AMD Radeon HD 6970 from 2010
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- Опубликовано: 11 май 2023
- The Radeon HD 6970 was the AMD flagship graphics card and launched at the end of 2010. It cost only $369 a bargain comapred to current graphics card launch prices. In this video we will check out this old graphics card and test some classic games.
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Remember when graphics cards came with unique art like this on the fan shrouds? I miss that.
There are anime girls with Yeston cards.
@@conyo985 good point.
@@conyo985 maybe on the box art but not the actual cards like these
@@mastyrb8 pretty sure the backplates of those cards have an anime girl on them
I miss them too. Those are actual graphic cards.
But at least we got Yeston waifu GPU.
But, here's an idea. *GPU with public health warning from cigarettes.* Gnarly
I remember that back in 2010s, my brother-in-law had either a HD 6970 or a HD 7970 and I was incredibly jealous of him for having such a nice GPU without being aware of how power-hungry of a card it was. Later, he gave me a 512 MB HD 4550 and even though its performance was nowhere near his GPU, I was really happy because it was my first dedicated video card and I could finally play some PC games with decent performance and graphics settings. Later, I bought a 1 GB HD 5450 and kept my old card as a substitute in case of emergencies. Those were good times indeed, both for him and me.
Good times :)
hold on isnt the hd5450 slower then hd 4550?
@@Ciffer-1998I think so a little bit but the vram might be the reason why he bought it.
Zombie story time:
The HD6950/HD6970 was about the time when I discovered bitcoin. Bought 3 x 6950 and flashed them with the 6970 bios. Built a mining rig and made around 1.5 - 2 bitcoins each day. Let it run for a few weeks, then the bitcoin price went down to < 1 USD. Stopped. Sold my bitcoins for around 12 USD each a few months later. A few years later, I cried ... a lot ...
Duuuude, of only i knew.....
If it makes you feel better you wouldn't have gotten anywhere near a current prices for Bitcoin. What you're seeing when you search on the prices isn't what actually happens in trading. There's a lot of people who are technically millionaires in Bitcoin but good luck selling it and if they ever cash out they crash the market long before they get their money
Still yeah you would have got more than 12 bucks😅
The NPCs jumping was hilarious! Meme level.
I bought my 6970 used for $60 back in 2013 and it served me well all the way to 2019 when I did a complete system rebuild using the Ryzen platform. My card was originally an XFX 6950 but was BIOS flashed to unlock the soft locked features of the 6970 as XFX didn't use defective cores for lower stepped cards and instead just soft modded them to have lesser shaders
You flashed bios and you get rx 6950xt
@@Mr11ESSE111 It rarely worked as good as an original 6970 though...
@@Tc4ify it depended on the card. my card was one of the XFX models that used a 6970 core and used the soft lock to bring it to 6950 levels and this went on for a specific line (there were 3 SKUs for the XFX 6950) or batch before they moved to a dedicated 6950 core. This was a pretty common thing to do with XFX cards that I think Techpowerup had a page for this model to do the BIOS flash.
i had the bios flash aswell saphire cards had 6970 core aswell that was soft locked and i a had the extra cores unlocked on the phenom
Would be nice to see these pricesdrops nowadays 😂
There is a surprising amount of older games that are speed sensitive. We never noticed back then because we often played them with v-sync on a 60 Hz monitor. PCGamingWiki often includes an entry on high refresh rate support.
Need for Speed Most Wanted is one of those. Back in the day, playing with the 7800 GTX, there were no issues. Recently, with a GTX 1070 and without v-sync, good luck trying to drive...
GTA 3d universe
Exceed 30 fps, physics broke
Even the original dead space.
Exceeding 30 fps breaks physics and it continues to get more absurd the more fps you get.
if it's a bethesda title as late as fallout 4 there is a fps limit at 60fps as well. Even on fallout 76 you can't go above 180 or the game just gets wonky.
I'm finding that more and more now with my XP rig. I have vsync disabled globally because it's the only way to get rid of it for some games, but that in turn makes Unreal games go absolutely mad when you get hundreds of fps. I'm using RTSS to tame those to a reasonable number.
I cannot believe this HD 6970 came out only 2 years after getting my Nvidia 9800GT. What a different time for GPU's. AMD Radeon was doing very well at the time.
