£200 difference, but is it "£200" better?

Marine-RX179 · 31 Oct 2010 at 16:21

theron said:
couldnt u get a 5850 for 200 and crossfire that with the 5870?

Then his 5870 will be downclock to same speed as the 5850, plus the CPU limitation would still be there.

theron · 31 Oct 2010 at 17:18

ah i ddidnt know that was how it worked, thanks.

subbytna · 31 Oct 2010 at 17:30

sell the 5870 and add the 200 quid he's got to spend and get a 5970?

Jony27 · 31 Oct 2010 at 17:46

no keep the £200 when cayman/antilles comes out sell 5870 and add fund to the £200 so you can afford cayman/antilles

lamboman · 31 Oct 2010 at 17:56

Is your current setup holding you down? I'd say keep it for now, wait until you absolutely need the extra power, otherwise, you'll be disappointed with the money that's gone down the drain.

Vekiq · 31 Oct 2010 at 18:27

Marine-RX179 said:
The Antec 550W will be fine for a overclock system with a 5870. It should be fine even with GTX470 (which is higher power consumption). But if you are thinking of going Crossfire in the future, I'd recommend upgrading the PSU to a decent branded 750W at least.

Also, one thing you need to note is the i5 bundle you quote (the motherboard in the bundle to be specific) will only do Crossfire/SLI at x4/x4, so you could lose from as little as few % to up to as much as 50% speed depending on the game. If you can do or learn to do overclocking yourself, you can buy a 1156 board that will do Crossfire/SLI at 8x/8x, which will only lose 3-4% speed max.

Xfire/SLI does not really bother me to be honest, I generally go with best single GPU I can afford. If I had money to throw of course eyfinity and xfire would be my choice.

I am very comfortable with overclocking myself, but this bundle seems to be good deal, and its warranted for overclock that OC sets, makes sense to jump on it. I might buy things separately as i am not that keen on gigabyte boards, i had some bad experiences with them in the past, so I am really sitting on the fence here with this bundle.

Vekiq · 31 Oct 2010 at 18:29

Jony27 said:
no keep the £200 when cayman/antilles comes out sell 5870 and add fund to the £200 so you can afford cayman/antilles

That`s the plan, I am looking for a foundation that will take new gen of gfx cards and get max out of them once I decide to upgrade from 5870

Vekiq · 31 Oct 2010 at 18:38

lamboman said:
Is your current setup holding you down? I'd say keep it for now, wait until you absolutely need the extra power, otherwise, you'll be disappointed with the money that's gone down the drain.

My setup works fine as is, but i have Abit IX38 Quad GT board, and Abit has left Motherboard market, I don't feel comfortable having a board that has ancient BIOS with no chance of getting new BIOS developed, It could have buckets of performance, but if there are compatibility issues, like there was with ati 4870 x2 gfx cards and my board, there is little i can do about it.

My full spec is

Abit IX38 quad GT
4 gig ocz reaper ram
ATI 5870
E8400 (oc`d to 4.0 GHz)
SB X-fi Xtreme music sound card
Antec NEO 550 HE PSU
Win 7 64 bit