What to upgrade next?!? Help!

mf2385

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Sep 22, 2007
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Hey so my overclocking options are done, stable overclock of my 2500K at 4.5Ghz at 1.380v, now comes the issue of what to fix next. I will be upgrading as soon as I sell my 32'' Samsung HDTV in about a week and a half to a new 24'' ASUS LED 2MS 1920x1080 (1080p) monitor for gaming. Now that being said my 6870 black edition won't cut it anymore for gaming. I was going to originally upgrade monitors a little later down the road but I got a good offer from someone I trust and they are gonna take my TV off my hands for a good price. Now my options are:

1) Buy another HD 6870 and XFire them, and deal with issues such as micro-suttering and drivers and what not (I also have not dealt with crossfirex yet at all)

2) Sell my XFX HD 6870 Black Edition and get a GTX 580. At 1920x1080 could I upgrade to a gtx 570 for now, like a really good overclocked version and maybe later down the road SLI them?

Hmm I am contemplating what to do....

I mean I would invest in a more powerful GTX 570/580 if it's needed, I am a bit of a perfectionist, meaning I don't like 40fps in games and I know in some you will get that but I don't want to worry about having a low fps at 1080p when I upgrade. People are telling me an HD 6870 BE by itself won't be what I'm looking for when I upgrade. For now at 1280x720p it works great in every game.

 

dane332

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I would personally wait a bit. The amd 7000 series has a release date of December and while the cards you list are a decent bit stronger, they are not overwhelmingly stronger.

A 6870 should play games well at 1080p with medium to high settings depending on the game
 

dane332

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They were given a release date of December 6 a week or two ago. and yes I'm fairly sure they will release the 7850 then the 7870 and so forth, usually how it rolls, but i would imagine they have very similar performance to the high end cards of the current gen but for a much lower power consumption.

While i cannot say that(since they are no benchmarks yet). It still probably better to just wait right now.
 

mf2385

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I will be upgrading my monitor in a week and a half to this I think as of now:

ASUS 24'' LED 1080p (1920x1080) 2ms response time
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236153

So I will most likely be needing another video card to play all the newest games in higher detail. So I don't want to wait really cause these games like Batman Arkham City, Skyrim, Battlefield 3, etc. I will be playing and I want to play on atleast high settings.
 

580 is still pricey, even a HD 6950 1 Gb will let you max out the upcoming games until the 7K series is out... so sell your GPU and don't pay too much right now and get a single HD 6950
 

+1
I'd just rather get a single gpu solution and not have to worry about micro stuttering and driver issues.
+1
They were given a release date of December 6 a week or two ago. and yes I'm fairly sure they will release the 7850 then the 7870 and so forth, usually how it rolls, but i would imagine they have very similar performance to the high end cards of the current gen but for a much lower power consumption.
+1
all said about the 7k is true, the first gen would be the 78xx which are GDDR5 on Dec 6 the higher end ones 79xx is XDR2 which are twice faster than GDDR5
 

It will max out any game out there with the exception for metro 2033 & Crysis 2, even a single GTX 580 won't give you 60+ FPS.In this case go CF.
The single card solution was temporarily till the 7K is out
 
You really need two cards to max out Crysis 2, though even with two 6870s you may need to lower the AA and AF for DX11 1080p (my res is 1680x1050). Microstutter isn't really an issue when you enable v synch, since that's kinda what v synch is for matching your frames to your monitor refresh-rate. True there are some minor issues with crossfire but it's alot more stable and consistent than you might think.

If you're still bothered then just wait for the 7k series. You should see reviews and basically a paper launch in December, so hopefully you can actually buy one without a horribly inflated price in February.