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Which Upgrade Route?

Chasser

Chasser

Chasser

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,023
Location
West Oxon
Greetings,

My kids play a lot of on-line COD:MW2. To try and improve the gameplay they plan to buy a more powerful graphics card. Currently they run a HD 4850 on a MSI P35 Platinum board with a E8500 and 8 gigs of RAM. They plan to buy this; XFX ATI Radeon HD 5770 XXX Edition, but a mate of theirs says this won't noticeably improve things and the best thing to do is buy a second 4850 and run them as Crossfire.

Not being that knowledgeable about graphics cards, this is a plea for help. Should I let them buy the 5770 or is their pal right about a second 4850 and Crossfire?

Thanks in anticipation.
 
Buy a Nvidia GTX 460 for another £20 extra. Faster than a 5770 by about 25%, and will overclock if they feel the need to.
 
Their mate is right, the 5770 isn't a massive improvement on the 4850. But I wouldn't recommend a second 4850 either... The real-world performance increase with dual-GPU systems isn't all it's cracked up to be (microstutter, compatability issues, driver issues etc). None of these issues show up in basic benchmarks, but they are real issues.

I would recommend a GTX460 1Gb, or, if you can spring for the extra, a 5850 or GTX470 would be the cards to go for in order to see a big improvement. You should get some cash back from selling the 4850, it's still a decent enough mid-low end card.
 
to be honest if they are just playing mw2 they dont really need anything more powerful than a gtx460. plus the 460 is future-proof as stock, and can be easily overclocked.
 
You really don't want to run crossfire on a P35 board anyway. That second slot runs at 4x and it's only pci-e 1.0 so will hurt performance badly.
 
Chasser said:
Greetings,

My kids play a lot of on-line COD:MW2. To try and improve the gameplay they plan to buy a more powerful graphics card. Currently they run a HD 4850 on a MSI P35 Platinum board with a E8500 and 8 gigs of RAM. They plan to buy this; XFX ATI Radeon HD 5770 XXX Edition, but a mate of theirs says this won't noticeably improve things and the best thing to do is buy a second 4850 and run them as Crossfire.

Not being that knowledgeable about graphics cards, this is a plea for help. Should I let them buy the 5770 or is their pal right about a second 4850 and Crossfire?

Thanks in anticipation.
Click to expand...

Right I just installed MW2 and run it at stock, my resolution was 1440x900 all other settings at Auto.

I ran this on a E2140 at stock (1.6GHz) and a powercolor 3870 512meg and 1 gig of RAM.

My cpu-z link:
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1375538

and my FRAPS results

2010-09-04 12:37:26 - iw4mp
Frames: 12201 - Time: 218332ms - Avg: 55.883 - Min: 33 - Max: 92

What Im saying is the 4850 is more than good enough, if its all about the eye candy then a HD4890 1GB would be a much better deal.
Shameless plug HERE

The crossfire option on P35 just wouldnt cut it, I mean yeah it would get better FPS but it would be wasting a great deal of power at the same time.
 
redshadows said:
resolution was 1440x900 all other settings at Auto.

...

Avg: 55.883 - Min: 33 - Max: 92

What Im saying is the 4850 is more than good enough
Click to expand...


1440*900 is a pretty small resolution mate... Short of laptops, you don't really see that resolution any more. A standard 1920*1200 screen would have 78% more pixels, and so requires a lot more GPU horsepower.

Besides, a 56fps average with a 33fps minimum isn't exactly ideal.
 
Duff-Man said:
1440*900 is a pretty small resolution mate... Short of laptops, you don't really see that resolution any more. A standard 1920*1200 screen would have 78% more pixels, and so requires a lot more GPU horsepower.

Besides, a 56fps average with a 33fps minimum isn't exactly ideal.
Click to expand...

You did see I was running @ 1.6 Ghz on a e2140 and 1 gig of RAM with a 3870.
The 4850 is 30%-50% faster than the 3870 depending on what game with AA and AF on the 4850 kills the 3870

Throw in a e8400 and 8 gig of RAM and I think I might stand by my recommendation that the 4850 is more than good enough but a real upgrade even over the 5770 would be a 4890.

I know its pushing around 78% more pixels but compare the systems it makes a little more sense
 
redshadows said:
You did see I was running @ 1.6 Ghz on a e2140 and 1 gig of RAM with a 3870.
The 4850 is 30%-50% faster than the 3870 depending on what game with AA and AF on the 4850 kills the 3870

Throw in a e8400 and 8 gig of RAM and I think I might stand by my recommendation that the 4850 is more than good enough but a real upgrade even over the 5770 would be a 4890.

I know its pushing around 78% more pixels but compare the systems it makes a little more sense
Click to expand...
CPU power has no bearing on resolution scaling. If you want to render a larger number of pixels at the same framerate, more GPU horsepower is the only option.

I'm not trying to trash your setup here, only pointing out that your findings have little bearing on the OPs situation. If anything, they demonstrate that more GPU power is needed for this game at 1080p resolutions and above.

I did misread your post thougy, assuming you had a 4850. So apologies for that.
 
Last edited:
Gents, many thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

After much deliberation, they have decided to go with this GTX 460. They plan to sell-on the 4850 and then use the funds to start an upgrade pot, they want to save and then go on to a i5 set-up. They've been dabbling with some other game titles at friends places and see the need for a more powerful rig. If they stick at the cash saving rather than waste it on junk as kids are want to do, they may get some help with it all at christmas ;)

Thanks again.
 
Just another thought, the current PSU is a Kingwin 600w (ABT-600MA1S, SLI-Ready), it's dealing happily with the 4850, would the GTX 460 cause it any problems in the interim until we upgrade?
 
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