Upgrade advice. Thinking of a Sapphire 5770 Vapor-x

ern88

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Jun 8, 2009
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Hey guys,

I am thinking about upgrading my rig to a Sapphire 5770 vapor-X. I have a BFG NVIDIA 9800 GTX.
Some concerns I have is the 5770 will be bottle necked by my CPU. My rig specs are ASUS P5K-E MOBO. 4 gigs ram, WIN 7 PRO, and my CPU is Intel E8400 dual core 3.0 ghz. I will probably upgrade in a 1 1/2-2 year time frame. I play games in 1680 x 1050 resolution. I still think there is life left with what I have. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks guys
 
Solution
Your cpu is still good, although OCing it is a good idea. It OCs easily and well.
The HD5770 will give you DX11 and an extra 25ish% performance. If you can afford it and your resolution is 1920x1080 or higher you may want to wait for the HD5830 which should be available very soon and offer a more substantial upgrade.
Your cpu is still good, although OCing it is a good idea. It OCs easily and well.
The HD5770 will give you DX11 and an extra 25ish% performance. If you can afford it and your resolution is 1920x1080 or higher you may want to wait for the HD5830 which should be available very soon and offer a more substantial upgrade.
 
Solution

deadlockedworld

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Hey,

Jyjjy is exactly right. (thats probably why noone else jumped in here)

1. The e8400 is still an excellent gaming processor. (I also have it) If you look at toms gaming CPU hierarchy you will see that it still ranks near the top because of his high clock speed and somewhat muscular cache. It will not bottleneck most cards.
Hierarchy: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu,2545-7.html

Overclocking can give you quite a bit of performance boost with an e8400. I regularly see reports of people clocking it well past 4 ghz.
Toms article on C2D overclocking: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-2-overclock,2316.html

2. If it were me, I wouldn't consider the 25%ish performance boost of a 5770 to be worth an extra $150.

I think the best options here are to
A) upgrade all the way to a 5850($300) for a large performance gain,

B) Wait for the 5830 to come out soon (a little over the $200 mark) and significantly more powerful than a 5770, or

C) Wait longer for Nvidia Fermi and/or AMD price drops. (you might overclock both CPU and GPU in the meantime)