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5850 upgrade

Yrkoon

Yrkoon

Yrkoon

Soldato
Joined
15 Sep 2006
Posts
2,983
Location
Edinburgh
hey guys im looking to get a bit more power for gaming as my 5850 1 gig is starting to show its age a bit.

my budget would be around 130-150 quid so if any one has any suggestions for a nice bang per buck upgrade it would be much appreciated :)


oh edit : my pc case isnt very big so no big massive cards please :)

system specs :

ocz 600 watt psu
phenom II 955 @ stock 3.2ghz
8 gig ddr @ 1333mhz
sapphire 5850 extreme 1 gig
 
Yrkoon said:
hey guys im looking to get a bit more power for gaming as my 5850 1 gig is starting to show its age a bit.

my budget would be around 130-150 quid so if any one has any suggestions for a nice bang per buck upgrade it would be much appreciated :)


oh edit : my pc case isnt very big so no big massive cards please :)

system specs :

ocz 600 watt psu
phenom II 955 @ stock 3.2ghz
8 gig ddr @ 1333mhz
sapphire 5850 extreme 1 gig
Click to expand...

What about this ?
 
You will find the 270X is closer to the 7950 in most gaming benchmarks so the 7870 seems a bit below the 270X. The memory and clock speed is faster out of those two cards on the 270X. The 270X also supports DirectX 11.2 but that may not make much of a difference.
 
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Em...I wou'dn't recommend upgrading your graphic card until you upgrade your CPU, or at least clock it to 4.00GHz.

My old Q6600 overclocked to 3.60GHz was bottlenecking my 5850, your Phenom II X4 955 at just 3.20GHz would be even slower than that, thus bottleneck even more.

If you overclock your CPU to 4.00GHz then you can may be consider the 270 or 270X. If you are leaving your 955 at stock clock, I'd say don't waste your money, just stick with your 5850.

Is your board a AM3 or AM3+ board? See if you can upgrade your CPU to a FX6300 or something like that.
 
yay ordered it and it has shipped, so should get it tommorrow :)

ill be upgrading my cpu and mainboard soon enough as well so im not bothered if it gets bottleknecked a bit, this should be this systems final upgrade before a new mainboard and cpu :)

i can get my cpu up to about 3.7 on stock voltage, its one of the early phenom II's so c2 revision and 125 watts lol :)

oh my dad has a 5850 of the same model as mine so he can crossfire my old card yay :)
 
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hey guys just thought i would say now that i have the card installed that im very very happy with it :)

games that were struggling at high settings are now maxed out with aa eg sky rim is now every thing maxed at my native 1200p res with 8x aa and is smooth :)

bf4 went auto to settign every thing at high and it looks sweet and with nice performance on 64 player servers :)


im very pleased with it so thanks again for the advice and my cpu is still at stock, im surprised how well my cpu still performs at times, oh the card barely fitted in my cooler master elite case lol

edit : erm marine rx my phenom II 955 was equivalant to a q9550, as my freind had one of them with similar gpus and memory, and they performed about the same, no waste of money or massive bottleneck just awesome performance compared to my old 5850 by getting the 270x, the phenom II is more capable than you think :)
 
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I found upgrading from my phenom 965 to i7-2600k made very little difference to games performance, too. People do tend to massively overstate the "CPU bottleneck" 'problem'.
 
MeMeMeMe said:
I found upgrading from my phenom 965 to i7-2600k made very little difference to games performance, too. People do tend to massively overstate the "CPU bottleneck" 'problem'.
Click to expand...

yep my m8 who is in the spare room here went from his q9550 to a i5 and noticed about 3 or 4 extra fps on his 7850 gpu.


im just shocked that some one would suggest i was wasting my money by getting a nice bang per buck card because my cpu is apparently not awesome or something, if i did'nt know my cpu and pc better i might of beleived that and never bought it.

im very happy i bought the 270x it is performing so good compared to my old card and my cpu is on stock still :)

hehe maxed out dirt showdown (not a demanding game) it said i had average 75 fps with max aa and settings but couldnt use aa on it before with my old card with out a big hit eg 35 fps, and bf4 is running like a dream :)
 
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MeMeMeMe said:
I found upgrading from my phenom 965 to i7-2600k made very little difference to games performance, too. People do tend to massively overstate the "CPU bottleneck" 'problem'.
Click to expand...
You are gaming at on 3 screens with a single 7970, so obviously you gonna hit the GPU bound WAY before the CPU does. It's normal to barely get any extra performance on the i7 comparing to the Phenom II X4 at the res you are gaming at...

OP DOES need to overclock his CPU higher if he's getting a faster card. Any game he plays that doesn't use up to 4 threads would be instant bottleneck, and it won't be just a little if he was using the 270x...

It's also about using the right settings for the games depending how demanding the game is. If someone was to just mindlessly turn everything to max and 4xAA on a 7850 in games such as Crysis 3, of course it's gonna be GPU bounded and it wouldn't make much different whether people were using Phenom II X4 or i7, as the frame rate would be so low; however, if dropping the graphic level down by one tier to high for example, the i5/i7 would be pushing 40-60fps+, where as the stock Phenom II X4 at 3.20 would still be stucked at hovering betweem 20-50fps.

Yrkoon upgrading your graphic card will no doubt give you more headroom for using higher graphic settings, however, it is more about the Phenom II X4 at 3.20GHz is not fast enough to keep the minimum frame rate in the 40-60fps+ range in the more demanding games...regardless of how powerful the graphic card you are using.
 
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Right now I'm gaming on three screens with two 7970s.

But I've been through these upgrades all at single screen:
5850 -> 5850 CF
5850 -> 6950
6950 -> 7970
7970 -> 7970 CF
I've also tested my old phenom 965 (and an 1100T hexcore) vs my current i7-2600k, with the 5850 (1 and 2), 6950 (1 and 2) and seen very little difference between all the CPUs.
I haven't tried the 7970s with the phenoms, so cant say for certain whether they would be bottlenecked, but my experience suggests if it is, I'd still be getting considerably better performance with the 7970s than the 6950s.

Which leads to my main criticism of people suggesting upgrading CPUs to deal with bottlenecks:

The increase you get from the graphic card (there's always an incraese) will be more than the performance you lose from not upgrading the CPU. Usually a LOT more.

So it's ALWAYS a better move to ignore people talking about a CPU bottleneck and upgrade graphic GPU first. If you then find you do have a bottleneck, that's the time to think about upgrading CPU. Never upgrade CPU first, just because some people claim there will be a bottleneck.
 
i was just looking through my thread starting history.

im using the same 270x and have a 6600k cpu now with 2666 ddr4 etc, the gpu was bottleknecked a wee bit but nothing major.

the phenom II with the 270x ran the witcher 3 pretty well for a nearly 7 year old mainboard.

the game felt smoother once i switched to the i5 etc but nothing godly and i got a very good boost when i first switched to this graphics card on the old phenom II and another 3 years of good fun out of it.

just only now am i wanting to upgrade the gpu im still gaming at 1200p on the same knackered monitor lol
 
cheers but i already made a thread asking what to upgrade too :)

just thought i would mention the bottlekneck was not much on the phenom 2, i be drunk lol
 
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