the dye was the size of a modern CPU on the FERMI 2 cards. it is no wonder they ran hot as balls. 90% of these cards that I have repaired in the wild have dead Vram chips due to not using thermal pads back then. I am glad they only pull that on the budget GPU's now days. I have a 6950-70. lol, its a 6950 that was flashed to a 6970, it still needs the power unlocked to match the 6970 but the shader count is identical. if you want a "cheaper" 6970 just buy any 6950 that has a "AMD" logo on the PCB where the PCIE slot connects and flash it over. That is the cheapest way to get one because the 6970 still sells for MAD prices on ebay due to it being a "rare" card from it not doing so well back then. I owed a 6950 and hated it, only because I paired it with a cheap AF A10 CPU that I got from my brother. When I got enough money, I bought a nice new EVGA board and paired it with a q9550. I used that up until I got Fallout 4 and then upgraded to a GTX 970 3.5GB lol
@@DanielCardei These cards have a thermal spreading plate over gpu and thermal paste between them. After several years of active using, thermal paste dry and gpu is continuously overheated and later die. Amd cards have no such problem.
@@ivansergeev4827 How hard would it be to delid them? Any worse than on the Intel CPUs at the time? Might be worth trying. Especially with liquid metal under there. On my old i5 that dropped temps by nearly 15°C, so I could see similar results on a 580
I picked up years ago the same directcu card of a 6950 for only $50 Canadian and did the unlock mod to get the full shaders. It was a pretty fast gpu still in games like gta 5. Flipped it later on
AMD came back hard with the 7000 series. I still have a 6870, 6970 and a 6990. Great video as always, really love the intro to each GPU you always give, the tear downs and the overall presentation :) At one point I had 3 CUII 6970’s (!) which I ran on a Crosshair 4 extreme. Crazy system.
This old and interesting 🤔
I don't have a pc 😔 still
Yeap, the 7000 series wiped the floor with Nvidia counterparts while being cheaper and way less power hungry. Still, GTX 600 series were still quite better than the 500 series as well
@@AncientGameplays I really wouldn't say they wiped the floor with NVIDIA back then. I remember them being fairly evenly matched. Now as years went on it's a totally different story thanks to Kepler aging like not so fine milk.
@@AncientGameplays that's some revisionist history; HD 7000 series beat GTX 600 series to the market by a couple of months, but the GTX 680 was generally faster, came at a lower MSRP, and was more power efficient when it launched in early 2012. That being said, the Kepler architecture hasn't aged as well, so the 7970 gradually became the faster part with time, but generally long after both options were woefully too slow to bother with anyway.
Subscribed. Need more of this kind of laid back channel which discuss old hardwares.
Got a couple for you you might be interested looking in:
- Budget-Builds official
- RandomGaminginHD
- Tech YES City
- Dawid Does Tech Stuff
- LowSpecGamer
And then obviously we have this channel here.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I already an active viewer of those channels :)
Thank you mate, appreciate your feedback, happy to hear :)
Thank you :) There's plenty more of us out there, check Iceberg Tech
Congrats on 1k 🥳
Hello mate! Thank you, that's very thoughtful :) You're leading by example!
Man what a great youtuber! Your like linus tech tips but less screaming!
Thank you, that's very kind :) I also don't wear sandals! :)
AH yeah! 2 GPUs that I looked at and once considered. In 2020, I wanted the GTX 580 because the dated reviews I found all said its very powerful and it was "cheaper" compared to modern cards ($60 due to the height of GPU scalping) however I didn't have the necessary PSU (520w) or a case with good enough airflow. My build would have been a Q6600/9550 and GTX 580,
When I upgraded from my Q6600/HD 4870 build in 2012/13 the 500 series cards were already old, the HD 7000 cards sucked too much power and the 600 cards were available, so I grabbed a 660 Ti, which was about as fast as a 580 but much more efficient. Ran that stuff overclocked for years on a 480W PSU without issues.
I hope that Q9550 still lives on? I threw the 660 Ti together with a Xeon X5460 later on as secondary rig, and that also runs to this day. Those Core 2 Quad are still decent chips, if you still have one around.
Thanks for sharing this :) What card did you get if any ?
I still have my old GTX 660 Ti, which was, at release, about as fast as the GTX 580. Now I wonder how the 580 has aged. Sure Kepler had more time to ripen afterwards, but the 580 has a 3 GB model with more bandwith.
I'm surprised how cool the 580 runs. Shows that Asus did make a good cooler with the DirectCU design.
Thanks for sharing mate :) I might revisit the 3GB model, tried the GTX 770 2GB vs 4GB few weeks back and it would not be any quicker, which was a surprise to me :) It's huge, there is no other way around it :)
now I'm just waiting for the Keplar vs GCN battles. I want to pick up a gtx 780 for windows xp and am trying to consume as much content as possible to justify doing so.
