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Upgrade 6870 now or wait (new architecture)

waldaize

waldaize

waldaize

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Joined
26 Dec 2015
Posts
105
I have a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6870 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card...only want to play wow @ ultra now and when Legion arrives Q3 (have an older i7, 6Gb DDR - so older system but still has legs).

I was set for a 380x (missed the deal but sure another will come along soon on O/C) so budget no more than £200.

Don't know whether to wait for a new Nvidia/AMD mid-range card and live with the 6870 for now or upgrade now.

From reading posts the date when the new cards will be ready is unknown and I've not really been able to understand whether expected performance in the mid-range would be much better or simply less power used.

Any thoughts from people here that seem way more involved/clued up in this arena?
 
no announcement of new cards yet; we're most likely looking 3 quarter mim for the big cards....

the pipe cleaners that might come; most likely be lower end cards. Honestly should see deals on 380X and or 390s soon.

I'd snag one of those and then look again some time next year.....I know about budget :D
 
Get a used GCN based GPU (HD 7850 or higher) to see you though and in 6 moths or so get the latest GPU that takes your fancy, you can sell the used GPU on again and lose next to nothing or not too much if you go for the higher end.

What to look for in ascending order, the lower of these will give you a 40% bump in performance, the highest will triple it.

HD 7850, R7 265
HD 7870, R9 270, R9 270X
HD 7950, R9 280
HD 7970, R9 280X, R9 285, R9 380
R9 380X
R9 290, R9 390
R9 290X, R9 390X
 
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waldaize said:
I like the idea of triple the performance :)

I might wait to see if any deals come up re: a 390.

Thanks for the input guys.
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Triple? if you wait out you'll definitely get more than triple the performance, my 980 Ti overclocked to 1550mhz is 3 and a half times faster than my brothers GTX 660 Ti overclocked, and a 660 Ti is roughly twice as fast as the 6870 so with a 980 Ti you'd be looking at 7 times the performance, so any card coming out in the coming months faster than the 980 Ti is only going to increase on that ;)

GTC is in the first week of April we'll hear some information regarding Pascal then :D
 
Find a used 7950/280x imo, it's under 100 and it will absolutely blow WoW out of the water. For your needs, I don't think you need to wait for the new cards, especially since they definitely will have a price premium attached to them and the mid-range cards are late releases anyway. I would say though that a 390 would be your best value bet for the long term.
 
Poneros said:
For your needs, I don't think you need to wait for the new cards, especially since they definitely will have a price premium attached to them...
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Agreed. WoW isn't demanding enough to warrant you spending £200 on a new GPU on it. Buy a GPU now and start enjoying your game straight away as you should be getting 60+ fps anyway with a 7950 as Poneros suggested. If you want to play any other graphically demanding games though then a 7950 might not cope, so I'd just try and make sure if I were you that WoW really is the only game you care about.
 
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