Let me talk about the card for now. I ordered the card last Friday, via Flipkart, and it reached me on Monday noon. The card was shipped on Friday itself from Flipkart's Delhi warehouse, and would have made it earlier had the 26th of Jan not fallen in between. That's impressive as the delivery time is shown to be 8-9 days on the card's page. The packaging by Flipkart though left a lot to be desired. It had just been packed in a flimsy cardboard wrap which had a one inch tear on an edge. The box came without any seal, you could just pull out the flip with your hands and take out the gpu. At least it didn't have any visible damage.
Sapphire's own packaging was rather mediocre too. No padding anywhere, The card had been placed in a bubble wrap, and was in excellent condition despite everything. It's really long around 28cm and friggin heavy. It had two 8pin slots for power connectors. My Corsair TX650 V2 came with two external, 2+6pin PCIe cables, so that was fine. It took me more than two hours to get it running because I hadn't seated it in the slot properly, and I kept tinkering with the cables and the BIOS rather try reseating the damn thing. I installed AMD's 13.1 drivers for the net, the cd that comes with the box doesn't have anything useful. I switched on the Boost button on the card for the BIOS with overclocking.
It's running really well. The card is silent all the time, whether idle or gaming, you don't hear anything from the fans even when the pc is booting up. The temps are great too, 27C for idle and under 45C under load. This is without having attached any extra fans, coolers or whathaveyous.
There's an oddity that I have noticed. The card emits high pitched whine whenever Fraps shows the fps at insanely high values (1000+), usually at game menus, which goes away when you start the game. This is an issue that appears in both AMD and Nvidia cards. Turning on V-Sync fixes it. The only two games this happened were STALKER SoC and Crysis Warhead.
It runs games decently too, Crysis 2, Crysis Warhead, The Witcher 2, Sleeping Dogs, Battlefield 3, Dark Souls all run fine at maxxed out settings at a resolution of 1920x1080. I'll post more in-depth updates regarding games when I've spent a decent amount of time with them. The card does reach fps of around 30s when you max out everything on Skyrim, maybe owing more to my lack of ram(4gb) than the gpu though.
Glitches:
Sleeping Dogs: Intermittently, I notice a couple or more small flickering squares, about half a centimeter in width. Most likely a driver issue. I'll report back after trying 13.2 beta.
The Walking Dead: Microstutters, without drop in fps, and occasional sound glitches. I think that has more to do with game engine than the drivers.
I've got myself into the Crysis 3 beta and have the 13.2, I'll report back the results after I've installed the latter.
System specs: Dell US2311HM 1920x1080@60Hz
4GB ram
2500k at stock settings
Corsair 300R cabinet
Corsair TX650V2
Asus P8Z77-M Pro
Shout out to ALPHA17 for helping me make the decision. He's the guy who helped me get together the rest of the pc too.
Sapphire's own packaging was rather mediocre too. No padding anywhere, The card had been placed in a bubble wrap, and was in excellent condition despite everything. It's really long around 28cm and friggin heavy. It had two 8pin slots for power connectors. My Corsair TX650 V2 came with two external, 2+6pin PCIe cables, so that was fine. It took me more than two hours to get it running because I hadn't seated it in the slot properly, and I kept tinkering with the cables and the BIOS rather try reseating the damn thing. I installed AMD's 13.1 drivers for the net, the cd that comes with the box doesn't have anything useful. I switched on the Boost button on the card for the BIOS with overclocking.
It's running really well. The card is silent all the time, whether idle or gaming, you don't hear anything from the fans even when the pc is booting up. The temps are great too, 27C for idle and under 45C under load. This is without having attached any extra fans, coolers or whathaveyous.
There's an oddity that I have noticed. The card emits high pitched whine whenever Fraps shows the fps at insanely high values (1000+), usually at game menus, which goes away when you start the game. This is an issue that appears in both AMD and Nvidia cards. Turning on V-Sync fixes it. The only two games this happened were STALKER SoC and Crysis Warhead.
It runs games decently too, Crysis 2, Crysis Warhead, The Witcher 2, Sleeping Dogs, Battlefield 3, Dark Souls all run fine at maxxed out settings at a resolution of 1920x1080. I'll post more in-depth updates regarding games when I've spent a decent amount of time with them. The card does reach fps of around 30s when you max out everything on Skyrim, maybe owing more to my lack of ram(4gb) than the gpu though.
Glitches:
Sleeping Dogs: Intermittently, I notice a couple or more small flickering squares, about half a centimeter in width. Most likely a driver issue. I'll report back after trying 13.2 beta.
The Walking Dead: Microstutters, without drop in fps, and occasional sound glitches. I think that has more to do with game engine than the drivers.
I've got myself into the Crysis 3 beta and have the 13.2, I'll report back the results after I've installed the latter.
System specs: Dell US2311HM 1920x1080@60Hz
4GB ram
2500k at stock settings
Corsair 300R cabinet
Corsair TX650V2
Asus P8Z77-M Pro
Shout out to ALPHA17 for helping me make the decision. He's the guy who helped me get together the rest of the pc too.
. What's stopping you ?.
