Best £100 upgrade

Trancer said:
Have u decided what to go for? :)
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I'm leaning towards the GPU, but will wait until the weekend before I commit :).

From a resolution point of view, what will that matter - will the performance drop, the higher the resolution I set?
 
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that's a socket 939 board, aye? waste of money getting a new cpu.

graphics card all the way.

i went from a 939 athlon x2 3800+ with a 7800gt,
to the same cpu with a 8800gt, and got a very nice boost in what I could play.

and as others have said, a new gpu can be moved to a new build later on, a 939 cpu is completely out of date and a dead end upgrade.

[never mind, me eyes need testing. you wrote gpu, not cpu :p]
 
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You can get a new 4870 here for £100,or a 5770 for £120.Then sell the 1950 at auction for maybe £30 (sometimes more! )
Nice upgrade that you can take through to your next rig.
 
Uther said:
You can get a new 4870 here for £100,or a 5770 for £120.Then sell the 1950 at auction for maybe £30 (sometimes more! )
Nice upgrade that you can take through to your next rig.
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Would there be a noticable jump in performance between the 4870 and 5770?
 
bigbadish said:
Thanks for the responses guys.

I have a 23" Widescreen monitor, which is capable of 1920 x 1080 if i remember correctly.
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Yeah at that res your GPU bound really, so yeah get the 5770 and when the time comes Crossfire those S.O.B's ;)

Actually in some games the 5770 beats the 4870, and in crossfire they have out performed GTX285's in SLi

The 5770 scales nearly perfectly in CF dude, get one, then get two ;)
 
bigbadish said:
Will that require a new PSU though, as hinted above?
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And also, is there anywhere I can see the performance of the two and how to configure them? As in i have the SLI adapter to connect the two cards but will I need to install additional software to run the two cards?

Cheers
 
That depends on your PSU i think, if its a quality one you might get away with it, however i think 600W would be much safer to run 8800GTS's in Sli

Pretty sure you dont need extra software, you just need to enable Sli

Personally i dont see the point in buying 3 year old tech. Its DX10 so any new games coming out you wont ever be able to take full advantage of the new DX11 feature set

As times goes on your find yourself sacraficing IQ as games get better graphically because the old tech cant keep up

Power consumption a single 8800GTS consumes i think 146W whereas a single 5770 consumes 108W (this is under load) the 5770 consumes i think its 16W at idle!!! And a single 5770 will outdo a 8800GTS, it'll take 2 8800GTS to beat it in terms of performance FPS!!

Not to mention a 2nd 5770 in the future will handle 1920*1080 no prob too, like i've said the scaling of these in CF is awesome! for example COD5 in CF at 1920*1200 hits 85FPS

Far Cry 2 at the same res with max in game settings hits about 60FPS

I really think your better off getting one 5770 now and then another later, or if you can wait a while (like 2 weeks) save a little more money perhaps and get the 5830 when it drops
 
Matt26LFC said:
That depends on your PSU i think, if its a quality one you might get away with it, however i think 600W would be much safer to run 8800GTS's in Sli

Pretty sure you dont need extra software, you just need to enable Sli

Personally i dont see the point in buying 3 year old tech. Its DX10 so any new games coming out you wont ever be able to take full advantage of the new DX11 feature set

As times goes on your find yourself sacraficing IQ as games get better graphically because the old tech cant keep up

Power consumption a single 8800GTS consumes i think 146W whereas a single 5770 consumes 108W (this is under load) the 5770 consumes i think its 16W at idle!!! And a single 5770 will outdo a 8800GTS, it'll take 2 8800GTS to beat it in terms of performance FPS!!

Not to mention a 2nd 5770 in the future will handle 1920*1080 no prob too, like i've said the scaling of these in CF is awesome! for example COD5 in CF at 1920*1200 hits 85FPS

Far Cry 2 at the same res with max in game settings hits about 60FPS

I really think your better off getting one 5770 now and then another later, or if you can wait a while (like 2 weeks) save a little more money perhaps and get the 5830 when it drops
Click to expand...

DX11 sounds like the clincher to me, i'll order a 5770 over the weekend, as I don't think I can stretch to a 5830.

Thanks for all the input gang!
 
bigbadish said:
Will that require a new PSU though, as hinted above?
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Yeah, i personally wouldn't go SLi as EpicCarnage suggested. Way more power usage and you'd most likely need as new PSU. Plus dual card setups don't always scale perfectly. You may find that the 5770 performs better in some games.

For example, a while back i moved from dual HD4850's to a single Nvidia GTX260 (similar performance to the 5770 and some dual 8800 setups) and noticed that my average and minimum framerate was actually better with that single card.

I'd say the 5770 offers you the best of both worlds. Less heat, less power usage, no need for a PSU upgrade and still good gaming performance for a 'relatively' budget price tag. :)

gt
 
I would say that it being faster will be marginal at best. SLi'd 8800GTS's will most probably return higher max framerates but their average and minimum framerate probably won't be much different to the 5770.

Also, i really wouldn't want to put all that kit on the end of a 550w psu unless it was a really good make. That said i've successfully run dual 4850's in crossfire with a high clocked e8500 on a tagan 600w but i didn't really like the idea of doing it in all honesty.

It ultimately depends on the OP's PSU model and whether he fancies messing about with SLi.

gt
 
gt_junkie said:
I would say that it being faster will be marginal at best. SLi'd 8800GTS's will most probably return higher max framerates but their average and minimum framerate probably won't be much different to the 5770.

Also, i really wouldn't want to put all that kit on the end of a 550w psu unless it was a really good make. That said i've successfully run dual 4850's in crossfire with a high clocked e8500 on a tagan 600w but i didn't really like the idea of doing it in all honesty.

It ultimately depends on the OP's PSU model and whether he fancies messing about with SLi.

gt
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YEP:)
 
sell mobo and cpu with mem on ebay and put all together and upgrade to something newer.

not worth throwing money at it . you can get a new 620 quad and a cheap board for like 120 be like night and day difference to what you have now .

dont get a 4870 or above your cpu will bottleneck it ubless you overclock current chip to 2.8 or avbove so basically time to update .
 
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