What's my upgrade path?

InsertGenericism

Honorable
Feb 25, 2012
3
0
10,510
So I've had my computer for about two years now; designed, built, and maintained by myself since around December of '09. And ever since, I've kind of been out of touch with the computing and technology community, news, newly released tech, etc.... :non:

I feel the time is ripe for an upgrade, and only started to briefly look around at parts. But as I looked more and more, it seems like my computer really isn't all that old and I thought perhaps I should wait a while longer for parts that would better justify an upgrade.

I've been on a two year technology and computer hiatus, and need the opinion of those who haven't been as out of touch as I am :) . So do I really need an upgrade? If so, I'd want it to be the most bang for my buck, and easily noticeable on a daily basis. I use my computer for mostly web surfing, gaming, and sometimes video and photo editing, but by far game the most.

I like gaming at a 1920x1200 resolution with settings on MAX but started getting the feeling that the 1GB VRAM on the 5850 isn't enough for ultra high textures, especially in Skyrim (been thinking about selling them for 110 each). I noticed the 5970 isn't really that bad on February's hierarchy list, so my performance can't really be all that bad...I'm not made of money, but if your suggestions are justifiable, then my wallet is of no concern :pt1cable:

My specs:
Asus Rampage II Extreme
Core i7 920 clocked at 3.3Ghz daily, water cooled with 360mm radiator
2 Crossfired 1GB 5850's (Both OC'd to 775mhz core, 1125mhz memory) air cooled
2 1TB Western digital hard drives (storage)
2 30gb OCZ Vertex SSD's in RAID 0, (OS installed here) (210mb/s read, 75 mb/s write)
1 750gb Western digital hard drive 7200RPM
6gb dominator ram at 1600mhz
Powered by 850w corsair PSU
HAF 932 chasis

SSD's are slow by today's standards, yes :pfff:
 
I don't really see any reason to upgrade at 1080p, but then again I don't play Skyrim either.

It's going to be quite expensive to buy a card to replace a 5970 which is basically what you have.

You would be looking at something like 2x 7850/7870/7890 2GB cards but we don't even have benchmarks on those yet. Even better would be 2x 7950's, although I'm not sure your cpu could keep up with those at 3.3ghz.
 

g-unit1111

Titan
Moderator


Actually it really isn't - I still use an i7-920 and it's still as good now as it was back when it was first released. Still beats the AMD FX.

I'd definitely second taking a look at upgrading your GPU to something like a Radeon 7950.