Was wondering with the increase in minimum requirements better to crossfire or upgrade with skylake on the way.

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hystr

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build i5-2500k
Asrock z68 Fatal1ty Pro gen3
SAPPHIRE HD 6950 2GB GDDR5 Dirt3 Edition

With the announcement of Intel's skylake coming during the fall of 2015 and the expectancy of the broadwell chipsets to have a short life. To combat the ever growing minimum requirements in games. I was wondering , would it be better to get a used 6950 and crossfire $100 or less,or get a r9 270 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121823) $150 and run it in PCIe 2.0,or to do a future proof full upgrade to z97 with haswell LGA1150 with a r9 290x running me $800-900 bucks. If i do a full upgrade with skyline on the horizon wouldn't i be just throughing money away instead of future proofing. Also if I instead decide to crossfire would it be enough to expand my rig life expectancy or purchase a new card running it in a PCie 2.0x16 lane.
Ideally I would like to spend the least amount of money while being able to hold myself over.
For benchmarking I would like to run "Assassins Creed Unity" and the new set to release games without sacrificing major graphical and performance values.
 
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Eximo
Easy enough to drop a new card into your existing system. R9-290X or a GTX970 is a lot cheaper then replacing the whole system. You wouldn't see a huge FPS improvement from going to a new processor, especially if you had to buy a slower GPU.

Get the biggest GPU now, then you can upgrade to a DDR4 system when it makes sense.
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Eximo

Eximo

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Easy enough to drop a new card into your existing system. R9-290X or a GTX970 is a lot cheaper then replacing the whole system. You wouldn't see a huge FPS improvement from going to a new processor, especially if you had to buy a slower GPU.

Get the biggest GPU now, then you can upgrade to a DDR4 system when it makes sense.
 
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hystr

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How much of a problem would the r9-290x or a r9-270x running them in PCIe-2 lane if if i did get one of these, and would it work with my sandy bridge processor.
 
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Eximo

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No problems at all. And the GPU doesn't care what CPU you have, it will perform to whatever ability the CPU can manage. i5-2500k is still a top tier gaming processor.

PCIe 2.0 @ x16 is more then enough for any modern video card. PCIe 3.0 may have double the bandwidth, but most SLI and Crossfire capable boards will run in 8x mode to run two cards. This is exactly the equivalent of PCIe 2.0 at x16.

This has been tested to death by multiple sites and reviewers. You would have to drop all the way down to PCIe 2.0 at 4x to start seeing minor bottlenecking.
 
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hystr

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So to clarify to see most minor preformance and visual impacts I would have to run a gen3 card with crossfire/sli or can i achieve PCIe 2.0 at x16 with a single card. Just to clarify what your previous post was,because preferably I would just like to get one card.
 
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Eximo

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There will be no visual impacts. Still all digital, and the scene will render the same regardless of bandwidth based on the in-game settings. If it were severely limited it would just render slower, and thus reduce the framerate. But that is not the case here.

If you install a single card it will run at 16x. This is more then enough bandwidth for any graphics card.

PCIe 2.0 at 16x is 8 GB/s
PCIe 3.0 at 8x is 7.87 GB/s (Most motherboards that support SLI and Crossfire will split the bandwidth between two cards, the point was that it would be equivalent to running a single card at PCIe 2.0 at x16)
PCIe 3.0 at 16x is 15.74 GB/s
 
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hystr

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One final thing; I can right now pick up a ASUS Radeon R9 270X Overclocked 4GB for $200or a ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti Overclocked for $154, would it be a good idea or wait and get a r9 290x on cybermonday for a possibly lower price
 
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