Incremental System Upgrade.. should i bother with the card yet?

[miseryguts]

OK so I'm just about to purchase a new cooler (Noctua NH-D14) and an extra 6Gb..? (undecided yet waiting on some feedback in the memory section) of memory.
I currently have a HD 5870 at stock speed most things run fine at high/max detail 1920x1200 but some recent games are causing system reboots.. Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Darkness II and a few others however i have been reliably informed that this is much more likely an issue with my processor i7 920 (3.45 O/C with a stock cooler which is why the Noctua) ..apologies going off topic..

Is it worth a couple of hundred quid (can't afford any of the top end cards) to upgrade my card now & how much of a performance gain could i expect in that price range or is it worth waiting till the end of the year or even into the next until Iv'e more money & there's more choice..?

Thanks for listening.

 

[chief barker]

Get your rig stable first then,


Does your motherboard support crossfire?

If it does then buy a second hand 5870 from an auction site for £100.

 

[gamerdude1989]

my stages are this:
* Buy a decent card and use it until games demand more than it can give
* get a second card and sli / crossfire for that little boost (by then the cards are old and cheap to get the 2nd card)
* once those twin cards are not juicy enough, i overclock the nuts out of em and flash them to that overclocked state
* once newer games demand more juice than my twin cards can give, i go out and buy a newer up to date card....
etc etc etc.... i do the same thing over again
instead of constantly upgrading when your card is still capable of powering a game, use it and stick in another until it cant run newer release games at a playable state... Get maximum use out of the money you have spent, before upgrading and re-doing it all again...

I have never been a fan of ATI / AMD, always prefer Nvidia for some reason.. But im sticking with my crossfired 6850's.. they are still powering my games perfectly fine, and still got overclocking to do once they are not juicy enough for any newer games that will be coming out... I will just run them until i have got all i can get from them

 

[miseryguts]

my stages are this:
* Buy a decent card and use it until games demand more than it can give
* get a second card and sli / crossfire for that little boost (by then the cards are old and cheap to get the 2nd card)
* once those twin cards are not juicy enough, i overclock the nuts out of em and flash them to that overclocked state

I hadn't really considered another 5870, but depending on the performance gains I would certainly be interested.. but don't really want to have to upgrade my power supply (850w) in order to support it, Iv'e also read that plenty of games still don't support crossfire setups.
Iv'e never heard of flashing cards to an overclocked state before, what does that involve & how does it benefit you..?

 

[gamerdude1989]

Firstly, an 850w psu is more than enough to power a crossfired system.

Flashing graphics cards....
OK, the clock speeds you get them from as factory, are stored on a read only chip, so when the graphics card runs, it reads from that and knows what clock speeds to run at..
So what you do, find a safe and stable overclock speed for it. Using a bootable USB drive with Atiflash on it, you read the graphics cards data and save it to file (on the usb stick), the data you save is all the settings that are stored on that chip for the card.. then you boot back into windows and use a program called NiBiTor, open up that file so you can see what the cards settings are.. find out the stable overclocks for the card, replace the stock clocks with the new overclocked speeds, save the file.. boot back on the bootable usb drive into atiflash again, and write that file back to the graphics card.. Now everytime that graphics card runs, it will read from the chip the new higher clock settings and constantly run at that. Instead of making overclocking software keep it overclocked... so basically, its "stock" clocks are now the overclocked ones..
So no matter what pc you put it in, it will always read and run at those new overclock speeds, and never need to use a program to overclock it again...

I find it a lot nicer to do that to relie on software to keep it overclocked...

you can put that graphics card in thousands of computers, and it will always read that chip and run at those new overclocked settings...
its like a permanent overclock method...