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Worth getting a new GPU or too much of a bottleneck?

Supernaut91

Supernaut91

Supernaut91

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Right guys here is my system. I think the 4870 is starting to show its age so i was thinking of upgrading, but will Isee a performance increase?

E6750 @ 3.66Ghz
Asus P5N-E SLI Motherboard Revision 1406
Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC2-8500 DDR2 812MHz 4x1GB (Expert Mode)
Sapphire Radeon HD4870 512MB Graphics Card, Core @ 790Mhz, Memory @ 1000mhz.
OCZ Vertex 2E 120GB SDD + Samsung SpinPoint 500GB HDD
X-Fi - Fatal1ty Professional Series 7.1 Sound Card
Pioneer Blu-Ray Optical Drive + LG DVD Optical Drive
Corsair HX520W Power Supply
Antec 900 Case

Any help would be greatly appreciated guys!:D
 
Your current cpu will cope with most games, though quite a few newer games benefit from a quad, unfortunately though, the p5n e sli boards arent great for clocking the 65nm quads.
 
Hmm exactly my thoughts setter. I wonder if i could sneakily put a 6870 in and then the 4870 can go in my old machine. The 1gb of memory on the 6870 will help a lot since i game at 1920,1080. Although i would not want to upgrade CPU as i bilieve its more worthwhile getting a brand new setup. But arent i7's on there last legs just about?
 
In custom PC magazine they looked at upgrading a PC similar to yours, I think the conclusion was getting anything more then a GTX460 was fruitless.
 
Dual core, especially nearer 4Ghz, is fine for 99% of all games around at the moment, and probably still 75% of all new releases.

Depends on your price, to be honest, bad value cards in general no matter what system you have would be 5870/580gtx/480gtx just because they offer very little performance improvement vs lower cards in the range.

A 6870/6850/460gtx 768mb/5850/470gtx are all fantastic value cards, all would offer a SIGNIFICANT increase in performance in the system you have. I wouldn't be going for say, 580gtx sli with a dual core at under 4Ghz, but I wouldn't recommend 580gtx sli anyway because its rubbish value :p
 
Its your card at that res i would have thought, not too much ram there. Get a 1gb card, sorted!
 
Either stay with what you have and try your best to overclock the cpu a little higher (though it should be adequate for most current games) and add a 1gb card, a 460 would be a nice addition. Or instead, a major upgrade, new cpu / mobo etc.
 
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I have tried overclocking the board more but it just does not seem to post. I presume I would have to tweak the voltages a bit? I'm not great with that sort of stuff.
 
My upgrade from 4850 to 6870 has lead to far better framerates and most importantly much higher minimum framerates in everything i have tested so far. I think a lot of the increase for the second bit may be partly down to going from 512mb to 1gb but my point is that your upgrade would definately be noticeable and worthwhile.
 
Rahr85 said:
My upgrade from 4850 to 6870 has lead to far better framerates and most importantly much higher minimum framerates in everything i have tested so far. I think a lot of the increase for the second bit may be partly down to going from 512mb to 1gb but my point is that your upgrade would definately be noticeable and worthwhile.
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Pretty much in same boat with my current spec.

I know that when I upgraded from a GF4200 to a 6800 on an older spec system, I got a big increase in fps whilst gaming and latterly, 8800GTX to GTX 260 gave a nice boost, whilst gaming.

I think to answer your question,
1, No you wont bench as high as someone with an I5/I7 system(do you care)
2, Yes, you will undoubtedly get higher fps where it matters most(in games)

When I monitor my GPU usage when playing crysis/JC2 etc, its nearly always pushing 90-100% at 1080P res.

This tells me that the GTX260 is holding me back, not the Q6600 at 3.2Ghz:)
 
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