[Solved] 6850 crossfire overkill for 22" 1680 x 1050 monitor

building my first gaming rig, and I'm wondering what direction to go in as far as GPU power and monitor combo's. I'd like to get a 22-24" 1920 x 1200 monitor, but that might be too much $$$. If the dual card is overkill for a 1680 x 1050 monitor it will save me money. On the other hand, if I want the larger display, I should really get the dual cards . . . hmm.

I agree. CF 6850s would give you very nice performance at 1680x1050. It might be a bit much in a lot of games, but in games like Crysis and Metro 2033 it's hard to have too much gpu power lol.

1920x1200, unfortunately, is a dying resolution. I don't know why, it's great for games, but 1080p is the norm now. I would say a 1080p monitor is a nice improvement over 1680x1050 because you gain quite a bit of horizontal viewing area - especially good in any sort of shooter game.

But yeah good contrast (50000:1) is extremely important but in the end it usually comes down to preference. As for physical size, well I have a 24" 1080p monitor (Samsung 2492SW) and it has extremely good image quality IMO.

I'm not sure about response time. I have a 5ms response and it's fine. As far as I know the delays are significantly larger elsewhere and 2 vs 5ms isn't going to really affect anything. But if you're going to do competitive FPS then you should consider 2ms.

I guess because it seems like in all the benchmarks it's not what they use so it hasn't been in my mind. Going with the newest standard is usually best. Better assumed future support/optimizing on the software end I suppose?
Sounds good to me, I like more options. Well, how about the logical following question: is dual 6850's overkill for standard 1080p?

I would honestly recommend CF 6870s for 1080p. I say this because I have CF 5850s, which are better than 6870s alone but in CF should perform very close... and at 1080p they can handle any game but in the most demanding ones they are definitely pushing hard to maintain decent framerates.

FYI, I have a Samsung 2494SW which are usually ~$199 and I absolutely love it and would recommend it to anyone. Great contrast (especially useful in Amnesia: Dark Descent lol) and great colour.

Honestly the only times games haven't supported CF for me have been either beta or JUST released games, where ATI updates the drivers with either a hotfix or a new version usually quite soon, or else older games that run at like 150fps with a single card lol.

Not saying there's never any issues but it's been pretty smooth sailing for me.

Yeah but have you tried STALKER or METRO? Good luck maxing that out even at 1680x1050.

i would just get a better single card for that res, like a gtx560 or 6950. and get a good cpu to match. then at least you can crossfire later for performance boost and dont have to worry about dual gpu hassles with some games that dont support xfire.

Best answer selected by ethanw.