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5850 in crossfire

gregster said:
5850 in CF will be nice for BF3 but as pointed out, VRAM will be an issue. All this means is though that instead of ultra, play on high and you will get great fps returns.
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I meant to quote your post earlier, sorry. You make an interesting point.

So are you saying that if I don't use ultra, (and frankly, I'm happy on just high as I've never been that fussed about getting the absolute best visuals since good framerate and decent visuals are more important to me), that the lack of vram won't actually be an issue for me in CF? So then it's just a case of some extra heat and noise? Those wouldn't bother me tbh.
 
I would plump for a single 6950 over 5850 CrossFire any day, but that's just me.

CrossFire is never as simple as plug and forget, you really need to do your homework about the pros and cons of CrossFire, this is where imho, people fall flat and then label dual cards as total rubbish.

Does your PIIx2 unlock?

If it does then try that as you might not even need a new cpu.
 
tommybhoy said:
I would plump for a single 6950 over 5850 CrossFire any day, but that's just me.

CrossFire is never as simple as plug and forget, you really need to do your homework about the pros and cons of CrossFire, this is where imho, people fall flat and then label dual cards as total rubbish.

Does your PIIx2 unlock?

If it does then try that as you might not even need a new cpu.
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Nah, tried unlocking it several times, won't do it. Ok, I'm gonna forget crossfire on your advice and others here. But a single 6950 won't give me a significant performance boost over my 5850, right? Or wrong?
 
It will give you much better overall playability as I said above.

If you get a good one, you should get about 900-950 MHz on the core, but don't oc the vram though, it will stop your core oc'ing as high, and the vram gains are virtually non existent anyway.

At 950MHz, it may surpass a stock 6970/570 in some titles and get close to a 580.

http://hardocp.com/article/2011/08/29/sapphire_toxic_hd6950_video_card_review/10
 
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tommybhoy said:
It will give you much better overall playability as I said above.

If you get a good one, you should get about 900-950 MHz on the core, but don't oc the vram though, it will stop your core oc'ing as high, and the vram gains are virtually non existent anyway.

At 950MHz, it may surpass a stock 6970/570 in some titles and get close to a 580.

http://hardocp.com/article/2011/08/29/sapphire_toxic_hd6950_video_card_review/10
Click to expand...

Ok that sounds good. Can I overclock any 6950 or only specific ones? For example, if I didn't end up getting the one in members market for whatever reason and bought this Club 3D http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-030-C3&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=

can that be O/C? Also, I used afterburner to test GPU usage. Crysis 2 was giving me around 83 to 98% usage with decent framerate, can't remember what it was. Crysis warhead around 70% GPU usage and about 30fps, and skyrim was about 50 to 60% usage with around 60fps most of the time. Does this signify CPU bottleneck?
 
If a GPU is not hitting 99% then yes, it is being bottlenecked. When I play BF3, my GPU is always hitting 99% and stays there while playing.
 
I had 2 5850s playing BF3 on High at 1080p. My target was 60fps and 90% of the time I got this. However like some have said, the fps range was high. Sometimes I'd get 25fps when things got mega hectic, albiet only for a few seconds. Sometimes I got 100+ fps in maps like Grand Bazaar and Siene Crossing.

VRAM wasn't an issue as I'm only playing at 1080p and I also have 8GB of RAM which helps a lot.

If you can get a 5850 for around £80 I say get one. Otherwise save up and get a 7950, awesome awesome card!
 
elrasho said:
VRAM wasn't an issue as I'm only playing at 1080p and I also have 8GB of RAM which helps a lot.
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That's probably why you were getting lows of 25fps.



If one 5850 is bottlenecked, 2 are a waste of time, not only will both 5850's be bottlenecked, he will also have to deal with poor scaling from his dual core PII.

If you were going to spend £160 for the 6950 new, then I would plump up the extra cash for a 7850, OcUK keep putting up good deals, about £170 gets you an oc'ing beast of a card that can go as fast as a stock 7950!

There is one on Mondays deal of the day@£168, but it will be gone in about 30 minutes.
 