Glad to hear that GOG still supports older operating systems.
Linux supports WINE, WINE supports GoG. And you're using a modern and secure OS to do it that you can still use safely online. The compatibility of WINE with GoG installers now is extremely high.
@Unknown Nomad There is usually very little performance difference between Linux and Windows when you compare the same game on both systems. However, you may have to do some "tweaking" of settings to get a game to run at all, and even then it may never run. With that said, it is newer games where this can be true - I play games from pre-2010 (because I have no interest in modern AAA "games as a service") and they all run fine under Linux.
@Unknown Nomad This GPU has good free open source drivers built into the Linux kernel. You won't have EAX sound in Linux though sadly.
Your my favourite channel bro, always pumping out the best videos on retro hardware. Keep it up
Thank you :D
Im still feel the excitement for getting HD 6850 for exact msrp, and this card had 256 bit in 2010. Imagine that
256 bit? Its okay, now look at radeon 7 with 4096 bit, released in 2019
Even though the HD 7970 came a year later, it had driver support for SIX more years. (HD 6000 support ended 2016, 7000 support until 2022) Keep that in mind. 6000 to 7000 is a much bigger jump than 5000 to 6000
More to come :D
I heard that part of the reason 6000 was so lackluster is that AMD planned for a process size that TSMC (I think it was them) cancelled, so performance couldn't be as good as they wanted.
It still has full support in the Linux kernel and as the "amdgpu" driver with full DisplayCore support.
In fact, AMD cards going back as fare as R100 cards (e.g. ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 cards in laptops from around 2004) are still supported in Linux.
If so many people allow themselves to be "bullied" by Microsoft then you should not be surprised that you hardware has forced redundancy.
yep, though not as disastrous as GCN to RDNA1 jump driver wise when it came to stability; Terascale to GCN was still a big Driver drama. Took over a year or two before the 7970s could really spread their wings and thoroughly humiliate Kepler as a uArch.
@Unknown Nomad Correct, they use "radeon" - but they are still supported.
I actually used Vista well until after 7 came out. Personally, I've never had any major issues with it, apart from the loss of EAX, but Creative solved that with ALchemy soon-ish. I remember, I had an Athlon 64 X2 6000+, and it is the exact same CPU I use in my XP build today!
The last hurrah of Terascale. The NemiZ drivers are pretty good for older Terascale and GCN cards for those that want to continue using these cards in modern systems. I've never had a 6970 in my possession but I did get a 7970 from the Visiontek mystery GPU boxes a couple years back. It still does very well in modern games with third party drivers considering how old she is.
yeah I sometimes use an old 7950 I bought for 20 bucks. so far it runs any game, altho I think the i7 960 is missing instruction sets for some more modern games as it really struggles at times. I should probably swap it for the 6 core xeon sometimes as it should do atleast a bit better with those 2 more cores.
Great video Phil, love that you put everything into context and all the background info about the OS transition periods. And especially that you took your time to comment some games in a bit more detail than usual.
Thanks for noticing. I really want to spend more time playing these games actually, but it's always a rush to work on a video as still work full time 😞
I had the HD5970 dual gpu card, what a beast it was, had a massive waterblock and huge heatsink on the top of the card, there wasnt any game on xp that wouldn't run locked at 100fps, AMD still support the 7XXX series cards as they are idencal to the R7 series, must be the longest running card support ever.
Awesome video Phil! I was making due with a highly overclocked core 2 duo e4300 and an HD3870 back in 2010 with windows 7. Good times!
Appreciate giving that kind of obscure settings info, I know I've found info like that very useful in the past.
I'm still rocking Windows 7 in 2023 with the same i7-3770 but a 1660 super for GPU. I might change over to Win 10 as main after steam support drops but I know I'll still be keep in dual boot like I do now :)
A very timely video - I just picked up this exact card (CIB no less - maybe even new?) the other day! Very excited to try it out after watching this video. Thanks for the great analysis Phil!
