[Solved] 4850 ->2x 5770 = = Totally worth it. Benchmarks inside.

That's true... but ONLY if you have $200 to spend and a 1920x1080+ monitor.

Just ordered a 5870 from Newegg yesterday, it should arrive tomorrow. Wonder how much of an upgrade it will be to my Sapphire 4850 512-meg card...

5870 is as good as 4870 crossfire, so atlest a good double in FPS.

Exactly the reason I was so hesitant in getting a card. Many of the people here asking if a 5770 was worth upgrading from the 4850 were met with a resounding "No". However I have quickly found that is not the case. My 4850 could hardly run the opening sequence of Crysis Warhead on enthusiast 1080p, meanwhile my 5770 Just ate through the whole first level; Doing some burn in testing and maximizing my driver capability before I get down to the nitty gritty testing, but for those of us doing minor real world upgrades to our computers, the 5770 is a steal. If you have anything below a Radeon 4890 I would see no reason NOT to upgrade to a 5770. Luckily while I was doing my cpu upgrades I got a CFX Mobo this time, and in about another week or two I am buying another one of these babies and doing my first ever crossfire setup. (I have heard that 2x5770 are as powerful as a $600 5870, over $300 in savings that's nice).

If you are on the fence about getting rid of your old 9800 GTX or 4XXX series that isn't a 4890 (even then if you want some power savings and just a little less performance), don't be. The 5770 is a wonderful card. And right now they are even shipping with free DX11 games (Dirt, Battleforge) so you can get a taste of things to come.

Basically, you've upgraded from a 4850 to a 4870 but the main reason you're noticing the extra performanece is because of the 1GB of RAM on the card. This is huge at high resolutions.

+100^

I wasn't aware that all DX11 titles will have the EXACT same performance as each other, and that Dirt 2 is an accepted benchmark for every single DX11 titles that will ever be released. Thanks for enlightening me!

/sarcasm off

Yup, $20 can net you a reliable SATA DVD burner. $25 if you want lightscribe.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

Just ordered my second card and a sata burner off new egg, I also need to upgrade my HDD as it's my lowest rank in WE at a 5.3 (everything else rates 7.4s and 7.3s), can anyone recommend a higher scoring raid 2.0 HDD for me; from newegg preferably. Mine is currently generic no name brand that is slightly hindering my gaming performance.

Ouch, so I should just stick to my intial plan of having Win7 installed on the SDD and just keep my 5.3 scoring 7200 RPM HDD as a secondary drive? I am complete new to the SDD so am wondering if its best to use it only for windows and game installations, then the secondary raid drive for movies etc?

my samsung spinpoint F3 500GB only scores 5.9, but can you really trust windows experience index?
It also says that my ci7 920 at 4Ghz is only 7.6 haha

A lot of it just plain depends on system specs though dosent it. The OP has what sounds like a decent set up but only mentioned resolution.
Others may not have a 1080p set up and so wont see the improvements that would be evident at higher resolutions.
Either way theses guys http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_5770/ dont exactly have a bad system and in no way can you call the differance major, maybe enough for the differance between playable and not to some people but if you have a 4850 i just plain cant see why you would fork out for 5-8 FPS.
Im looking at teh Crysis benching here as it was the game mentioned.
DX11 etc is moot, sure Eye finity might be a gymick you want but its not something i care about one way or another.
Thats why people dont fall over themselves to recomend the upgrade. As a new system buy sure you would be stupid not to but as an upgrade no thanks.

Mactronix

Well at the planned end, I will have the 5770 X-Fired is my end goal. Hoping at 1920x1080 that will be perfect for games such as Crysis in full glory (right now a single 5770 runs it at an astonishing 40 FPS avg hoping X-Fired will hit 60-70FPS). Overall it is a completely new system build yes. I am going from a Core2Duo E7200 Win 32 Bit 4850 to a AMD PHENOM II X940 BE 3.0GHZ quad, Win64 Bit, dual 5770s, with the hope that the system will get my through any games that may come out for the next three years. It should be suitable yes?

Its not that I didn't want to upgrade to a 4850, its that I did not want to spend more then $200 on a single GPU, especially after learning 5770x2 is just as powerful as a 5870. So I'd rather do 5770x2 which I can get for $320 total then spend $400+ on a 5870. I was following my rule of thumb for my upgrades: 1. Does it offer performance increase - 5770 vs 4850 512MB answer : yes. 2. Does it offer better features, DX11 , yes. 3. Is it scalable with what you are purchasing to be a powerful mid range system, 2x 5770 > 5870 in a lot of benchmarks. So that extra $100-$150 I save vs buying a 5870 I can use to go towards my SSD or more memory. I am more a mid-range budget performance gamer than a High end gamer and would rather spend $900 every few years upgrading my rig then $1800 every time the best new parts come out, which these days is quite frequently.

lol... win.

To be honest, a 25% performance increase is HUGE no matter how you look at it. That is another 10+ FPS is Crysis.

The problem is, anything lower than that isn't really worth it, which is why I haven't upgraded, I don't have the $400 to blow on a 5870 and I don't consider 2 5770s the same, as you can't crossfire those later on and get any real benefit. For the OP, 2 5770s will kick some major ass.

As for the VRAM argument, I call BS. People say there is little difference between 512mb of GDDR3 and 1GB of GDDR5 because benchmarks don't show it. You know what else benchmarks don't show? The full quality of gameplay. I can run Fallout 3 MAXED at my res without any AA and get 60+ FPS, but every minute or so it dips to 20 FPS as things load. This is because my GPUs don't have enough VRAM to load these things, and I know it is that because I upgraded from 8GB of DDR2 to 4GB of DDR3 and an i5 750 @ 4.0 GHz from an E6750 @ 3.2 GHz without any change.

Sort of like spinning #'s so 34-41 fps is a HUGE !!! increase.
facepalm

IMO, thats pertinent info, in a perfect world all 4850's would perform the same. Over the course of years, whether its bios updates, revision refinements, die steppings, board components, your older 4850 may have performed on the low side to begin with, as long as your happy thats what counts.

Of course the HD5850 would be better, it will have no scaling issues and yes, it has double the memory bandwidth and amount. Your speculations about the differences SPECIFICALLY between 512mb of ram and 1gb of ram are exactly that, speculation. Let me repeat, you will only be able to know for sure if that is the issue by using the same card with different amounts of ram.
BTW the cards in question in this post don't just have different speed ram they also have different memory buses. The HD5770s memory bandwidth is only very slightly higher than the HD4850 despite the switch from DDR3 to DDR5 because the memory bus has been cut in half. Not that it is relevant as I was talking about exclusively the difference associated with quantity of ram.

Crossfired I would think 2 years would be a reasonable expectation at 1080p, 3 may be pushing it but it's impossible to tell really.

30% faster than what?

Lol I'm surrounded by Einsteins read the review COUNT the FPS difference

Ok well look at it this way then, in that whole review there are maybe 3 games if I'm being generous and only one really where the difference between the 4850 and the 5770 is Playable and Not playable, that's out of 19 games. Also you specified the resolution i didnt.
Either way you want to look at it its a very very stupid upgrade, Comes under more money than sense to me.
As i said new build sure but 4850 to 5770 no way.
We have the numbers and these are under best conditions, remember lots of people dont have top end i7 set ups like the guys at techpowerup do so the FPS will be lower still.

Mactronix

my dual 8800 GTS 512mb.

I rarely resort to this but, your an idiot. Lets say he is getting 20 FPS at medium-high without AA. With the 25% figure he will get 25 FPS, which is playable. Lets say he is getting 30 average FPS, that 25% figure will increase it to 40 FPS, which is far more playable.

He wont be playing Crysis at Very High with 4x AA with EITHER card, so why is it relevant. He can now go to medium-high instead of low-medium.

Look here:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/200 [...] 0_review/6

Comapring the 5770 scores to the 5750, which is a bit faster than the 4850, we see a HUGE difference in what settings he can use, they don't even recommend his resolution with a card that is in between his older one and his new one.