Btw do u know where i can get those retention brackets? I bought a used HD 7970 but it came without the bracket and is unusuable due to extreme temperature and noise.
Im sure its because the missing bracket and not enough pressure as result.
But they are somehow not easy to find. Do u know a solution for this? (i want to keep the stock blower design - it looks lovely)
Hmm, no idea mate! I'd imagine the usual places like Ebay or Ali might have them??
🤩 I had the 570 with the Twin Frozr cooler!
Love how you reach outside the standard benchmark games!
I kinda knew how this one was going to go... and this is the point in the years where I start looking harder at Nvidia cards (just got a Titan Black, woot!).
The 580 was definitely a beast - and I don't think the 6000 series really lived up to the 5000 series in some instances - it just wasn't that great a gain, whereas Nvidia fired some serious shots... for serious money...
AMD for years has been the cheaper option - and somewhat maligned for it (amongst other things, I guess).
Thanks and keep on rocking! :)
The HD 6000 were a bit of a refresh with better efficiency. Plus they changed the naming, before it was the x800 at the top, now the x900. And they still weren't that much faster.
Thank you mate, I'm really happy to hear that :) TITAN BLACK FTW!! I need one too!
I thought both NVIDIA's 500 series and AMDs 6000 series were pretty underwhelming. The gtx 580 also wasn't that big of an improvement compared to the gtx 480. Overall that generation of GPUs was the smallest generational performance jump we've seen since then.
the HD6970 Never had a chance against the full Fermi
IF the HD6970 would have been on the Planed 32nm things would have been Much different
The HD6970 wasnt worth buying at all , the HD5870 it was just a bit slower but cheaper and cooler
1. The hd 6970 cost was on gtx 570 level, but in some games like metro 2033 it had the same fps as a gtx 580. 2. True. 3. Actual power consuption of hd 6970 is about 200Wt and reach 250Wt only in the heaviest benchmarks.
The 6970 was an impressive card at the time, and remained broadly compatible for quite a while afterward with quite decent performance on newer games. It was a bit hot, though, and reference versions were loud.
Thanks for checking out the video 🙂
Yes, I still play the first Dying Light. I can't wait to benchmark it at 1440p with a 5700xt and an oced 2600k.
Let me know how much did it push at those settings 🙂
i had a 6950. it was one of the best gpus i've ever owned. I kept it for 4 years and in that time it hadn't gotten slow at all. It still handled everything perfectly fine. but to be fair, i haven't owned many gpus i didn't like. i guess the exceptions would be:
the gtx 970 (not only because of the 3.5gb conundrum, but because mine was defective and i had to underclock it severely to get any semblance of stability),
the geforce 4 ti4400 (it was just plain shit, the only plain bad card i've ever owned)
and my current 6900xt (it coil whines way too much, completely unacceptable. as a result, i have to underclock it to get rid of the noise and i don't like having to underclock my card to use it).
Unfortunately coil whine is pretty much the name of the game with new cards. About the only way to be sure you don't have loud coil whine is to go with a sapphire nitro+, XFX is also pretty good about coil whine, but powercolor is terrible about it. Lots of reports of 4090s and 3090s having a lot of coil whine too, it's just a matter of how much power they draw. You can however disassemble the card and put a drop of nail polish around the base of the chokes which will dampen the sound or eliminate it entirely.
Not a big surprise here
Fermi 2.0 was better 12 years ago and it's even more so now. AMD move by pulling driver support out after less than 4 years for couple 6000 series cards didn't help much too
Got to use single 6970 for a week, tbh it was a lot worse than my 570, and somehow it did couple things worse than 5000 series. Overclocking too was rather meh, 60mhz on core while 570 does over 300 on air (sure golden chip etc etc but there is 0 6950/6970 doing these kinds of OC on HWBOT)
Great vid as always
Fermi 2.0 ?
no buddy it was the same card (gtx 480) just fixed , aka the card we expected gtx 480 to be
@@wakesake the 570 was more like 480 with all the improvements, 580 on the other hamd quite bit more than that. Just look how close it came to beating 5970 vs the 480
Fermi was also the last card with the hot clock on the shaders and before nVidia artificially cut down DP performance.
Lovely cards! I miss those more simplistic, "classy" designs. Less "gamer" plastic look, more heatsink and metal.
The GTX 580 was a very impressive card and despite being Fermi it was much better than the 480. I have never owned a Fermi card though. Not yet anyway.
Not yet anyway! hahah! Love that! They are not too bad! I remember buying GTX 570 as I could not justify the full fat 580! Agreed, I was very happy and it was perfect for 1080p back in the day!
I find it interesting how well the GTX 580 has aged, it seems to have aged much better than the 6970. I have one of the 3GB models laying around, it's an MSI Lightning model. I wonder how much that would change the performance compared to the 1.5GB model.
