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Another - What Graphics Card..........

olibb

olibb

olibb

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Joined
1 Mar 2010
Posts
151
Im looking for a card to replace my old ATI 5770. Now i was looking at a 6970 at around £250, but wondered if it was worth spending the extra 100 and getting a new 7950?

I usually play some BF3 and SC2 & sometimes play WOW (unfortunately).

I do like to play games with high settings etc - but i only run 1920 x 1080 so not a massive resolution.

My system specs are a AM3 AMD Phenom x4 3.2GHz, 8gb DDR3 Ramm 1600MHz, Corsair 700w PSU. Would this cause any bottle necking with the 7950?

Thanks guys
 
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I would be tempted to wait a month and see what the green team relase (if anything) - if the rumoured performance and price point of the green team's newest addition are true, the 7950 willl be £50 cheaper at least in a few weeks time
 
olibb said:
Im looking for a card to replace my old ATI 5770. Now i was looking at a 6970 at around £250, but wondered if it was worth spending the extra 100 and getting a new 7950?

I usually play some BF3 and SC2 & sometimes play WOW (unfortunately).

I do like to play games with high settings etc - but i only run 1920 x 1080 so not a massive resolution.

My system specs are a AM3 AMD Phenom x4 3.2GHz, 8gb DDR3 Ramm 1600MHz, Corsair 700w PSU. Would this cause any bottle necking with the 7950?
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For SC2 and WOW...yes there would definitely be a CPU bottleneck. This is because SC2 pretty much only use 2 cores, and WOW pretty much only use 1 core. A single core/two cores of Phenom II is not fast enough to provide the scaling necessary to get the most out of 7950 to deliver GPU usage at 100% during intensive scenes. BF3 on the other hand require more GPU grunt than CPU, because the game would use up to 6 cores.

If I assume you got a budget of £400, this is what I would do-
set £200 budget aside for the graphic card, and use the remaining £200 and get a i5 2500K for £130 (it is possible, I got my off the auction site for £125 plus £5 delivery) and grab a Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 socket 1155 board for £75~£80.

For the graphic card, you might want to wait for the new gen cards of around the £200 range to arrive, and as a sidenote, Nvidia card generally offer better performance on all 3 games you mentioned.
 
So with my current computer spec a 7 series would be pretty much pointless and a waste of money for the games i play? Would you say i then would be better off going for a 6950 / 6970? Do you think these would cause a bottleneck still? I do have my CPU clocked to 3.8GHz if it would help any? Would you rather choose an Nvidia card for WoW and SC2 then? Which one?

Thanks again for your detailed post.
 
Marine has a good point. Regarding the graphics card you may as well wait for the Nvidia offering, also AMD have their midrange cards on the way, these are meant to perform as well as the 6950/6970...
 
To save some money a lot of 6950 cards can be unlocked and overclocked to run at the same speed as a 6970. This is not guarenteed to work but my msi 6950 has run at 6970 speeds playing bf3 with no real change in temps and no crashes etc.

When you come to upgrade again you can sell the card. That is unless you want to wait to check out the new cards coming out in the next month or so.
 
I was in the same boat as OP a few weeks ago . I had 5770 x2 CF and AMD [email protected] I was going to go for a rebuild i5 and new ATI card . Having sat down and had poke about on the net I bagged a 560ti 488 , and going to wait on cpu untill later in the year . I play the same games wow sc2 bf3 . WoW everything ultra 125+fps sc2 the same Bf3 ultra setting with a few tweaks 50-60fps 1080p. If im honest your not missing much in BF3 i sooner play BFBC2.
 
I also agree that perhaps going to an i5 2500k and then getting a moderate graphics card upgrade would be the best performance/£ upgrade you could do.

560 ti would do the job nicely.
 
DarkHorizon472 said:
To save some money a lot of 6950 cards can be unlocked and overclocked to run at the same speed as a 6970. This is not guarenteed to work but my msi 6950 has run at 6970 speeds playing bf3 with no real change in temps and no crashes etc.
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Actually the days of unlockable 6950 is long gone...the only cards that can unlock is either a new Sapphire 6950 Toxic, or 2nd hand unlocked 6950.
 
bhindi said:
WoW everything ultra 125+fps sc2 the same Bf3 ultra setting with a few tweaks 50-60fps 1080p. If im honest your not missing much in BF3 i sooner play BFBC2.
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I'm afraid when people talk about WOW and SC2 performance, they are not talking about frame rate for laid-back scenes which almost any entry level gaming system can handle, but about busy town areas/huge raid and loads of units on screen. When the limitation is on CPU side, turning down settings won't do much to improve the frame rate.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
I'm afraid when people talk about WOW and SC2 performance, they are not talking about frame rate for laid-back scenes which almost any entry level gaming system can handle, but about busy town areas/huge raid and loads of units on screen. When the limitation is on CPU side, turning down settings won't do much to improve the frame rate.
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Not really you still get high frame rates in raids and in oggi and such 80+ easy on ultra . anything more then 60fps is a waste i cant tell the difference
 
Martini1991 said:
I unlocked a DC II like 2 weeks ago.
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I guess it still pretty much down to luck then.

bhindi said:
Not really you still get high frame rates in raids and in oggi and such 80+ easy on ultra . anything more then 60fps is a waste i cant tell the difference
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I agree that's not much point for beyond 60fps, but I find it hard to believe that you are holding 60fps constant on WOW and SC2 with just a Phenom II X4 at 3.6GHz...
 
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Sorry for the thread hi-jack but the question is sort of relevant.

When gaming at a max resolution of 1920x1080 (currently on 1680x1050) what would the general concensus be for the best value for money graphics card?

I was looking around and it appears that anything more than a 560Ti or 6870 would be wasted, is this correct? Another part of me is wondering whether it is better to wait to see the prices of the 78xx cards or would this be more than overkill?

Any opinions/suggestions would be much appreciated :)
 
olibb. Wait for the 7850 and 7870 that are set to arrive in around two weeks.

Buying a card now could be financial suicide. If you want to wait longer for Kepler then do so, as it's going to be the sort of card you are looking for (mid/high end) and thus may be affordable.

One of the above (7850 or 7870) should fall in right at the £250 range, so it would be really silly not to wait. However, if you are set on buying now then buy a 7950 or 7970. Reason? I've seen quite a few 6970 cards up for sale lately and they're just not selling at all.
 
schumi84 said:
Sorry for the thread hi-jack but the question is sort of relevant.

When gaming at a max resolution of 1920x1080 (currently on 1680x1050) what would the general concensus be for the best value for money graphics card?

I was looking around and it appears that anything more than a 560Ti or 6870 would be wasted, is this correct? Another part of me is wondering whether it is better to wait to see the prices of the 78xx cards or would this be more than overkill?

Any opinions/suggestions would be much appreciated :)
Click to expand...

It might be worth waiting. If you can't, a 560Ti will run most games at 1080p perfectly fine if you're not worried about the best settings.
 
I would wait as others have said, i built my first rig last week and its all finished minus the gpu was going to just get a 6970 as it would be great for what i need but i decided to wait till the end of march (cant wait any longer i miss my games damn it lol) to see what the the 7870 has to offer and if its near the same performance as a 6950/70 it will drive the prices of the 6900 series down :D
 
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