I bought the Asus variant new in 2010 mainly for it's excellent Eyefinity capability. I do miss you talking about this feature, because this was one of its selling points, together with blazing speeds. I add another one 3 years later in crossfire mode. Served me well over 4-5 years, superb card. Nice video and great to see you talk about. It sure is a legendary card and deserves a spot in the hall of fame.
another great video, thanks Phil. I used to have a fx 5200 back then and dream about this sort of graphics, this is just an amazing xp machine.
Interesting video, like!
9:46 that's Serious Sam The Second Encounter, not Serious Sam 2
Great video! Please keep them coming!
Oh, you're right! Seems Serious Sam 2 isn't actually available on GOG. Thanks you!
Who still remember ?
the most phenomenal year of PC gaming history was 2008
$299
GF 9800 gtx vs.
$299
Rad hd4870
yeah i remember how nvidia launched GTX280 for like 650usd then AMD launched 4870 for 300usd and like few weeks later they reduced price of GTX280 to 500USD and after few monts they refreshed GTX280 as faster GTX285 for only 350usd!!! Then GTX275 for 250usd and that was like 10% slower than GTX285 and AMD was there with HD 4890 1GB also for 250USD. In those times i bought super cheap GTX260 216core it was like 150usd brand new ASUS ROG one...
I bought one of these for a new build with a 2500K CPU, a couple years later I was able to pick up a 2nd-hand one off of Ebay for a little over $100 US dollars.. back when Crossfire was prominent, I was able to get close to double my performance in most games.. It was an absolute powerhouse.
I bought one of these cards used online for $50 in 2013. It's still running in an FM2+ rig with an Athlon to this day, a decade later, under Linux. It isn't used for gaming or mining anymore, so it's enjoying a nice, comfortable retirement.
I too use a 6970 (unlocked 6950) for my X58 based XP gaming PC (dual boots with windows 10). I dont really bother with vista and 7 too much as unlike XP, I find they don't bring anything to the table that 10 can't do. I also like the option to safely grab web based files for my xp partition using windows 10.
I was using a relatively ancient Radeon HD 3870 at the time. I didn't replace that until the following year in 2011 with a GTX 550 Ti. Tbh the 3870 with the last drivers is a much better performer than I remember it being back in the day. It was such a dog and I very much regret buying it over what my friend recommended the GeForce 8800 GT. I've recently come into possession of a Radeon HD 4870 and I really wish I had upgraded straight to that back then because it's so much better.
I know of a graphics card today tho that can straddle more like 3 eras. XP era, Vista/7 era, and the Modern era. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti. Fully supported under Windows XP, fully supported under Windows 10. It's driver support was only just dropped a little while ago so it can still run a few modern games ok ish. As long as they only need basic DX12 and not DX12 Ultimate or something. Absolutely obliterates something like Crysis on Windows XP the game doesn't even stand a chance.
I miss those days. I love your channel and your work! 🎉 ❤
I mostly skipped Vista. I had a Pentium iii 1000Mhz 1.5 Gb of RAM, Nvidia Geforce 256Mb DDR3 AGP (think it was a 6800, was a great card), a sound Blaster Sound Card & 2 Hard Drives windows XP & used it right up until about 2008 when I built my Core 2 Quad that I used for almost 10 years. Went from playing Civilization 4, Diablo II, Emperor Battle for Dune, Dungeon Lords, Age of Mythology (on the P iii) to Finally being able to Play Oblivion & Resident Evil 5 & finally Skyrim when it came out.
You reminded me that I actually have one of these in a box somewhere... I switched the stock cooler over to a Rajintek MORPHEUS or MORPHEUS II then the card never worked again and I dont think I spent enough time diagnosing what went wrong with it. I really should dig it out and seeing if i can get it to work. I used to run two of them in crossfire back in the day. Those cards ran *HOT* !! 80-90'c during BF3. When one stopped working, I sold the other card and bought a set of GTX680s
I loved the clean look of the blower style cards .
Very interesting, well laid-out video presentation for this card. Being retro-gaming focussed, it changes from the various tests seen elsewhere, that display the lacklustre performance of Terascale architecture cards in nearly-current games. This underwhelming performance being mostly due to the early abandon of driver support from AMD (2015). But for older titles, we can see it has sufficient shader cores to give him the raw power to run games very smoothly. I very much like these old Radeon Terascale video cards, and if you scrutinize a little bit the auction and classified ads sites, an old high-end Radeon HD like the HD 6970 can be obtained for little money, like ~25-40 €.
