worth upgrading 5850 to 6950 ?

xXxsephirothxXx · 13 Mar 2011 at 16:09

hi ,
im not sure if its worth upgrading my HD5850 to HD6950 , or buying a second hd5850 and putting them in crossfire mode.

if its not worth buying the 6950 and i end up buying a second 5850 then does the card need to be by the same company brand , i.e asus , xfx and so on . Or can it be 2 differant brands as long as the settings are the same ?

cheers

Cleeecooo · 13 Mar 2011 at 16:13

xXxsephirothxXx said:
hi ,
im not sure if its worth upgrading my HD5850 to HD6950 , or buying a second hd5850 and putting them in crossfire mode.

if its not worth buying the 6950 and i end up buying a second 5850 then does the card need to be by the same company brand , i.e asus , xfx and so on . Or can it be 2 differant brands as long as the settings are the same ?

cheers

Can be two different brands. if the settings are different then one will clock to the others' speeds.
I would get a second 5850 as they are cheap right now.

Purgatory · 13 Mar 2011 at 16:56

2nd 5850 I would advise but remember you may also find dual cards become a pain when drivers don't work well in some games for crossfire.. If you are gaming at 1920x1200 or less there is no need to update anything because a single 5850 is more then enough currently.

Cleeecooo · 13 Mar 2011 at 17:09

Purgatory said:
2nd 5850 I would advise but remember you may also find dual cards become a pain when drivers don't work well in some games for crossfire.. If you are gaming at 1920x1200 or less there is no need to update anything because a single 5850 is more then enough currently.

depends on the games he plays

Max3 · 13 Mar 2011 at 18:41

yeah for most games but certain games aren't doable with AA and max settings

Bulletstorm with 4xaa (I mean at 60fps!) and of course crysis/metro!

I thought about grabbing a 2nd hand 5850 also as it's a cheapish option but having to deal with the extra power/noise and the odd game that doesn't suppose xfire would be kinda annoying.

The 6950 at stock doesn't seem that much faster than a 5870 though.

MoodyB · 13 Mar 2011 at 20:12

If you can overclock your 5850 to around 900 / 1200, you have 5870'ish performance, which would make an upgrade to a 6950/6970 fairly pointless imho.

This bench has comparison scores for the cards at 1920x1200 / 4xaa :

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/13

All comes down to what games you play, as Cleeecooo said.

If they support crossfire well, the £110'ish upgrade would possibly be worth it if you didn't mind tweaking / fiddling a bit with drivers / RadeonPro profiles.

Max3 · 13 Mar 2011 at 20:36

the 5850 cf scales quite well but it seems the 6950 cf setup is something else :eek:

It's mighty tempting

Sgt Tackleberry · 13 Mar 2011 at 21:08

I am in the same boat as you. I am thinking of upgrading from the 5850 to 6950 or get another 5850 for CF but I know CF can have it's problems.
I play COD:Blops max setting @1920:1080 with a avg 100fps, all of my games I play are on that setting.
But what do I go for?, I want to future proof my Pc, so what do I do, CF or get a 6950.

xXxsephirothxXx · 13 Mar 2011 at 22:48

cheers for all ya replys , yer its a hard decision to make . the game that prompted this move is dragon Age 2 , its the first time i havent been able to play a game maxed out with a screen res 1920 x 1080.

the 5850 is a lot cheaper and that makes a big differane to me , but at the same time im not sure if i could deal with the extra noise it would produce.

the 6950 can be flashed then i wopuld effectivly have a 6970 and it seems that scales well in cf , so it would be pretty future proof.

hmmmm what to do , what to do :confused:

Marine-RX179 · 13 Mar 2011 at 23:01

You should overclock your 5850, and check your GPU usage to see if it is at 99~100% when you get low frame rate; you haven't provide your CPU details, so that could be the limiting factor for all we know...

I don't think there's much point going from 5850 to a 6950, as it would be just like moving from a 5850 to a hotter, better tessellation performance, high frame buffer version of the 5870. Yes unlocking to 6970 would fetch you extra performance, but it still a bit slower than the GTX480. To be honest, this gen cards from AMD hasn't really move forward much, if comparing the 69xx to the 58xx series...I doubt the extra 10-15% faster is really worth the amount of money you are paying...if you were upping from a slower card, like a 5770...that that's different and the 6950 would be a worthwhile upgrade.

xXxsephirothxXx · 13 Mar 2011 at 23:43

my pc build :
phenom II x 4 955 be ;
hd 5850 ;
4gb 12800mhz ram ;
Asus M4A88TD-M EVO ;
800w psu

so its getting on a bit , but yer i will go test it out and find out what componets are under heavy load when playing the game

MoodyB · 14 Mar 2011 at 00:38

Your M4A88TD-M EVO only has one pci-e slot, so no crossfire with 2 cards I'm afraid.

