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Graphics Card Upgrade For Douchebag

themachinist100

themachinist100

themachinist100

Associate
Joined
18 Apr 2014
Posts
6
Hi Folks,

I hope you don't mind me posting on here fishing for advice. I'm looking to upgrade my Graphics Card just so I can put the settings up more in games like DayZ and modded Skyrim and get better performance but I don't want to spend a fortune and I'm pretty overwhelmed by all the options out there. My knowledge of modern Graphics Cards isn't great. I currently have a ATI Radeon HD 6850, INTEL CORE I5 2500 (3.30GHZ) CPU, 4GB RAM, 500w Power Supply (but a friend has just given me his old 850w so I can upgrade that.

Can anyone recommend something in the £100-£200 range that will give me a nice performance boost? Or is it a better idea to get another 6850 and go crossfire?
 
Modded Skyrim will appreciate the 3GB vram on that 280, but I'm wondering if anyone knows whether Skyrim still favours Nvidia to a big enough extent to say sod it and get a 760 instead?
 
Five.Stars said:
Here is a bench comparison between your card and the card I linked (pretty much) the 280 is a rebrand of the HD7950. As you can see it is massively more powerful. About 110% more, plus the Tahiti cores overclock exceptionally well, so you could probably expect to add at least another 10% or more on top if overclocking is something that interests you.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1077?vs=1033
Click to expand...

A w e s o m e. Thanks for the great advice, FiveStars, I really appreciate it. Looks like I definitely ought to go for this moderately priced beast of a thing. It's moments like these that make me rejoice in not being a console sort of fellow.
 
shankly1985 said:
Another thing to note is don't expect massive gains on dayz with a GPU upgrade. The game is very cpu demanding.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah that's true. Well I seem to able to run the standalone fairly well at 1920x1080 with high textures but only if I crank everything else down (no postprocessing, no AA, no shadows, small view distance). It would be nice if I could just get rid of those jaggies and have minimal eye candy. Aren't some of these things I'm turning off solely reliant on the GPU or is it all CPU? :confused:
 
Uncle Petey said:
Modded Skyrim will appreciate the 3GB vram on that 280, but I'm wondering if anyone knows whether Skyrim still favours Nvidia to a big enough extent to say sod it and get a 760 instead?
Click to expand...

At the moment I can run a few mods ok (2K textures, static meshes, various other texture/weather/lighting mods) - but if I try to use any of the ENBs it start to slog big time and that improved flora mod is a no no. Bah who needs all that tall grass, couldn't even see where I was going. ;)
 
Uncle Petey said:
Modded Skyrim will appreciate the 3GB vram on that 280, but I'm wondering if anyone knows whether Skyrim still favours Nvidia to a big enough extent to say sod it and get a 760 instead?
Click to expand...

I think the ENB mods work better/easier to run on Nvidia, but imo 2Gb isn't enough if you like to mod Skyrim, you should plump for the 4Gb one, but the extra vram is pretty useless in any other title.

The 280x is what I'd go for as it has quite a bit of extra grunt over the 760's though while having that extra vram/quicker bus.
 
Yeah, more power and memory should have the advantage.

I will say that even with a healthy OC, I've found that certain enb mods can take the peepee with a 7970/280x in certain areas and vram isn't part of the problem.
Then again, it's probably more to do with other stuff like SMIM tbh...
 
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