Well done sir !
This is something I find really awesome. After a video, I learn new stuff from thee comments. Like the better driver support with the 7000 series...
@@philscomputerlab You can run the HD6000 series on modern AMD systems still with Windows 11 using the NimeZ drivers. HD5000 series too, I think there's a way to get those running on modern systems too. Definitely HD6000 and up though, still have full support with NimeZ drivers. Just ran a HD6850 on my 5800x a few weeks ago actually for hwbot, going to try to run HD6850 crossfire on it again soon.
I loved the All In Wonder series. Still use mine. The functions are pretty much obsolete now... Old television broadcasts are gone, who listens to fm radio anymore, etcetera... But back in the day I loved them.
love it, amazing video Phill. I always wanted the 6950 instead even though this was a more powerfull chip. For retro old triple a and esports is an absolute beast
A lot of 6950s could be unlocked to the full 6970 with a BIOS flash. That's what I did with mine back in the day.
Still using two 6970 in crossfire and two 6850s in crossfire .Two pcs i used in my İnternet Cafe. Still running strong .Running two Amd phenom six cores in each system.Still love playing the old games .cheers mate.
bought 6950 + phenom x6 8gbram 1tb hdd for witcher 2 back then.
Gr8 config, changed it only to play w3 and wolfenstein and for WAY LESS power hungry setup. if not those 3 reasones i would keep using till 2023
That jumping NPC bug in Far Cry 2 happens when your FPS goes over 60. It's a well-known issue.
I recommend anyone to lock their FPS to 60 whenever playing almost any Ubisoft game from pre-2015.
This is a great card for XP and Windows 7 machines. It's crazy how fast they dropped in price, too--I recall getting mine for something like $70 just a couple of years after release, new. It's made for a fantastic card in my Windows 7/XP hybrid rig.
I have my HD 6950 2GB exactly this way: in dual boot with Windows XP Pro and Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. Everything runs flawlessly.
What games was I playing in 2010? Runescape, TES IV Oblivion (Still), and a little known newcomer on the block called "League of legends".
Once upon a time, I got an ATI Radeon X800XT All-In-Wonder that came with 3 free games for $325 US new at CompUSA...Damn I miss that store!
I still have a C2E (QX9770 @ 4.2Ghz) running two 5870's in CrossFire.
I think they were one of the last GPU's that were still marked "ATI".
Each of my cards just have 6 mini DP ports in the back hah. They came with a bunch of dongles.
They absolutely crush Crysis. Even Crysis2
In fact my C2D running two 8800 Ultras in SLI do very, very well in Crysis. They run very hot though :(
Great vid as always bud!
Back in 2010 I had a GTX 260 with a amd CPU 955be and 8gb of ram. Then in 2011 I upgraded the GPU to a GTX 570 which was so much better. Still have the GTX 570 I'm too attached to it to let it go.
Those old GPU boxes were nice too!
the blue pcb on the sapphire card is so nice.
A Radeon HD 6850 was my first GPU that I bought with my own money. I'd have loved a 6970.
I like how the Sapphire cards have a Blue PCB, thats a nice touch. Mine was an XFX model with a red PCB.
I had 2x 5850 in crossfire. Back then they were very cheap. I miss those times when AMD/NV actually competing and not price fixing like today
So now you've made me want to try my spare HD 7970 in an XP machine. I'll need to swap the old power supply for something more chunky!
would love go see a retrospective on the 7990. the 7950 was the first graphics card i bought for myself used at 200 buck. i ran that card for yeeeears.
I have the same setup for my XP retro build. I added an Ageia physx card for compatible games.
1000 games, nice! Barely just broke 100 myself on GOG since focusing more on it about 5yr ago
That was my dream gpu back when first got into computers.
Also back when AMD last didn't fuse off chips, so you could flash the 6970 rom onto the 6950 (not all, some) and get additional performance!
Interesting gpu, i thinking to buy this gpu for win xp/7 pc. What's about temperatures ? It's competitor to gtx 480 and these nvidia cards was run very hot.
