I was trying to write a question regarding vide cards to the forum and my cat ran across my keyboard before it was finished. I apologize for the confusion.

Here is my question as I meant to write it.

I have three unused video cards . (The HIS Radeon 6850, the 7870 and the 7950.( I collect computer parts.)

I hate loud video card noise.

The 6850 has 1gb of memory the 7870 has 2, and the 7950 3.I do not know which to try. I have physical problems. so it is not easy to change cards to test them. Are their any ideas on which card would be better for me. Obviously the 7950 , which has the most memory should be the best but which card is louder/better overall. I currently have the 6850 installed and do not want to change if I can avoid it-but I do plan to use a number of mods that will increas memory use a lot. I have an ssd, does that make getting extra memory on the card unnecessary?

Also I can run the 6850 and nothing else but necessary services on on my old win xp system with 3 gb of memry free, including pagefile. On the win 7 system I plan to build soon I will have 8gb of memory. I know win 8 is the newst os of all but I try to stay one behind so I miss most of the bugs. Many thanks and Joe, my cat, says hi.

That's difficult to say.

Under load all high end graphic cards making noise you know....

There are 1 fan cards 2 or even 3 fan cards, so nobody can know on what rpm's those cards operating at load !!!!!

If you have physical problems, you can see how long or big your cards are, and act accordingly.

As for the louder/better that's not comparable. (more or less noise has nothing to do with better or not)

--------------------------------

I would say try skyrim with 6850 but i doubt you will have performance problems with a 128 GB/sec bandwidth card.

Only if you want to install lot's of mod's i would go for the 2GB video card.

---------------------------------

Beside that you should worry more about your CPU as for your GPU !!!!!

---------------------------------

and i thing 6850 and 7870 are approximately 24cm long, and the 7950 should be approximately 28cm long.

beware for the PCI-E pin plug to the end of the graphic card, so be sure to give it extra room. !!!!

Memory on a video card (VRAM) is an entirely separate pool of memory than system memory, and an SSD is storage space and is completely different than system RAM or VRAM. All that the SSD will do is give you faster loading times when the game fetches data from it to load into RAM to run the game.

If the mods you're planning to run include high-resolution textures, then you need to use either the 2 GB or 3 GB card. The game with HD textures runs okay with 2 GB of VRAM in my experience. http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=664&card2=677 gives you a comparison between the 7870 and the 7950. The 7950, like you say, is the better card.

As far as noise goes, that's going to be hard to say. Under load, both cards will make audible fan noise. I'm guessing that the noise levels between the two should be similar, but I don't have any direct experience with either of those cards.

Ah, so the faster hard drive will do nothing for my v memory. Very good to know. I am obviously going to have to change to one of the newer cards. Many thanks.

P, S. I have a REALLY top of the line cpu so that is not an issue either way.

Thanks again.

> P, S. I have a REALLY top of the line cpu so that is not an issue either way. <

that's nice to hear so either way you keep your 6850 or if you want mod's install the 7870, as they are identical in length...