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Wil my PC be ok for a 5970?

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Hi guys,

I was thinking of upgrading to a 5970. Will my rig (in sig) be ok, or will the fact that I havent got ddr3 ram or an I7 be a waste?

Ta
:)
 
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you mean waste.

paying for a 5970 is a waste when a 5850 does everything most of us need.

i would have thought your pair of 4870s would still be okay though
 
I just upgraded myself from E5200 @ 3.6Ghz to a core i7 930 @ 4ghz i would not spend the same amount of money on a 5970 when the 4870x2 is still fine for all games i have not had a single performance issue on anygame running @ max settings you ofc could do the i7 930 route then buy a 5890 when there launched and then buy a second ;D and enjoy DX11 gaming till DX12 hits.

Be a man with a plan.
 
need to know what your motivation is for this thread. are you having a particular problem with your current system?

right now i'm thinking your current system is okay and you'll probably want to start saving for your next build.
 
What do you use your rig for?

If it's just gaming then your CPU is fine (though selling it now whilst it's still worth something is a point to consider)

What res do you game at?
Do you want/need DX11?
Do you have/want eyefinity?
Do you do any other CPU intensive tasks like encoding?
 
What do you use your rig for?

If it's just gaming then your CPU is fine (though selling it now whilst it's still worth something is a point to consider)

What res do you game at?
Do you want/need DX11?
Do you have/want eyefinity?
Do you do any other CPU intensive tasks like encoding?

I think you will say stick with wha I've got:) I don't want eyefinity, I play at 1080p and not too bothered about DX11 yet.
 
I think you would get better gaming performance if you bought a i7 930 mobo and ram instead of a 5970.

I upgraded from a qx6800 to i7 and at stock speed the i7 is as fast as my old 6800 when it was clocked at 3.8 gig.

ive also just added a second 5870 for xfire and i get very little gain from a single 5870 until i overclock the i7 to 3.6 and at that point the xfire starts to impress.

For instance if you've ever run 3dmark06 the part with the soldiers in the landing craft i would hit 120 fps there with cpu stock and a single 5870 and when i tried with the other 5870 installed and cpu stock guess what it did 120 fps lol.

With a single card as i overclock there you will see the frame rate sore and keep getting faster the more cpu i give it all the way upto 4 gig at which speed it will hit 160 fps there with just a single card.

With cpu stock and single card id score 19600 with single card and cpu overclocked to 4 gig i score 24800.

With cpu at 4 gig and 2x 5870s in fire i scored 27400 so you see you really need the cpu to be able to feed the gfx cards or they just sit there waiting for info from the cpu and all the speed they are capable off is wasted.

Heaven 2 benchmark gets a nice boost up from 38 fps to 72 i think it was.

Got nice gain with Crysis warhead with gfx set to gamer dx10 it was very smooth with fps going between 70 and 100.

Supreme commander forge also seemed to gain and i stayed pegged at 100 fps for most of the skirmish i played and only saw it drop to 70 with nukes going off

So over all id say im very happy with the extra card but you DO really need a very fast cpu to feed them a good psu to power them and a case with good airflow to help keep them cool because adding a second card the temps have risen to 50 idle and 79 load on the lower card near the cpu were before it was like 40 idle and 60 or so load temp.

One other thing which i hadn't banked on is i cant use my xfi sound card anymore as it no longer fits.

Ive sorted the sound by using a optical cable from mobo to a old daci had spare and that feeds my cyrus vs2 preamp i use as headphone amp and this sounds better than my xfi tbh..

Am i happy yes but not delighted pros and cons not all pros im afraid but when its good boy is it fast.
 
I never said I needed one. I said is it worth me getting a 5970,

I'll help best i can there have been many benchmarks for the 5970 out there if you spend some time to compare them you will find the best results come from highly overclocked i7's. i'll see if i can dig around for the ones i looked at the other week but the results are pretty clear that a 5970 can still be quite cpu bound

just plucked up the old LH conclusion pretty much said either a phenom or i7 over 3Ghz would give same performance and would not see a bottle neck from the cpu.

obviously this could change over time as games really start to go mental and start pushing the cpu's,gpu's harder
 
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Using a 5970 on the rig you have now, and a top of the line i7 overclocked to 21jiggawatts, you wouldn't notice the blindest bit of difference, I mean, at all, not an iota, no one on earth could tell the difference between the "fastest" computer in the world with a 5970, and your rig with a 5970.

Ok, I'm assuming your cpu can do, a good 3.5GHz, so the few very single thread limited games have a little headroom as at stock it could be a little slow in those games.

In the vast majority of newer games you'd have no issues.

This is by no means, every game in the world, or even close, but its a general trend the majority of games follow, that is, being severely GPU limited.

http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/metro_2033_performance_guide,9.html

965 at 2Ghz, same FPS(ever so slightly higher, you'd NEVER see it but its funny anyway :p ) beating a 4Ghz i7, and a 2Ghz i7 matching in every way that matters, a 4Ghz 965.

Its all about the gpu, its always been all about the gpu, the few situations people don't run the resolution settings high enough you'll start to see a difference, but thats when you run say Metro 2033 at medium settings, at 1280x1024, show me a person who has a 5970 who runs those settings, and I'll laugh at them, as we all should, as he complains he's cpu limited.

The fact is NO MATTER the gpu you have, you adjust the settings and resolution till you're gpu limited, otherwise you're wasting the GPU.

THe very few CPU limited games, the first Sup commander, a couple other RTS's and FS maybe, your quad will still only be marginally behind a i7.

If you essentially have the cash to get a i7 setup and a 5970 ontop, you basically have the cash for 2x5970, and that will give you double the performance of the i7 + single 5970 setup.

I would recommend though, 2x 5850's, overclock further(probably) save a bundle, see probably higher performance with the better overclock, quite a bit cheaper at the moment. Thats assuming you have the slots for xfire and mobo supports it.. on that subject does a mobo need to support xfire, or do all dual pci-e slot boards do xfire and only SLI is not allowed on certain mobo's?
 
http://www.guru3d.com/article/phenom-ii-x4-965-be-revision-c3-review-test/16

Same review, different page; shows the CPU making no difference.

The more eye candy you run, the more the stress is put on the GPU.

Actually that one shows, that in BIA the Phenom actually pulling away pretty significantly at higher res, which shouldn't happen, at all, higher res equals more gpu load, not cpu load, so if the Phenom should be ahead anywhere it should be lower res like the other test.

I haven't trusted guru3d for a while to be honest, not since they insisted the latest and greatest thing ever was a i7 and you couldn't game without one, its the bestest quad ever and xfire/sli is just slow without it. They proved it by benching the highest i7, against a midrange DUAL CORE C2D chip, and sli/xfire results were different in the multicore using games they decided to use.
 
I just got another 5870 for xfire yesterday and i didnt see any gains over my single 5870 until i start to overclock the cpu to 3.6 and above then you start to see what xfire 5870 can do.A 5970 is same speed near or mighty close to my xfire cards.

For the price of a 5970 the op can buy a i7 930 mobo and ram which i think would give better frames in games with his 4870x2 imo.

My last card was a 4870x2 and my last cpu was qx6800 so i have gone through the stages of upgrading my 4870x2 to a 5870 on my qx6800 rig then upgraded to i7 930 then added another card for xfire 5870s so my posts are from experience of owning the systems mentioned and i got very big upgrade with the i7.
 
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