I had a 965 black when I switched from xp to 7. I had heard at the time I would see a performance increase but my dad was skeptical. But to my pleasure I did mostly across the board see an increase in performance. Was using a gtx 275, then I went to sli 2x 275"s. Was good times.. :)
Guys I did it I finally bought my dream graphics card. The GTX 1080 t.i. I need all that vram Skyrim Graphics modding at 1080p.
My 2014 computer is complete with an i7 4790k 16GB of 1333 MHz Ram and a graphics card from 2016 oddly enough (1080 ti) I remember when they came out with the 1080 t.i. I wanted one so bad
Time to retire the tried-and-true GTX 970 I'll probably give it to my cousin
I got a Sapphire 6950 at that time converted to 6970 through bios flashing. There is an article on Techpowerup about that. Sometime later I got the 7970 GHZ edition, which I kept until now. It’s on my XP ultimate machine with an i7 3770k just like your testbed. The other XP machine has a 970GTX with i7 4790. Although it is faster, quieter and cooler, the 970GTX cannot output 1440p on HDMI, only the DP port can do that. The 7970 GHZ can output 1440p on the HDMI port. ATI/AMDs cards don’t sell easily on 2nd hand market as Nvidia cards. When the 7970 GHZ was relevant I had it listed for sale for months, I grew tired of people bargaining it for pennies, I put in storage and decided to have it as a backup card. Some years ago I realized it was the final XP card for AMD and got very happy about having it around.
That's the worst when people low ball you. I just stick things on eBay now, yes the fees are outrageous but it sells and usually goes to someone that really wants it. I don't like using facebook sales groups, you just get the weirdest interactions. I bought a 7950 recently, but 7970 still asking for around AUD 100 and don't think these are GHz editions.
Just recently someone decided to work on adding a Vulkan rendering support into the Radeon HD 6000 series and was codenamed Terakan so there is a chance that ya can also play modern games on it or have a long term support when OpenGL gets deprecated someday. AMD does not provide any Vulkan driver of their own since that GPU doesn't officially support it.
The only drawback is that this Terakan driver is Linux only since it is for Mesa driver library.
Wow this brought back memories .. like a lot of people I had a 6950 unlocked to 6970 specs which was even more of a bargain! Had a lot of good times playing Battlefield 3 on it with friends.
BF3 was awesome 😎
Great video as always. I do have a question about that H77 motherboard.
Does it allow turbo overclocking on locked non-K CPUs? For example, can you set the frequency of that i7-3770 to 3.9 GHz, all cores?
Thanks!
No it doesn't let you do that, but should work with K version...
@PhilsComputerLab
When I finally updated my computer in 2009 it's was an i7 with a gtx 260. I had a great experience with Windows 7, when I got the pc first it was vista and was experiencing heaps of bluescreens.
The games I was planning where;
Bad Company 2
Dead Space
Resident Evil 5
C&C 3
Far Cry 2
Since then I have been switching between AMD and Nvidia and I can honestly say from first hand experience that those games all run better on Nvidia cards, not only do they have support for PhysX but for some reason only on AMD cards I have that Vysnc issue. I know alot of games have issues running openGL on modern AMD cards like UT99.
Love to see a follow up video using a Nvidia card form 2010
I have a HD 6950 engineering sample that I bought for $38 and it's flashed as a HD 6970. It's a sample that is exactly like the production version.
Even the price of the Voodoo II 12 MB at release, which happened when 3Dfx still had pretty much no competition and so was free to price it as they wanted, is only equivalent to ~550 USD today when adjusting for inflation.
It's mind boggling how much the very high-end has increased in cost.
Can you do a review of PCIe sound cards? I bought a CMI8738 clone from amazon and it said it was 5.1 surround but was only 4.0. I did not know anyone used 4.0 since the 70s quadraphonic. Lots of modern motherboards are leaving out surround analog out. Is the only option for the price the $30 to $45 Sound blaster or are there cheaper ones?
I used 6950 for few months during GPU shortage when my GPU failed, played few older games (and one of it was FarCry 2) and didn't have any issues. But that was under win10 so I can only guess that these problems you had are related with win7/drivers for win7.
