Maximus II Formula & 5870/5850

well you'll definatley get bottleneck. My advice would be to get another 8800gt and then get a new cpu, mobo, ddr3 ram. 2 8800gt's has the same power as 9800gx2/gtx280, and tbh you dont need more then that for gaming.

You cant possibly make that assertion without knowing the resolution and clocks of his CPU...

Anyway.. to the OP. The 5850/5870 would certainly be a nice upgrade.. but only worth it if you game at resolutions of at least 1080P. You might run into some bottle necking but a bit of an OC (at least 3ghz) would help alleviate that.. So far we have not seen any reviews demonstrating how scaling is affected on older hardware, so no one can say for sure.

If you game at high resolution even a rather strong bottleneck will still not make the card worth while.. It would just limit how smart putting a lot of money into a GPU right now would be as opposed to a cheaper gpu and a CPU. Until we see more thorough reviews I can't say how hard the bottleneck would be.. but it won't be catastrophic unless you try to double up in crossfire.

If you play at lower resolutions or are not going to overclock or upgrade the CPU something like a 4870 to 4890 would be plenty, and a better way to spend your money. Though the 5870 will still generally be faster than other single GPU cards.. just not 'faster enough' to warrant the cost if it is heavily limited by the CPU.

Yes the 5870/5850 should work with your motherboard.

Thank you that is very informative.

Here's some more info. My q6600 is running at a stock 2.4 gHz but I've been planning to OC it to about 3gHz for a while, I jsut haven't really needed to. It was one of the reasons I chose that chip and this mobo, that it was apparently very stable and easy to overclock the thing upwards of 3ghz on air-cooling alone.

I play on a 1080p 24" moniter and when I can run it at that resolution I always do. Since I got the moniter it's been a gaming revelation, and I was put off jumping on the 4xxx band wagon by my 8800gt still performing quite well. But the last week or so the volume of the fan has been steadily getting louder when under load, which made me think maybe now was the time to start my search.

I'm not planning on Crossfire if I go for a 5870/5850. The 5850 is around £200 in the UK right now on Pre which doesn't seem so bad but i'd like to see some benchmarks for it before deciding between them. Whereas at c.£310 the 5870 is obviously far more expensive.

Sounds like you should get the card then. My guess is the new cards from ATI will last as long as the 8800gt did so it's a win-win in my book. I am looking at moving from my 8800gt to one as well. Should match nicely with my q9650 at 3.8 Ghz and mate well with future chip upgrades when i move to i7.

Seems we're in a similar boat, I actually had a 2nd thought on all this and that was on the power consumption side. My 8800gt is a zotac amp edition and it idles at 193W roughly according to some old bench tests I pulled up.

Now compare that to the reported 27W of the new 5870. Frankly i have another reason to consider this upgrade.

Yes upgrade to 5870 definitely. A q6600 can pull out atleast 45fps in most of the games(even in cpu intensive games like supreme commander). So even if your cpu bottleneck(which wont when u overclock the q6600) u will get atleast 45fps in even the most cpu intensive games(except GTA4 which is badly coded) and i think 45+fps is pretty much a playable framerate. And if u play at 30inch monitor then definitely that bottleneck will not be ur cpu but ur gpu. And 5870 not only takes less power than the sli 8800gt but has new technology and new architechture so yes a 5870 is a very good upgrade and u can think that it will last quite a while because except crysis and stalker:CS in higher resolution like 1920 resolution 5870 pretty much crush most of the games out there(i mean getting around 60fps with max settings)

Just a quick question without starting a whole new thread, the 5850 is it worth upgrading to if you don't plan on upgrading again for a good while and want DX11 card, even if you game at 1440x900?

This on an i7 rig.

won't let me edit wanted to add;

and want to play the newest games on the highest settings?

Ofcourse !!! 5850 is a high end card and meant to be game at higher resolutions like 1920x1200. So in 1440x900 the 5850 will crush all the games out there (including crysis) and if u plan to game at that resolution(1440) 5850 is pretty much a future proof card u wont be needing another upgrade for a while  

If crysis can be played at max settings with good framerates then i guess newer games on the highest settings shouldnt be any problem at that resolution.

buy new monitor that supports 1080p and get a 5850.

Excellent posts all, I am pretty certain now that I will be getting a 5870 asap. I found over on the OC forum that someone had done some number crunching regarding the electric costs of the 5870 he reckoned around £35 a year to run (now it might be slightly less for for me due to the pricing difference) on idle power. Ok so it's going to cost more...but with my 8800gt idling much much higher it worked out enarer £220 a year to run it!!

One thing you should keep in mind is that the electricity costs may have been based on idle load, not loaded down during a game or some other intensive task. I'm not sure how much the 8800GT uses when loaded compared to a 5870, but it may not be that different. So you need to do a bit of figuring on the costs based on how much time you spend loading the card down (gaming) and how much time simply browsing, word processing, etc. Thus a 5870 may save a bunch of money, even paying for itself in a sense, or it may not be much different in electricity cost at all.

Don't mean to sound like a spoiler, as I intend to upgrade my 4870 to a 5870 in a few weeks, after my pension check arrives.

Yeah I get that, I've been working it all out on idle since my PC is on pretty much 24/7. I appreciate that it'll be higher when I'm gaming etc, but it still is lower at load than the 8800gt.

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey