Should I Upgrade to 7970?

[teldara]

I'm not sure if my processor will bottleneck the 7970. Please give me some opinions.

Current Build (Things that matter):

AMD Phenom II x6@3.2Ghz
2x AMD/ATI 5850 in Crossfire
8GB DDR3 RAM

If I was going to upgrade my CPU, I'll probably have to get a new motherboard (Switching to intel and i5), which will be costly too.

What do you think?

 

[xxyougotownedzz]

Your Phenom II X6 already bottleneck's your 5850 Crossfire. I don't think you will see a lot of difference with a 7970 unless you run you games at 2560x1600. You should replace your cpu with a i5 2500K for now.

 

[teldara]

Your Phenom II X6 already bottleneck's your 5850 Crossfire. I don't think you will see a lot of difference with a 7970 unless you run you games at 2560x1600. You should replace your cpu with a i5 2500K for now.

Thank you for your feedback. Can anyone else give me some input?

 

[king_maliken]

I can guaranty that you already bottleneck your CPU (well depending on use), so if anything I'd change that first.

 

[teldara]

Is it worth waiting for maybe 7950 or 78xx or when there's a price drop when ever nvidia can put some competition on the market.

Right now, my computer runs good. I have no issues on it. All my games can run on highest setting on 1920x1080 with 60+ fps

 

[zakattak80]

Is it worth waiting for maybe 7950 or 78xx or when there's a price drop when ever nvidia can put some competition on the market.

Right now, my computer runs good. I have no issues on it. All my games can run on highest setting on 1920x1080 with 60+ fps

then why upgrade if there is no need to?

 

[teldara]

then why upgrade if there is no need to?

Future proof? Make sure everything I have is decent enough.

BF3 on ultra only runs 30 FPS, sadly. And what I've been seeing is that my 5850 crossfired isn't seeing much of a performance boost regardless of CPU bottleneck. Most games out there (MMO/Online wise; which are the main games I'm playing right now) aren't optimized for crossfire. Essentially, I'm wasting money by having two 5850s because it hogs more power compared to the performance increase.

 

[johnny_2bags]

Definitely upgrade the CPU. I went from a Phenom II 920 to an I7 2600K, and it breathed huge life into my crossfired 5870's. Went from 21,751 on 3dmark Vantage to 33,485. Your CPU is bottlenecking your cards. Crossfire works. Don't mess with the cards. Get a Sandy Bridge. You will love it.

 

[teldara]

Definitely upgrade the CPU. I went from a Phenom II 920 to an I7 2600K, and it breathed huge life into my crossfired 5870's. Went from 21,751 on 3dmark Vantage to 33,485. Your CPU is bottlenecking your cards. Crossfire works. Don't mess with the cards. Get a Sandy Bridge. You will love it.

Ivy Bridge is around the corner. Would it be better to get the i5 2500k (best price/performance ratio) now or wait a few months after Ivy Bridge (To get all the kinks worked out)?

Just trying to find the best options and reviewing them all before a purchase.

 

[xxyougotownedzz]

We don't have any information about Ivy Bridge yet. Shure you could wait for Ivy Bridge to come out but as far as we know, it will probobly be a die shrink of Sandy Bridge witch means it will run cooler and have more room for overclocking. But most of the latest games run perfecly fine on the 2500k even at stock clocks.

 

[sarinaide]

IB will apparently be a 10~15% improvement over Sandybridge, better efficiency and will support PCI-e 3.0 and faster RAM clocks, yes it is worth waiting out for the Ivybridge release and benches to be finalized. I would say that a X6 is still good enough to last you a year until the Piledriver and then the Intel Haswell chips. I would hold out for a while yet architectures are moving fast now.

I don't know what was meant by "Nvidia offering competition" 600/700 will be coming out, and the 7000 series from AMD is hardly dominating, I guess you only have to look at the "AMD" part to realize that.