Terrascale age terrible compared to first gen GCN cards, not just because driver support ended sooner for TS. Even 7850 is way better than 6970 in any game newer than 2013/14. If driver support is there for GCN1 cards I'd always go with any of them for retro build (they are also much less power hungry)
I still use this card with my win7 old overclocked i7-2600k build with my 4k OLED TV.
I use an displayport 1.2 to HDMI 2.0 adapter to get it to run 4k output, the only bug with the output is it can only run at max 57hz not the full 60hz so I had to make a custom resolution.
I could never figure if it is the card/screen/cable(I use a 10m) or the adaptor that is not allowing the full 4k 60hz resolution.
It can even run UHD HDR movies if you use MPC-HC with madvr.
I still use it for retrogames/emulation and watching movies.
still got one in the garage, was great for skyrim
13:27 I wonder if in Dead Space you could limit the framerate to 60 using Afterburner/Riva tuner? Since you only mentioned the driver vsync or the game vsync but you are using afterburner to show the fps in the top left?
Will test!
I have the same exact card 😁 Used it daily for gaming from 2016 to 2018 and has been really solid for me... Especially for the 50€ I paid for it used 😇 I think it’s comparable to a 1050...
I remember when AMD or rather ATI's flagship card was only $279 US. I bought a Radeon DDR for that price shortly after it was released in 2000. It was the most expensive video card I had ever bought until the 6600 XT I paid $300 for in Aug of 2022
I have an his Radeon 6870 blower style and even though it’s only 1 gb, it still rocks on win7 or xp
I don't think prices have balooned. 370$ from 2010 = 518$ of today. The DIE size of that card was as big as a 3070. And it was built like a toy.
What changed is the high resolution and high refresh rate screens. AMD and nvidia had to create bigger cards, costing more.
Potentially you and I are the only people watching youtube who understand inflation
That looks like a great option for xp gaming. I went with a gtx 960 for xp but it does not output over 1080p on my 4k tv. Even have a hdmi 2.0 and still locked to 1080p. Was hoping to play some underground 2 in xp in 4k. Underground 2 is a hit and miss game to run. Remember getting alot of random crashes on different newer systems. Was able to play thru the game once on windows 10 with a 8700k and 1080ti. Great game. Love the content man! These are my kind of videos. More of the inbetween stuff also that i like the xp era etc.
@@ihatelols Served me well for 5 years. I thought that the 8700k was a hot chip until i upgraded to a 13700k lol. Using a arctic 420 and still running a undervolt to keep the temps normal.
@@alvar891 undervolt is underrated.
Interesting to see what a card like this was like in 2010. I was playing the Half Life series, various other source games, GTA and the original Doom in 2010. I didn't expect my foray into PC games to last but here I still am in 2023. This card would've blown away the 8600GT I had back then.
the limited color range is super useful if you use a projector or old school rear projection TV.
Yes it's one of those features that most of the time you don't need it, but when you do, it's a real pain if the setting is absent.
awesome!
Happy Friday Phil! I never got on the Vista bandwagon and hopped from XP to Win7 instead, but I still love XP. I am currently building a few XP or XP/Win7 dual boot systems from a few eMachines systems I picked up for cheap. I like the HD 7770 and 7970 over the 69xx cards because they are less power hungry and have less issues in games. Maybe you can do some videos on the HD 7xxx series 👍
7970 was my all time favorite card. Regrett selling it. Played on it 4 years without feeling it getting underpowered. How well does the 7000 series work under xp?
Vista x64 believe it or not is one of my favourite OS's
@@Synthematix the only reason I jumped from Vista to 7 asap is Trim support.
Absolutely brilliant and lovely OS.
I upgraded from my Asus gtx 260 to a Sapphire 6870 just to play Battlefield 3. Was a beast of a card for the price. Recently repasted it and the temps dropped significantly. I shoulda done that since the beginning because it was a hot one lol. I later upgraded to a 660ti -> 1050ti -> 1660 super. Looking to upgrade soon, limited to smaller cards sadly.
Have you tried to put a FPS cap in RTSS? You have MSI Afterburner installed it seems, so RTSS should be there too - it's 60FPS cap performs a little bit better (less spikes) than the driver one IIRC from Digital Foundry video, and it should work on Radeon as well. Maybe that will be a good solution for Dead Space?
