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X-fire my 6950 or Sandybridge???

tommybhoy

tommybhoy

tommybhoy

Soldato
Joined
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As the title suggests, If you were in my situation what would you do, X-fire my 6950>70 and get rid of hybrid physx with a 9800gt(which I do like having).

OR upgrade to a Sandybridge i7 or Bulldozer(if better bang for buck when it comes)???

Setup just now is a [email protected], Asus P5Q-E with 8 gig of Corsair PC2-10000.

The Q6600 is rock solid and has been from day one.

Only use PC for internet, Media Centre and playing games. I don't do any photo editing or encoding whatsoever.

Suggestions please.
 
xfire is a hell of a lot cheaper,
personally id not bother with upgrade
 
Last edited:
GJ02 said:
xfire is a hell of a lot cheaper, hell of a lot
id not bother with upgrade
Click to expand...

not so... the price is about the same. If you are gaming then you will get a huge gain from x-fire sand a much smaller gain from sb - plus you should consider the i5 2500k - cheaper than the i7 2600k and the same performance in all but heavily threaded tasks
 
yeah but he can still sell his current motherboard, cpu, and ram and get some of the money back. imo, you should first try to get upgrade to a cpu that can keep up with xfire and then xfire if you need
 
Thanks for your input guys.
Xfire would cost me 220gbp, whereas new system would be about 400+gbp.
I am a bit concerned that the reference 6950's will dry up and wouldn't get to unlock one when I get round to buying another.
Any idea on how much my current setups worth?
 
tommybhoy said:
Thanks for your input guys.
Xfire would cost me 220gbp, whereas new system would be about 400+gbp.
I am a bit concerned that the reference 6950's will dry up and wouldn't get to unlock one when I get round to buying another.
Any idea on how much my current setups worth?
Click to expand...

I sold my Q6600 for £70ish and the P5Q Pro board for around £45 to give you some idea.

I put the money towards a new i5 2500k set up and crossfired my unlocked 6950's so it's hard to say which would be better.

Personally if I had to choose I would go with the processor, ram and board upgrade. It really does seem a lot faster than my old Q6600 and an unlocked 6950 is still pretty fast for most games.
 
without a shadow sandybridge that q6600 is holding your card back a little. dont care what anyone says. i had a q9550 and that was clocked at 4ghz and i had a gtx480 clocked and when i did some tests in my rig and a friends i7920 rig there card was performing better. not loads better. so you will just get more bottle neck xfiring
 
I wouldn't bother with either to be honest. Wait around until Bulldozer is out, or the X68 chipset is out at least. I'm sure your 6950/70 is doing absolutely fine. (I know mine is - even at 2560x1600).
 
I sympathize with the OP as this is something that I will have to weigh up at some point. One set of user experiences and results seem to suggest that staying with the older tech and just dropping in a very high end card would be fine or 'good enough', while my head tells me to get a newer board and cpu to allow the modern gpu's to stretch their legs.

Either wait for Bulldozer, if it isn't far off, or upgrade the the cpu etc in your rig seems the most sensible on reflection.
 
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