6950 vs 5830

[Witcher1979]

Hey guys

My system at the moment is this:

Q6600 @3.0ghz
4gb Ram
HD5830

Now this setup actually plays almost everything on high with around 40-60fps on most games (those fps are OK for me). But with upcoming games I feel a little upgrade is in order.

I have £200 to spend next month on a GPU and I was thinking about the 6950. It does not have to be AMD, its just I liked the looks of this card.

Now for the questions.

1) Will my CPU bottleneck the 6950
2) Is the 6950 a good upgrade over the 5830
3) Maybe a better nvidia card for the same price?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Trunks9486]

Wait fior next generation. 6-series amd and 5-series nvidia cards were not that radical from prior generations.

Next gen comes with a die shrink and should offer a good boost. The boost from 5830 to 6950 is not THAT great. A second 5830 might be a better idea if you HAVE to be upgrade and your mobo supports crossfire

 

[IronWarrior]

Depends on the resolution you play at.

I have pretty much the same setup as you as in Q6600 OC'ed to 3.1GHz, 6GB RAM but running an 6950 as well for Eyefinity gaming at 5670x1080

Plays very well, am sure am bottlenecked but it plays BFBC2 and other games at a decent FPS on high settings.

 

[Witcher1979]

Hey

Yeah I can run BC2 on high just fine on my current card. My res is quite low its actually only 1680x1050 which I guess is fairly low for the card really. But I am thinking of upgrading my screen so its full 1080p maybe higher, hence why I thought about a GPU upgrade.

On some sites they say you will get a 25% increase from most games, I call that a lot to be honest going from 5830 to 6950. To be fair the 5830 plays most stuff on high just fine. I am just trying to keep this setup for at least another year maybe two so I figured GPU upgrade. After a year or two I will upgrade the full machine to something a bit newer.

Cheers

 

[jorzeh]

Hmm... I'm pretty sure the 5830 is quite a lot slower then the 5850? isn't it ? well the 6950 is quite a boost over the 5850 @ 6950, Infact it's twice as fast if you run DX11 and tessilation.

If your current card is fine on the games you play, I wouldn't upgrade, From what i read the next gen cards will be 32x PCIE ? so this means a full new PC to take advantage of them fully, Ofcourse if that is true the prices of the mainboards and CPU's will be retardly overpriced, The Core i5 2500K builds at the moment are really nice of balance of power to cost ratio .

Nat.

 

[arc@css]

6950 > 5870 > 5830.

I couldn't find a direct 6950 v 5830 using that comparison so I choose to use two links for a breakdown to give you a better idea. As a 5870 is quite a lot faster than a 5830, so then a 6950 will be faster again, albeit only slightly more so. However, I doubt that difference between the two high end cards would be readily noticeable to all unless you a lot of Stalker.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/171?vs=162

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/293?vs=294

For the cpu, 3.0ghz in most single player games will not really be an issue, none major anyway. For multi player games then yes, you will notice a big improvement if you had a faster cpu.

1. No. (as above).
2. Yes.
3. If I have your res correct in my mind, a 560ti would be the equivalent for nVidia. If you do upgrade your screen then I'd be looking at either 6950 / xfire / 560 2gb / possibly sli, or higher. However, there your budget would need to scale considerably in accordance with your needs.

 

[Defunkt]

If you want true bang for your buck you can pick up 2 5850's and crossfire for £200 (if you shop around) for that you get performance that cannot be bettered for £200, Worth considering.

 

[Witcher1979]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I would go down the crossfire route but my mobo does not support this

I think from the help here the 6950 will be better then my 5830 so I will grab the one with the free dirt 3 game I also found a nice 24" screen, the ones here are pretty limited, not many on offer so I had to look elsewhere for that.

Next year or maybe the year after (depends how my machine holds up with newer games) I will do a full upgrade anyway I think.

Cheers guys for the expert knowledge

 

[gazzaman2k]

6950 all the way if you can even better if the shaders unlock too