Worth a shot!
What is the max current link speed in GT/s?
@Philscomputerlab is there a program like snappy for windows 95/98 Im seeing it only shows for xp and up.
Nope
played a lot of starcraft 2, aoe3, and bad company 2 in 2010
BC2 was so awesome 😎
I’m thinking of using one of these for one of two machines. I keep seeing them for cheap.. I want an Intel machine with either a core 2 quad or a pentium D (praise thermal pads!) and one of these, to go with my AMD Phenom II machine with a 4870 (which I will have two of by the time I do this)
I think what is even more amusing for me is that post-2010 there are very few AAA games actually worth spending a huge amount of money on a graphics card for!
Take "Cyberpunk 2044" - "get in car, drive car, shoot people, get in car, avoid police, get out of car, shoot people, rinse, repeat..." Weren't we doing that already in GTA 3 some 20 years ago?
Where's the innovation in gaming now?
Where are the games that are actually COMPLETE on launch day that don't expect you to pay for more DLC over the next 18 months just to get them in a finished state?
There are still good indie games being made and released, but most of them care about good content and not the most intense graphics - plus most of them are written with single play in mind.
Why would I even consider paying $80 for a modern AAA game when at least half the cost of it is for multiplayer servers so that I have to "make my own fun" playing teenage gamer-brats who can just sit on servers 24x7 griefing everyone else?
Multiplayer fun is getting your real friends over for beer, pizza and a LAN party playing Unreal Tournament, Red Alert, Quake and other great classic games three or four times a year.
A great Card for an XP Build, Very Affordable and awesome performance. Thanks for the video
I used a 6950 (bios flashed to be a 6970) until two months ago. Solid cards
I had a compaq with Windows Vista. Athlon 64 X2 I think it was. I couldn't wait for Windows 7 to come out. I had HP send me their updrade DVD. Worked much better than Vista. Vista couldn't run the OS well at all. I had a Nvidia 9600GT 1GB GPU. I think it was still the 32gb era for os's so 4GB memory. I ran XP with Vista. XP was fast on that machine in a era where there was still support.
In this day and age I'm working on a Ivy bridge system. 3770 with hd 7970 and 1600MHz memory. It's on a Foxconn PCWPBABCY6S3P5 Motherboard with Windows 7 through 10 support from HP Pro 3500 PC. I was able to acquire most of the important drivers from Driver Scape. Device manager shows a missing driver for a Simple PCI Device. I achieved what I could get computable with XP on CDs and put them on the shelf. I hope it works as intended.
I worked at a computer store during this thing's release, and I remember the Bitcoin conversations. Things like, "Well with its current price, Bitcoin should pay for the card and the electricity combined in a few years"
If only we knew it'd buy you wealth you couldn't get rid of
NFS Underground. Had it on PC and XBOX and aI was AMAZED at how well the XBOX did with that title. I don't play driving sims often but I got into that game for a bit. The visuals were sharp, the effects were outstanding...the weather was great...I loved the rain, it looked realistic. On PC it seemed off in comparison and I could never put my finger on what it was.
I feel racing is a genre that just does better on consoles?
@@philscomputerlab Makes sense. The way consoles are designed suits a racing game VERY well. However in this case it was something else. Again, I can't put my finger on it. It's probably something simple like FXAA on XBOX but not on PC or a setting like that.
I ran 2 in crossfire back then! Still have them and was replaced by 2x 290x cards.
I did put my media center gpu back then in my XP retro rig! R9 280
Completely unrelated to the performance of older graphics cards, but do Need for Speed Underground and Underground 2 work on modern versions of Windows? I've been wanting to pick up a copy of both.
Yes
G'day Phil,
For Maximum XP performance I have a Sapphire HD7970 & EVGA GTX780Ti SC (with EK Waterblock)
$369 US dollars in 2010 comes out to $507 US dollars today. That's less than a 2x increase in the value of the dollar, yet (in the USA at least) earnings have at least doubled as the US minimum wage in 2010 was $7.25/hr vs $15.50/hr currently. So a $600 GPU today would in theory be not much more expensive in today's market than a $400 GPU would have been 13 years ago.
I remember when the radeon 9700 pro was released in July 2002 for 400$ usd.
I use to have a poster in my room counting how much money I had until I could buy it. 2 years later I bought a radeon 9550 for 135$ usd. XD
There is a few things to remember when talking about 2010 flagships, the first is inflation, that 370usd price adjusted for inflation is 520usd. The other important fact is that the HD 6970 only has a die area of 389 mm², which is far less silicon (the most expensive part of the GPU) then current flagships (around 500mm for AMD and 600 for Nvidia), on nodes that are more expensive adjusted for inflation because lithography just doesn't scale down in price per mm2 as it used to for a lot of reasons.
The 6970 in modern terms is kind of a high midrange, with die area being pretty much the same as a 3070 at 392mm2. And close to a 6700xt which uses 330mm2. GPUs have gotten expensive, but adjusted for inflation and rising die sizes it's not that much, with only Nvidia charging extreme fees for a 4080 that uses less die space then a 3070.
I'd absolutely select HD7000-series over HD6000-series for Win7.
In my experience 7000-series had much less driver-issues w/ Win7. Especially 7750 (only PCI-power needed but remember to buy ddr5-version!) and 7850 are my personal favorites. Both are quite overclockable too, 15% OC-speedup is almost guaranteed.
I know some older users still with 2012-2015 PC's using 7750's and Win10. And I have 7850 as a spare card because it needs only one extra 6-pin power-connector and runs fine even with 300W PSU's.
GCN 1 vs TeraScale 3 arcitecture!
@@philscomputerlab Interesting question is why _drivers_ were much more reliable in Win7 with HD7000-series? Have you tested if any HD7000-series cards have same driver-problems w/ Win7 you just encountered with 6970? I have an old friend who used Win7+HD7850 from 2013 to 2019 without major issues. He plays mostly strategies and older titles, but as far as I know had no big problems beyond slowing performance...
(I switched to nvidia gtx760 around 2013 and we played mostly same games for years)
there was also an hd 8000 series of cards but those were oem only and they seem to be very hard to find on ebay. the latest amd drivers i found that still support xp were for the r9 270x but that card doesn't look to be as powerful as this one is
My old broken hd 5670 ia great when i new buy can play all game in high.. is low-mid VGA but price under $90... Old is gold
I have that gpu too! However for some reason it would not work on windows 10 nor 7, it would however work with linux, and worked wonderfully on linux, a very powerful card!
Fun facts about the Radeon 6000 series.... and not it being the first to use the AMD name. AMD changed the numbering scheme with the 6000 series. Beforehand the 5970 was the dual-GPU card, and the 5870 was the flagship single GPU card. Well anyway, the 6870 was released before the 6970. Some people bought the 6870 on launch day thinking it would be faster than the 5870, but were shocked when they found out the 6870 was a bit slower than the 5870.
The only way to have known about the change was either have been paying attention to the rumor articles or read the launch day reviews.
Hi Phil, I got an OEM Dell HD 7570 (rebranded HD 6570) for retro gaming with many issues, at least compared to NVIDIA cards. First, some OpenGL games have massive frame drops. For example, RTCW (2001) and Far Cry (2004) also have massive frame drops. Some areas can reach 200 fps, while others drop to 20 fps. I couldn't make it work on XP. The 14.4 drivers didn't recognize it, and forcing the installation from the .INF file doesn't load Catalyst. In the past, I had an HD6670, which had so much CPU overhead with an Intel Pentium CPU. Later, I used the same CPU with a GF 9600GT and saw much improvement. Maybe I will test an older driver from the Guru3D library later to see if it works better.
Yea OpenGL stuff can be challenging for ATI/AMD. Haven't noticed issues with Far Cry though. But sometimes older, more period correct drivers can work best. Like within a year of the game released...
I had the HD 5870 from the year before (2009) which lasted me until 2015! The HD 6970 was only 20% faster so wasn't really worth it in my situation. Finally replaced it with an R9 390 which gave me over double the performance. It was paired with a Phenom II X4 955BE. Almost all the parts from that original PC died over the years but I got a replacement HD 5870 recently to pair with a Phenom II X6 1090T. Ran Crysis on the original PC at 1680x1050 absolutely fine.