The 3GB model is actually a lot faster in some modern titles than the 1.5GB. The GTX 580 has a lot of power to spare being held back by the vram.
Just better driver support for games till 2018 nothing special. I was using 5970 and 6990 for mining had gtx460 and 580 just for fun, Fermi cards were unusable for mining amd killed rulled so they had to rid off bunch of Amd cards from miners that were unloading cards. Amd shamefuly stoped driver support back with 15.1 drivers for terascale, same now with 7970-390 8gb cards.
@@nikolakarovic5964 It's sad they dropped support for the 7000 series cards already. I have a 7970 that's still quite capable if you turn down settings a bit. Especially considering they dropped support during the worst time in history to buy a new GPU.
@@IronicTonic8 You can install moded drivers.They work nice. 7970 is beast.
@@nikolakarovic5964 Thanks, I heard about those recently but haven't tried them out yet. I'll have to take a look.
Nice video thanks
The MSI aesthetics are pleasing to me. I got a 560 GTX that generation. An EVGA at that. So yeah, my wallet couldn't afford MSI 580 GTX aesthetics.
EVGA had some neat looking cards. Okay, maybe not their GTX 580, but their 600 cards were slick.
And that MSI 580 already has all the asthetics of their later cards, but without trying to be "edgy gamer" in design.
You have to set the HD 6970 to x8 tessellation max in adrenaline settings. You can't turn heaven benchmark to ultra against an amd card, tessellation will kill it. Put it on normal. Heaven was specifically made to overdo tessellation.
Had 2 gtx580 Msi lighting both died, I allso have asus 6990 with custom cooling (was mining with It till 2016 😂)
Holy! That's so sad, how did they go to GPU heaven ???
@@nexus_tech Nope I reanimated them with reball but 1 of them again died after 2 years so I just keep them now in collection, same with 5970 and 6990 all in box for memories ( 6990 was mining 10$ per day Ltc in its prime). Fermi had high failure rate, gtx600 serie is better in every way, same for hd7970 amd cards.
@@nikolakarovic5964 6990 power consumption is more than 400Wt, did you get any profit on mining with it?
@@ivansergeev4827 In mining it newer used above 200w.
I didn't know I wanted this
So tell me, how was your journey ? What did you like, what did not work ? :)
Nvidia Fermi probably aged better due to AMD ending Terascale drivers back in 2016. Same probably will be said comparing GCN and Maxwell cards
The results are not what i have expected! I wonder how the next generations compare.
Interesting how the 7970 beat the 680 the next gen.
The finest AMD wine hahah!
Aaaah yes! When gaming was affordable...
Those were the days! I hope we might see this return in future...hahahha!
JESUS H CHRIST!!! I forgot the dye was the size of a modern CPU on the FERMI 2 cards. it is no wonder they ran hot as balls. 90% of these cards that I have repaired in the wild have dead Vram chips due to not using thermal pads back then. I am glad they only pull that on the budget GPU's now days. I have a 6950-70. lol, its a 6950 that was flashed to a 6970, it still needs the power unlocked to match the 6970 but the shader count is identical. if you want a "cheaper" 6970 just buy any 6950 that has a "AMD" logo on the PCB where the PCIE slot connects and flash it over. That is the cheapest way to get one because the 6970 still sells for MAD prices on ebay due to it being a "rare" card from it not doing so well back then. I owed a 6950 and hated it, only because I paired it with a cheap AF A10 CPU that I got from my brother. When I got enough money, I bought a nice new EVGA board and paired it with a q9550. I used that up until I got Fallout 4 and then upgraded to a GTX 970 3.5GB lol
three radeon hd 7970 graphics cards or three nvidia quadro 6000fermi100 graphics cards 6gigabytes videoram
I had a asus GTX 580. Spent all the money for it haha
You see, you went all in! I did not, instead, "cheaped" out and got ASUS GTX 570...I really wanted the 580 tho...
Anything under 60 fps = HEADACHE.
Msi looks nice
I love the sleek yet aggressive design!! Those cards look awesome!
I assume the 3gb ram 580 would only be better.
heres the funny thing 3gb versions comapred to 1.5gb version 580 the 3gb edition wooped the butt of the 1.5gb 580
The 3GB 580 version its a must have GPU
They all are dead already due to gpu drop :).
@@ivansergeev4827 what do you mean?
@@DanielCardei These cards have a thermal spreading plate over gpu and thermal paste between them. After several years of active using, thermal paste dry and gpu is continuously overheated and later die. Amd cards have no such problem.
@@ivansergeev4827 How hard would it be to delid them? Any worse than on the Intel CPUs at the time?
Might be worth trying. Especially with liquid metal under there. On my old i5 that dropped temps by nearly 15°C, so I could see similar results on a 580
@@HappyBeezerStudios Yes, it is harder than with cpu case. But actually it's the single method to save videocard.
I still use a 6970 :)
i also hate that word, among many.
First 😈😈😈