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Different strokes for different folks i guess.

I still run 2 5850s and i have not come across a game which i cannot play maxed out. BF3 in single player for example on ultra minus AA is easily over 70 fps. Crysis 2 on ultra does struggle at times but still manages 40+ fps.

At the moment, personally, i see no need to upgrade.

I think i would actually go for 680 or 690 and only consider that a befitting upgrade to 2 5850s.:p
 
My Samsung 3D monitor arrives between 2 and 3pm today, so I'll have a better idea how much more graphics processing power I'll need.

gregster said:
If a GPU is not hitting 99% then yes, it is being bottlenecked. When I play BF3, my GPU is always hitting 99% and stays there while playing.
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I don't really understand how this works, and excuse me for being thick here. If some games are CPU dependant, and if the GPU says for example 70% usage in a game, could that just be because the CPU is doing the rest of the work or should the GPU always show 99%, whether it's CPU dependant or not? I've got some point and click games which take pretty much no graphics processing power, you know like monkey island type games, and last night in one of those games, GPU % was around 44%, according to MSI Afterburner. I wouldn't have thought there'd be a bottleneck on a game like that?




tommybhoy said:
If you were going to spend £160 for the 6950 new, then I would plump up the extra cash for a 7850, OcUK keep putting up good deals, about £170 gets you an oc'ing beast of a card that can go as fast as a stock 7950!

There is one on Mondays deal of the day@£168, but it will be gone in about 30 minutes.
Click to expand...


Hmm, I must say, if you think I can overclock a 7850 to match a 7950 then that's really damn good, considering I'd effectively have bought a card for under £200 matching a near top of the range card well over £300. Btw, you mentioned poor scaling from my dual core PII, but I would not be keeping this CPU, but going with either Ivybridge or worst case a X4 965BE overclocked.
 
The 7850 oc thread is worth a look:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18389760

Simply the best bang for buck highly overclockable gpu out there right now imo.

The poor scaling was in relation to going CrossFire, there will be a scaling bottleneck on your current setup, meaning that you currently won't have enough cpu grunt to push 2 cards to work to their full potential.

I had scaling problems with my [email protected] and a stopgap 3 Core PIIBE@4GHz.

It wasn't until I went [email protected] that my 6950>70's started performing(scaling properly) as they should.
 
tommybhoy said:
The 7850 oc thread is worth a look:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18389760

Simply the best bang for buck highly overclockable gpu out there right now imo.

The poor scaling was in relation to going CrossFire, there will be a scaling bottleneck on your current setup, meaning that you currently won't have enough cpu grunt to push 2 cards to work to their full potential.

I had scaling problems with my [email protected] and a stopgap 3 Core PIIBE@4GHz.

It wasn't until I went [email protected] that my 6950>70's started performing(scaling properly) as they should.
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Thanks, I'll have a read through that, then I'll wait to see if any further 7850 deals come up similar to that monday deal I missed. Btw, I don't think Ivybridge is the one for me anymore, seems Sandybridge is still king for overclocking and cooler temps.
 
Merlin5 said:
I don't really understand how this works, and excuse me for being thick here. If some games are CPU dependant, and if the GPU says for example 70% usage in a game, could that just be because the CPU is doing the rest of the work or should the GPU always show 99%, whether it's CPU dependant or not? I've got some point and click games which take pretty much no graphics processing power, you know like monkey island type games, and last night in one of those games, GPU % was around 44%, according to MSI Afterburner. I wouldn't have thought there'd be a bottleneck on a game like that?
Click to expand...

I am not overly clever on this but my understanding is that a game like BF3 is heavily GPU intensive, so when I look at how my CPU is working, I can see that 4 cores are sitting pretty much around 30-35% and when I look at the GPU working, it is sitting at 99%.

If my GPU was not hitting 100% and only hitting lets say 75%, then that GPU is capable of another 25% of current fps increase (if I was getting 40fps @ 75% GPU usage, I am losing out on another 10fps).

I hope this makes sense?
 
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