• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

recommend an upgrade?

just_jack

just_jack

just_jack

Associate
Joined
22 Mar 2012
Posts
20
I'm upgrading from an asus 6770 in the next two weeks and would like some help on my decision. Have a budget of around £270 and had a 6970 in mind but not sure which one?

I'd also like to know if i cross-fired 2 6850/7850 would i get better or worse fps? playing a lot of bf3 atm.
 
Hi there,

May I ask what resolution you play at what is the spec of your PC (specifically the make and model number of your PSU, motherboard and CPU)?

For around your budget you can get a HD 7870 2GB (with a custom cooler), a HD 7950 3GB (with a standard cooler) or a GTX 580 1.5GB (with a custom cooler) in terms of a single card.

For a dual-card setup (assuming your motherboard and PSU can support it), the lowest I would suggest going is dual HD 6950 2GB or dual GTX 560Ti 2GB, as if you go for any cheaper cards they only come equipped with 1GB of VRAM - so with those cards you would be likely to be VRAM bottleneck in many modern games.
 
Last edited:
hey,

yea sure screen res is 1440 x 900 (will be upgrading that next) psu is a cooler master gx 650w, asus sabretooth 900fx mobo and fx 4170 4.2ghz cpu.

cheers for the reply and links :)
 
Last edited:
In that case the graphics card I would go for is the hd 7870 2gb with a custom cooler. i say this because it is packed with vram (2gb should be plenty, even with a new higher resolution monitor), it is rather quick for playing modern games (see here) and it runs cool and quiet.


that said, if you are playing a lot of games you may also want to consider changing your cpu and motherboard to an intel z77 and an i3 or i5 (to help pay for it instead do for a slightly slower hd 7850 2gb graphics card). i say this because in games the intel cpus are much quicker and won't bottleneck your shiny new graphics card in cpu-heavy areas.

Here is a gaming performance review showing the FX 4100 (the 3.6Ghz version of your chip) at stock and overclocked to 4.5GHz - and how it compares to many other current CPUs (including the i5 2500K and i3 2100). Here is another gaming performance review of the FX 4100.
 
Wow didn't realize how much better the i5 was, tbh i was goin by the ghz. First time iv built a p.c so its all new to me.
I went with amd to save around £150 on the build cost.

Think ill go for that gpu when its back in stock quite like the look of the 580 tho, hadn't looked at any of nividia cards as i thought amd cards would work best with my cpu.
 
Yea, unfortunately GHz isn't a very good gauge of CPU speed - since Intel CPUs (like the i5) carry out many more calculations per clock pulse than an AMD FX CPU, due to the big differences in the CPU designs. Therefore, even at stock 3.3GHz the quad core i5 2500K is significantly faster than the FX-4170.

If you do want an upgrade in the next few months, then I can recommend this excellent £114 Gigabyte motherboard and for the CPU I would either go for a second-hand i5 2500K (hope to get one for ~£130) or this Ivy Bridge i5 3570K. As you imagine, you can reuse your RAM and all your other kit.

Also, when choosing graphics cards you don't need to worry about going with a AMD graphics card if you have an AMD motherboard. Both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards work equally well on modern AMD motherboards like yours (in fact yours even supports Nvidia SLI), the same goes for Intel motherboards - Nvidia and AMD graphics cards work equally well.

Finally, please bear in mind that new 600 series Nvidia graphics cards (using the new 28nm process) are expected to come out later this month in your price bracket (the GTX 580 I mentioned is the top-end card from the previous generation, which has had some big price cuts recently). Considering the excellent performance, noise and power usage of the recently released GTX 680 (the first 28nm Nvidia card out) then newer, cheaper cards should be quite nice and give AMD a run for their money (we may even see some price cuts due to the new competition).
 
Last edited:
Think ill just upgrade the gpu for now.

Then get saving for a new build and sell this one with my 6770 in it, if i were to upgrade mobo and cpu id only be keeping my psu, ram and case may aswell flog the lot and start from scratch.. any ideas on a good place to sell a rig apart from (auction sites) as no acess to members market :(

:) @ your edit
 
Without MM access the only place I would go is a popular auction site, just make sure you take care to have lots of photographic proof of initial condition, serial numbers and the dates the photos are taken - to put off any scammers.

If you keep posting here then in 5 months or less (and 993 posts) you will have access to the OCUk members market - which IMHO is an excellent to buy and sell kit, since the people are great, scammers are not tolerated and prices are fair.
 
Yeah ill prob take the long 993 road tbh iv been browsing the forums for a while instead of posting ffs a well ill just av to pester some more good folk like yourself till then lol thanks for your help and good night or should i say morning!!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom