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Sapphire 7870XT potential issue?

For a cheap upgrade:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0 AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £89.99
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-6 Six Core 6300 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £83.99
Total : £185.38 (includes shipping : £9.50).



For a more expensive upgrade:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £191.99
1 x Gigabyte Z87-D3HP Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £103.99
Total : £306.78 (includes shipping : £9.00).



You could use your existing RAM, but it'd make sense to get 1600MHz memory for improved performance.
 
teppic said:
For a cheap upgrade:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0 AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £89.99
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-6 Six Core 6300 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £83.99
Total : £185.38 (includes shipping : £9.50).



For a more expensive upgrade:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £191.99
1 x Gigabyte Z87-D3HP Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £103.99
Total : £306.78 (includes shipping : £9.00).



You could use your existing RAM, but it'd make sense to get 1600MHz memory for improved performance.
Click to expand...

I'll be going Intel this time I think. I'd go all out and get the 4770K but the budget definitely won't allow for that, though the 4670K you linked to could work well I think. I'd sell the old parts to fund the upgrade but I want them for a HTPC build I want to do.
 
Don't get the 4770K for gaming, it's not at all worth it.

That Intel board is a very decent one for the money, and the 4670K will keep you going for a while!
 
Thanks gentlemen for your assistance.

I'll probably end up getting one of the 770's, which will hopefully give me a bit of a boost now and just see how it runs with the Corsair PSU. If need be I can get a new PSU immediately, then i'll get the rest of the parts later on in the year.
 
Okay further update:

I went for a GTX 770. I know there's a lot of discussion on here right now regarding the amount of VRAM and memory bus widths, so I was agonizing over whether to get a 7970 or the GTX 770. I went for my gut feeling and picked up an EVGA Superclocked version.

So far I am deeply impressed. GeForce experience is superb; it actually advises me on what settings to use to optimize the games (all of which need ramping up to around ultra settings, so hopefully that's a good sign). I'm running 320.49 drivers and, so far, have only tested Heaven benchmark, which has pretty much doubled across all results.

Results from the 7870 XT:

FPS: 35.5
Score: 894
Min FPS: 7.6
Max FPS: 83.8

Results from the GTX 770:

FPS: 61.1
Score: 1540
Min FPS: 18.0
Max FPS: 142.9

Does that look about right? I'm most impressed by the minimum frame rate - hopefully things will feel smoother. More importantly, IS my X4 975 actually holding me back? I don't understand why performance was so low with the 7870 XT, surely it cannot be the CPU because performance has increased with the GTX 770.
 
Last edited:
The minimum frame rate on heaven has nothing to do with your cpu. Heaven is a gpu bound benchmark, you would get the same score running a c2d e5300 with that gpu.
Something was wrong with either driver or the 7870xt, or it was using a 1.25v of v-core and you never increasede the tdp throttle limit, so the card was probably throttling.
Look at humbugs thread on the 7870xt http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18510238

Heavens minimum framerate is irrelevant, Its to do with the benchmark loading up, I bet if you run the heaven loop for a few times then bench the minimum will increase.
Secondly if that phenomII was clocked to around 4.0-4.2 with a good cpu-nb then IN GAME peformance would improve.
 
Davedree said:
The minimum frame rate on heaven has nothing to do with your cpu. Heaven is a gpu bound benchmark, you would get the same score running a c2d e5300 with that gpu.
Something was wrong with either driver or the 7870xt, or it was using a 1.25v of v-core and you never increasede the tdp throttle limit, so the card was probably throttling.
Look at humbugs thread on the 7870xt http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18510238

Heavens minimum framerate is irrelevant, Its to do with the benchmark loading up, I bet if you run the heaven loop for a few times then bench the minimum will increase.
Secondly if that phenomII was clocked to around 4.0-4.2 with a good cpu-nb then IN GAME peformance would improve.
Click to expand...

Christ, you just took me to school didn't you!
 
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