HEXiT said:
your running crossfire... best thing to do for that system is remove 1 of the gfx cards... you will gain overall performance because you have removed a sizable bottleneck created by the second gfx card...
seriously you bought what is a budget cpu and then threw 2 high end gfx cards at it... so you cant be surprised if it chokes...
you could swap platform to sandy but that would cost you 400 to get a board/cpu and ram that wont bottleneck both cards... so really unless you want to spend that kind of money your best bet is forget crossfire. sell the spare card or use it on another build...
oh and no amd has enough grunt to run both of them cards... well the new fx cpu's will but the chances are you will still have bottleneck issues on games that only use 2 cores...(which is the majority) so that would be a waste of cash 2... as would the 980 as your already getting more out of your current cpu than the 980 would give at stock and even if you oc'd the new 1 you would still come up short by some way.
you want good single threaded performance and amd just dont offer it. on larger configs.
taking one card out should not increase the fps. the cpu can only output so many fps and taking out a card doesnt change the amount the cpu can output. and if your saying that any amd cpu can run two 6950's without a bottleneck... no thats not right. in some games yes but in more and more games no.
HEXiT said:
it will be swings and roundabouts m8, on some games the crossfire wont be an issue while on others it will. its always better to have 1 big card over 2 smaller1s but in this case there not that much smaller. over all on a cpu bound game you would get better performance from the 7970 but when the cpu isnt an issue like in bf3 the crossfire will win out by about 40 percent. would i sell up the 2 cards in this instance. yes as your current cpu is likely to handle the 7970 a lot better than it does the crossfire. yes you will be down grading in a way but you should get more overall performance due to you releasing the bottleneck.
but that is a guestimate as there are no firm benches out yet.
i want to first say that i normally agree with HEXIT but in these last two post i find it very hard to agree with certain aspects.
first its wrong to say that BF3 is not cpu dependent. when setting my cpu to a dual core in bios my BF3 fps go to ***. yes single player is not cpu dependent but most people barely play that. MP needs a fast dual core.
second, if he were to get a 7970 with his current rig he is not releasing a bottleneck. the bottleneck is still there with that gpu. the cpu can still only output the same amount a fps its just that the single gpu can not output the same fps as the two 6950(thats debatable).
all we can offer is opinions though and in this case the 7970 will most likely be to much for your cpu. it needs to be replace because i have a single 6950 and your only getting 10fps more then me. thats a problem.
rough numbers here
cf 6950 + 965 100%
cf 6950 + i5 140%
6950 + 965 90%
7970 + 965 105% (maybe)
7970 + i5 125%
those are just very rough performance gains with different configs. bottom line your 965 is going to bottleneck you regardless.