Looking for cheap, quiet replacement for X1650 (RV530 0x1002:0x71C3 0x1043:0x01AC)

[gradinaruvasile]

if you want to have a totally open source system and very low performance ok, amd is for you.

It really depends what kernel and mesa is used. With the 3.12/3.13 kernels and mesa 10 the 6xxx series cards perform very very well i can tell you.

What do you think of the 6570 vs the 6670? Is it worth the difference?

Depends on what you need. Googling around i see that the 6570 is clocked slower than the 6670 (650 MHz vs 800 MHz core clock), thus slower and with the same type of DDR3 memory they should consume just about the same amount of power (max 44w, idle ~10w).
For your needs (you mentioned cheap), may be the 6570 is better. But google around for yourself.

[brosis]

Got HD5850 for 50$ of ebay a year ago. Just saying...

[l8gravely]

It really depends what kernel and mesa is used. With the 3.12/3.13 kernels and mesa 10 the 6xxx series cards perform very very well i can tell you.

Depends on what you need. Googling around i see that the 6570 is clocked slower than the 6670 (650 MHz vs 800 MHz core clock), thus slower and with the same type of DDR3 memory they should consume just about the same amount of power (max 44w, idle ~10w).
For your needs (you mentioned cheap), may be the 6570 is better. But google around for yourself.

I'm leaning towards the 6670, if only because I'm going to upgrade this system anyway to a newer linux distro, and I'm not afraid to compile my own kernels, since I follow the lkml mailing list pretty closely at times.

In any case, thanks for all the feedback, even from those without anything really useful to say.

Cheers,
John

[gradinaruvasile]

I'm leaning towards the 6670, if only because I'm going to upgrade this system anyway to a newer linux distro, and I'm not afraid to compile my own kernels, since I follow the lkml mailing list pretty closely at times.

In any case, thanks for all the feedback, even from those without anything really useful to say.

Cheers,
John

Make sure you upgrade mesa, drm, xf86-ati too - those are part of the driver and received many optimizations lately.

[l8gravely]

Make sure you upgrade mesa, drm, xf86-ati too - those are part of the driver and received many optimizations lately.

Absolutely, but even if I don't upgrade them right away, I figure a 6670 should be a nice big upgrade over the X1650 I have installed now. It works well for most things, but it's just not there for Flight Gear and more demanding OpenGL apps.

John

[pandev92]

It really depends what kernel and mesa is used. With the 3.12/3.13 kernels and mesa 10 the 6xxx series cards perform very very well i can tell you.

I have an apu a8 5600 k, and in my experiencia, with kernel 3.13 and mesa 10.1 devel, the performance can't be compared with Windows 8.1 performance, this is a shame. With catalyst the experiencia is even worse.

[brosis]

I'm leaning towards the 6670, if only because I'm going to upgrade this system anyway to a newer linux distro, and I'm not afraid to compile my own kernels, since I follow the lkml mailing list pretty closely at times.

In any case, thanks for all the feedback, even from those without anything really useful to say.

Cheers,
John

Say, why do you want to pick such an inefficient dGPU?
Investing into APU would make much more sense, because 6670 can't even 3D properly and will be wasting watts and money compared to APU.

No one really disallows you to get used card and mount a heatsink or go for watercooling if you want.
The 5850 I mentioned has a stock amd fan, if it breaks - it costs 10$ to replace and its loudless inside the case even when under load. Ofc if you burn the GPU, its different deal, but standard games never cause it mention its own presence.

[l8gravely]

Say, why do you want to pick such an inefficient dGPU?
Investing into APU would make much more sense, because 6670 can't even 3D properly and will be wasting watts and money compared to APU.

No one really disallows you to get used card and mount a heatsink or go for watercooling if you want.
The 5850 I mentioned has a stock amd fan, if it breaks - it costs 10$ to replace and its loudless inside the case even when under load. Ofc if you burn the GPU, its different deal, but standard games never cause it mention its own presence.

I'm going with a discrete GPU because I've already got a motherboard, CPU, RAM that work just great for my needs. All I want is to upgrade my dGPU to something newer and better, yet still silent. I don't understand what you mean by saying the 6670 won't do 3D properly. If it supports OpenGL, then it should work just fine. I'm NOT looking for xonotic or other 3D game performance, just improved speed on flightgear at times.

As for wasting watts, that's actually ok right now since it's all in my basement and I don't bother to heat it in the winter, so a bit of extra heat is ok. In the summer... not so much, but that's ok too. :-)

Do you have a suggestion for an efficient dGPU instead? That would be more helpful, since I really don't want to spend a lot on this system, it will be more likely that down the line I'll just get a new system for myself and let the kids inherit this one.

[brosis]

I'm going with a discrete GPU because I've already got a motherboard, CPU, RAM that work just great for my needs. All I want is to upgrade my dGPU to something newer and better, yet still silent. I don't understand what you mean by saying the 6670 won't do 3D properly. If it supports OpenGL, then it should work just fine. I'm NOT looking for xonotic or other 3D game performance, just improved speed on flightgear at times.

As for wasting watts, that's actually ok right now since it's all in my basement and I don't bother to heat it in the winter, so a bit of extra heat is ok. In the summer... not so much, but that's ok too. :-)

Do you have a suggestion for an efficient dGPU instead? That would be more helpful, since I really don't want to spend a lot on this system, it will be more likely that down the line I'll just get a new system for myself and let the kids inherit this one.

Ah, I see. If your priority is to spend less, then upgrading the dGPU might be right choice.
Then, it will OFC fluctuate between better performance/better warranty. But still, I don't think this machine will last long, performance-wise.
It will run older titles a little bit better than 1600, not newer ones. I myself would risk with more potent GPU off ebay for the price of warranty absence, but I understand your position.

[l8gravely]

6670 here, but not working with Linux Mint 16 x86_64

Hi guys,

Thanks for all the feedback, I ended up getting the HiS Silence fanless version of the AMD Radeon 6670 with 1Gb of RAM. But now that I'm trying to use it, I'm running into all kinds of issues.

And since I'm a fool, I also upgraded my main desktop to Linux Mint 16 Mate x86_64 since I figured my old Ubuntu 12.04 install wouldn't work well with the newer card. Silly me... the Linux Mint 16 Mate doesn't work either, I
have lots of corruption on the display, and the logs fill up with messages like this:

[16273.668350] radeon 0000:02:00.0: GPU lockup CP stall for more than 10000msec
[16273.668361] radeon 0000:02:00.0: GPU lockup (waiting for 0x000000000000002b last fence id 0x000000000000002a)

As seen in this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.v...ri.devel/78328

This is quite disappointing since I wanted to make sure I got a supported graphics card with the open source drivers. I've tried adding the following to the kernel command line:

radeon.no_wb=1

but that didn't seem to make a difference either. I was able to install and use the fglrx driver, but that too was not what I wanted, though I might have to use it for now.

Any other suggestions?

John