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i'm still waiting for nvidia to produce a card that's worth upgrading to from a gtx-560 Ti for around $250 or so.

that's what i paid for some gtx-560 and 560 Ti cards a few years ago and is about the limit of what i'm willing to pay for a video card. paying $600 or $700 or $1200 for a GPU is something only a moron would do.

every card since then that costs around $250 is actually worse than the 560 in terms of performance - generally much better power consumption, but worse performance...ranging from slightly worse to ridiculously bad, and usually deliberately crippled by being cut from a 256-bit memory interface to 64-bit.

at best, it would be roughly the same as what i already have - why pay that much for no actual benefit?

when i bought the 560s, i was upgrading from gt-240s - definitely a worthwhile upgrade, from ~ 1.5 to ~ 5 times the performance depending on what attribute you're measuring (GTX-560Ti vs GT240). when i upgrade again i want a similar increase in performance for about the same price.

so, nvidia, give me a reason to upgrade.

You should look at an HD7750, they will most likely be sub $75 in a few weeks and it uses nearly 30% less than the 240 while being MUCH faster when it comes to pixel and texel rate, source.

My youngest got one and I have to say I'm impressed, curbstomps my HD4850 while being whisper quiet and putting out VERY little heat. You could probably pair that with an ULV AMD or Intel and get a sub 150w gaming system pretty easily.

Not really. Radeon 7770 is about the same, maybe a little better than the 9800 GTX. As for most cards, yes.

http://www.hwcompare.com/11997/geforce-9800-gtx-vs-radeon-hd-7770/

I'll second Blaskowicz, the 260 uses more power than the 660.

Question: Why would you run the HD5550 at home when the HD4850 is only $53? I mean you look at the numbers and the HD4850 just curb stomps the HD5550 and geeks has them brand new for $53 and has had them at that price for ages. Until the 58xx and 68xx drop down to sub $70 I'll be recommending the HD4850s as they really do crank out the graphics. BTW this is the same model both myself and both of my boys have and i can tell you they are GREAT cards, they accelerate just about any major format of video, play games with plenty of detail, the amount of raw power you get with those cards is just nuts.

So if you are running crazy resolutions like that you'd probably be happier with the HD4850 as having 800 stream processors and a 256bit pipe you can keep that baby pretty well pumping when it comes to graphics.

Okay I gotta ask.....why? The E series is a horrible chip, loses in every metric and you could have simply underclocked a standard chip and not only would it have been cheaper you would have saved on electricity while having the ability to ramp up if needed. Frankly the only E series i touch is when a customer has a socket AM2 board and they want a cheap upgrade as Starmicro has some E series quads dirt cheap and if the customer just wants a render box or video converter better to have 4 slower cores than 3 faster for that use case. But that is a truly awful chip for gaming, gets awful scores and frankly doesn't save as much power as an underclocked Athlon or Deneb Phenom II.

But if you are truly concerned about your electric bill (one thing I don't have to worry about thank goodness as its thrown in along with water and garbage with my apt) then the Thuban and the Asrock would be the better choice and in fact I'd take the Pepsi challenge against your 910e and i'm confident I'd win, how? Because Asrock has ACC and an OC dashboard that lets me not only OC but to UC and turn off cores at will. my 6 can be anything from a single to a 6 core, and any speed from 1.6Ghz-3.5GHz simply by using ACC. The only place you'd beat me is in the GPU power dept but then again my HD4850 is more powerful by a good 50% while only costing $51 at geeks new.

So I just don't get why you'd have chosen THAT chip of all things, you'll probably start hitting bottlenecks on the CPU pretty quick and the lack of headroom for OCing means there simply won't be any place to go. I just hope you got a steal on the chip because like the first gen Phenoms they really don't fit any niche well, too much power to be considered truly low power but not enough headroom to be considered mainstream. BTW if you need cheap chips for upgrades i've been shopping with the Starmicro guys for years, they are a great bunch and I've never had a bit of trouble with their chips. they were even nice enough to call when the chip I had ordered was sold out and offered me a more expensive chip for the same price and just wanted to make sure it would fit, that's nice. Plus you gotta love a place with $15 Pentium Ds and $20 Athlon Mobiles. You can drop them socket 754 athlon mobiles in just about any socket 754 system and get a REALLY low power nettop out of it, very nice.

I generally don't find CPUs too confusing as they don't change toooo often, but graphics cards I just stopped trying to keep up with years ago.

When I bought a card recently I just googled "x-card vs y-card", hwcompare.com was generally the top result. It has lots of automatically generated pages which compare benchmarks of one card vs another. If you made a site similar to that for comparing CPUs/mobos within certain categories or price ranges then you might make some money from advertising revenue, especially since those people are out to buy new hardware anyway.

"Apple has used so few GPUs... Where does the 9400M and the 320M fall in that list?"

TFA:
"Mac Recommended System Requirements:....9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better"
Usually I'd agree, it can sometimes be hard to figure out if a 4890 is better than a 5750, etc, but in this case they made it pretty clear. A 9400M is not as fast as a 9600M, so while it'll play on minimum it isn't the recommended GPU.

FYI if you ever want to check just google "(BLANK) vs (BLANK)". Chances are you'll find a review comparing the two GPU unless one of them is so old it's not even worth comparing it with the other GPU.

Here's a great example: "PC Recommended System Requirements:... ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better"

So I googled: Radeon 3870 vs 4770 and found this review which shows the 4770 scoring 30%+ better framerates than the 3870.