The board does support hybrid crossfire, but that's with the onboard gpu, which is poor to say the least.

drunkenmaster · 14 Mar 2011 at 01:29

Depends on how far your 5850 overclocks, I got a 6950 largely out of interest more than anything, at max clocks it should be faster than a 5850 at max clocks, I've yet to put the 3rd party cooler on but my 5850 would do 1050Mhz with a prolimatech cooler on it, and silent, at the moment my 6950 unlocked to 6970 is probably a small amount faster, with a proper cooler on it, if I can hit similar speeds it should be a decent wedge faster but not light years.

I'd consider something like the Zalman cooler as its the cheapest, whack it on and go for a 1Ghz or so clock speed.

But then, do you want to throw money at cooling an older card, I don't know. It won't cost you the earth, really its up to you to decide, could you better spend say £100 elsewhere in your life, or will you use a new card extensively and its good value.

This is the one gen where a upgrade from a high end model to another really won't do all that much.

If you can afford to spend £100 extra on a card today but won't be able to afford a new 7950 end of the year, I'd wait and buy one of the next gen cards, will be a substantial upgrade.

If you can happily spend £100 on top of selling your card now, and happy to buy a 7950 end of the year, do both.

tommybhoy · 14 Mar 2011 at 02:39

drunkenmaster said:
I've yet to put the 3rd party cooler on

I thought you were going to hack your thermalright vrm cooler?

Max3 said:
The 6950 at stock doesn't seem that much faster than a 5870 though.

At stock the 6950 may not be that much faster, but it is certainly much smoother and steadier fps than the 5870. Unlock it and it just gets better and better.

Max3 said:
the 5850 cf scales quite well but it seems the 6950 cf setup is something else

It's mighty tempting

It was too tempting for me so I took the plunge

.
And yes 6950>70 xfire is something else. It absolutely kills the 580!

redfist · 14 Mar 2011 at 07:32

xXxsephirothxXx said:
my pc build :
phenom II x 4 955 be ;
hd 5850 ;
4gb 12800mhz ram ;
Asus M4A88TD-M EVO ;
800w psu

so its getting on a bit , but yer i will go test it out and find out what componets are under heavy load when playing the game

Really, i've only just upgraded my system to this. So much faster than my last build but mind you it was 8 years old!!!

Marine-RX179 · 14 Mar 2011 at 07:45

drunkenmaster said:
If you can afford to spend £100 extra on a card today but won't be able to afford a new 7950 end of the year, I'd wait and buy one of the next gen cards, will be a substantial upgrade.

If you can happily spend £100 on top of selling your card now, and happy to buy a 7950 end of the year, do both.

This pretty much sums it up. 6950 plus unlocking to 6970 is no doubt faster than the 5850 (even with it overclocked), but is it worth £100 extra cost of faster? I don't think so...

If your board can't do Crossfire, you'd probably best hold on to your 5850, and upgrade to a 7950 at the end of the year.

xXxsephirothxXx · 14 Mar 2011 at 09:09

yer £100 seems to be a lot for a card that doesnt seem to be much better than my card if i oc it , and that £100 can be well spent in other places . mabe you guys are right and i should w8 itl then end of the year to upgr the card and just oc the 5850 and see how that plays out .

cheers for ya help , it cleared a few things out and sheded some light on it .

p.s my mobo is a Asus M4A79XTD Evo and not a Asus M4A88TD-M EVO . my mistake

Marine-RX179 · 14 Mar 2011 at 11:15

xXxsephirothxXx said:
yer £100 seems to be a lot for a card that doesnt seem to be much better than my card if i oc it , and that £100 can be well spent in other places . mabe you guys are right and i should w8 itl then end of the year to upgr the card and just oc the 5850 and see how that plays out .

cheers for ya help , it cleared a few things out and sheded some light on it .

p.s my mobo is a Asus M4A79XTD Evo and not a Asus M4A88TD-M EVO . my mistake

The M4A79XTD Evo does support Crossfire at x8/x8, so getting a second (2nd hand) 5850 to crossfire is a possible option, and would definitely be faster than a single 6950 (unlocked to 6970). But personally I would rather wait for the 7950 as that the GPU's gonna be on 28nm process instead of current 40nm process, most likely will be quite a bit faster, lower power consumption and cooler running, and without the possible issues with multi-GPU (drivers, game scaling etc).

lazypnk · 14 Mar 2011 at 12:20

Ive noticed the same problems with dragon age 2 with my rig, it feels like im being bottlenecked changing the textures from HD to normal does nothing but I play (Mafia 2/Shogun Total War/Crysis2) and many other sexy and taxing games everythink maxed with over 60fps so im waiting for better drivers.

But I've been looking at other options the same as you Crossfire 5850's seems like the best option for me then picking up a 7xxx series card when they arrive, but crossfire run quite hot and have teathing problems which i dont care about but you might not have the same patience as me

xXxsephirothxXx · 15 Mar 2011 at 11:18

well i overclock my HD5850 to 765mhz / 1115 mhz and the card still goes to maximum load when da2 is at very high quailty , nevermind .

what im going to so is pick up a 2nd hand 5850 and a couple of decent coolers for them and put them in cf , that will do fine until later in the year when i have a bit more cash and pick up 7xxx series when they are released .

cheers for everyones help