Need help/advice on upgrade

[AMassive]

Hello!

First post here - I've been following this forum for the last month or so (and other news too) but I'm still massively struggling to make a decision on a new card.

I'm looking to upgrade from a 4870 X2, which has served me surprisingly well but is now definitely showing its age. Recent games have started struggling to get above 30 on decent settings, as well as causing the fan to sound like it's going to blow a hole in the wall – leaving me literally unable to play without headphones.

I play at 1080p and have no intent of going higher (I use a decent quality 37” HDTV as a monitor, please don't hate me!) or to use multiple monitors.
Budget is variable – was looking to spend £250-300 but I could probably go up to £400 if it was worth it. I had been hoping the GTX 780 would be more reasonably priced...
I'd prefer to spend more now and avoid upgrading sooner (as you can probably tell by how long it is since I upgraded last!).
I'm currently using a Core i7-920 on air at 3.6 GHz, and honestly haven't looked much at all into how much of a problem this is in terms of a bottleneck.
I'd prefer to get on with it rather than waiting for a distant release as I've currently got a lot of free time on my hands!

Anyway, any and all advice appreciated. Cheers!

 

[Lunawolfy]

If you've got about £250 to spend and your on an i7 at 1080p a 660ti would be MORE than adequate unless your trying to set records running Metro

 

[Gregster]

Hi there and welcome to the forums (we are not so bad )

From Nvidia, we have the 670 but could be worth hanging out a bit as the rumours of the 670's successor is looking like it could be around the £200 mark and will perform slightly faster than the current 670. The 770 is also a good card and is slightly faster than a 680 and is cheaper, so worth considering that.

From AMD, we have the 7950 which is roughly on par with the 670 and the top of the table we have the 7970GE. Both great cards and the 7950 is round 5% slower than the 7970 clock for clock.

With taking your low end of the budget, it looks like a toss up between the 7950 and waiting a week or a tad more for the 760Ti.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask more questions.

 

[Duff-Man]

To echo what Gregster said above... At the moment, I would say a 7950 is probably the best bet for you. It should be a nice jump in performance (say ~70% bump in fps or thereabouts). It's hard to find a direct comparison against cards 3 generations apart, but the 4870x2 is similar in performance to a 5870, and you can see the comparison of that against a 7950 here:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/511?vs=550

On top of the framerate bump, the single GPU card will give you a "smoother" performance for the same framerate (frames output more evenly) than the dual-GPU setup that you have now.


If I were you though, I might be tempted to wait a couple of weeks to see what the GTX 760Ti brings. Rumours are that it will be based on the GK104 core (same core as the GTX680), and may be priced very aggressively.

 

[AMassive]

Yeah it's been basically impossible to find any sensible recent benchmarks including the 4870x2, but I don't really need to know how much better the new cards are than mine (lots), just how they compare to each other.

I guess I'll wait and see how low a price the 760 comes out at. Failing that I might just go for the 7950 as (for the first time ever!) I actually want the bundled games.

One last thing - is there much/any need to have more than 2gb of VRAM? I'm seeing conflicting opinions on it.

 

[Duff-Man]

One last thing - is there much/any need to have more than 2gb of VRAM? I'm seeing conflicting opinions on it.

If you're gaming at 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200) then no. There is no real evidence that 2Gb is insufficient.

If you're planning a triple-screen setup, then 3Gb or more would be preferable - though you will need a lot more GPU horsepower to drive the three screens anyway.