Upgrading from Radeon 3870 + New system build

konoplya

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May 9, 2008
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i will be building a new system in the next couple months. my main concern is the video card upgrade. i currently have radeon 3870 512MB 256bit that i bought back in mid 08. i've been looking at both nvidia and ati cards for the past week and just can't come even close to deciding which one to get.

i have 2 24" HP M-PVA panels that i currently use. i used to game a lot, but in the past year and a half have been doing more and more work on my pc such as video and photo editing, including 3d with MAYA utilizing the hell out of my dual setup. i know that a lot of that has to do with a CPU as well, but the gpu also plays a role.
my res is 1920x1200. i've read in different threads that some cards are better for a dual setup than others.

also, looking at the current ati/amd cards, most of them only go up to 256 bit even on the 2gb cards. wouldn't that bottleneck the data with such a small bus for so much ram? so i'm curious whether it would be better to go with dual, lets say 512mb 256 bit in x-fire cards instead of one 1gb 256 card, for example?

please forgive my ignorance on some of these questions.

thank you.
 

konoplya

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May 9, 2008
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ok great. thanks for the info guys. i also was able to find some info on the bottlenecking. turns out that since the ram is so fast, it doesn't really matter that the bus is only 256 bit. thanks again.
 

Koolg223

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Jan 13, 2012
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You should wait for the next gen nVidia and ATi cards being released in the next few months. They'll certainly lower the prices of today's cards if you still want an HD 6xxxx or GTX 5xx card.