Sapphire HD7850, Crossfire Or Upgrade?

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PhilFails

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Sep 9, 2013
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Hello all, Before I get into it, my current specs are...

AMD FX4100 Overclocked at 4Ghz.
Sapphire HD 7850 OC (2GB)
4GB Ram
700W Psu.
Cannot remember exact model, but does support crossfire + up to 64GB Ram.
Don't think rest will be needed, but if so just ask :)

Right, Hey all, I am just wondering what would be better to do, I am currently looking on how to upgrade to a semi decent PC, but want to keep the cost down as well.

I am thinking about upgrading to a AMD FX8320 (Unless someone else knows of a better AMD CPU for roughly the same price)

But I am mainly wondering whether I should upgrade my 7850 to something else, or to just buy another one and Crossfire it? All suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks for your time!
Phil.
 
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t21

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yes CF is good in these situation but i hear there is games that doesn't go well with cf because the lack of driver support but in theory you are much better spending 200 bucks other than selling yours and lose money and end with one card
 
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lmaonade200

lmaonade200

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hmm now I kind of want to change my opinion, the best option for crossfiring cards would be PCIE slots of x8 and x8, while yours is x16 and x4, which means the first card will run fine while the 2nd will be crippled in the x4 slot (interface bandwidth is smaller so the 2nd card won't be used to it's fullest, there have been reports of performance losses from 5% up to 50%, changes from application to application)

So, if you are able to get a good price for your 7850 I would actually recommend selling that and going with a R9 280x or something similar instead. Crossfiring with a x4 second slot is wasted potential and possibly a waste of money too if you can't get a good price for 2 7850 cards in the future
 
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lmaonade200

lmaonade200

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For your CPU I really recommend saving up for a nice i5 processor, they're fast, which is a severe understatement but outside of throwing random numbers that don't really mean anything for anyone except bean counters there's not much else I can say.

If you like AMD and plan to do heavy workloads like video editing, rendering, encoding, etc. Then a nice FX 8320 is also a worthy upgrade :) 4 "cores" 8 threads to multithread the work.

As for your RAM, is your current RAM set a single stick or 2 sticks? If it's a single stick you can get another stick to make a 8 GB kit (which is enough and maybe even more than enough for the average consumer nowadays, 8Gb also seems to be the standard for building new computers nowadays)

If it's 2 sticks then you should probably replace them when you want to upgrade (doesn't have to be now, just when your system is starting to feel a bit limited), a nice 2x4 8GB kit costs around 50-60 bucks on a sale, just look for good brands like G.Skill, Corsair, Kingston, etc.
 
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PhilFails

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Thanks for the suggestions :)

I currently have a stick of extremely bad, Kingston HyperX 1600Mhz which is a 4GB Stick, which seems to Blue screen every PC it's every been used in...
I am from England, and currently for a set of two sticks, 8GB Total is about £70... stupid VAT... And thanks for the advice on the CPU, I run an AMD Build due to the price of I5s at the moment being around £180 for a 3570K, and that all AMD CPUs I have had have worked like a dream, until they come up against Crysis 3...
 
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lmaonade200

lmaonade200

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haha, you could probably save up for a nice aftermarket cooler (one that is good n cheap is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo), and give your processor a nice kick in it's clocks, an FX 8320 up to about 4.3 Ghz should be a beast. Edit: didn't see that you already have an overclocked CPU, but either way the Vishera x3xx CPUs should be better, it's CPU architecture is much improved over the x1xx series Bulldozers

and nice to see you have had good experiences with AMD :) my father hates AMD with a passion because every system he has had with AMD hardware has had performance issues and hardware failures.

And sucks to hear about that RAM :( I've actually had very good experiences with Kingston HyperX, got a pair of these running in my father's system for about 4-5 years now IIRC.
 
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t21

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lol 180 £ is really absurd it's like 4770 in the stats you could get it i mean i could advise you getting it imported but it depends if it's warranty work on uk i do that importing sometimes when things really get in high price to a ridiculous point
 
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