HD6950 vs HD4850 x2 (Crossfire)

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Silent Ricochet

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I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what I want to upgrade on my PC as of yet. After overclocking my PC further today, I've decided against upgrading my CPU and am now looking further into grabbing a video card.

Right now this is my current rig:

■Two HD4850 512M Crossfired
■Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P
■AMD Phenom II x3 720 @3.4GHz 4th Core Unlocked
■Corsair GS600 PSU
■Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit @ 1680 x 1050 Resolution

The Current setup I have does great in most games, but the Crossfire experience so far has been a mixed bag. Scaling isn't always positive, Company of Heroes for example hardly performs better, Shift 2 has it's fair share of graphical glitches, And BF3 for some odd reason chugged even though RadeonPro indicated that I was running in the range of 50-60 FPS. On the other hand Crysis 2 ran on High quite impressively, Source games are a joke, and even Bad Company 2 runs at or over 60FPS in most situations.

The problem is that I don't like sitting around waiting for the AMD Catalyst team to create a new CAP (Catalyst Application Profile) for us Crossfire users each week, just to find out it's going to take another week for the right CAP to come out, and in the end it usually causes other problems that need to be solved by yet another CAP. By that time a whole new Catalyst Driver is out, and the cycle repeats.

With everything stated above in mind, I'm considering actually upgrading to an HD6950. This One to be exact. It comes at a hefty price of $260, and after both my HD4850's maybe fetching $60-$70 on ebay; that makes this a decent amount of cash to drop on a video card.

According to Tom's Hardware Graphics Charts from 2010 Two HD4850s Crossfired are on par with the Nvidia GTX 460. Moving onto Tom's Hardware Graphics Charts from 2011 the HD6950 scores an average of 30FPS more than the GTX460. Benchmarks are benchmarks though, and I'm not really sure what to think at this point.

Any suggestions? Observations? Insight? Please help me out.

Thanks in Advance,
Silent Ricochet
 
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LOL alright you're good to go then.

I think it's worth it as the performance increase will be measured by more than just an average FPS increase. As you will have less issues with drivers, higher minimum fps, more vRAM (512mb isn't enough anymore), and no microstuttering. All in all it will be worth it. And your power supply is fine.

The only other alternative maybe to hold onto your 4850s a little longer until the 7000 series are release but I have no idea when that will be (maybe christmas?) It might be worth waiting a couple months for them, since you can still game decently with 4850s
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Silent Ricochet

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I figured a crossfire setup would sap more power than a single card, regardless of the Series. So I figured my Corsair GS600 (600 Watts) Would be sufficient. I fixed the link by the way, It's $260 because it has a much better heatsink than the Sapphire; it's an MSI Twin Frozr III
 
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purple stain

purple stain

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Nov 2, 2010
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Well a 4850 is compareable to a 5750 and a 5750 crossfire is comparable to a 5850.A 6950 is roughly 20% faster than a 5850.

Since it's would be difficult to look at benchmarks of the 4850 vs the 6950 just look to a 5850 for a comparison.

5850=4850x2(4850 in crossfire,same thing)

http://www.hwcompare.com/4687/radeon-hd-4850-x2-1gb-vs-radeon-hd-5850/

Benchmark

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-6950-1gb-vs-geforce-gtx-560-ti-review/15

So the 6950 would be around 10fps faster than a 4850 crossfire.Kinda seems like you should go a little bigger to get your moneys worth.Just doesn't seem like a huge gain.I would suggest going for a GTX570.

Here's the cheapest GTX570 I could find.

MSI(Reference) GTX570 $320=$290 after MIR + Free Shipping

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127552
 
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swifty_morgan

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I've been grouched on about this but I used to game at 16x10 and there were times when 1gig of video memory wasn't enough. You'll be running games in Dx11 mode which is another thing that will put a hurt on a card. The 6950 2gig would be more than enough for a while. You'll become totally cpu bound before the card will become "useless".
 
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amirp

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Make sure it fits before you buy it! that is one long looking card!

This is what somebody said about it: "Just make sure you're case is spacious enough to fit this card safely, anything under 12" of space may be hard/improbable to fit."

Lol edit: here are the dimensions on the details page: 11.4" x 5" x 1.5". so open your case and measure.
 
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amirp

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LOL alright you're good to go then.

I think it's worth it as the performance increase will be measured by more than just an average FPS increase. As you will have less issues with drivers, higher minimum fps, more vRAM (512mb isn't enough anymore), and no microstuttering. All in all it will be worth it. And your power supply is fine.

The only other alternative maybe to hold onto your 4850s a little longer until the 7000 series are release but I have no idea when that will be (maybe christmas?) It might be worth waiting a couple months for them, since you can still game decently with 4850s
 
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Silent Ricochet

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After waffling indecisively for 45 minutes, I bought it :D
 
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