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One Radeon 7970 or Xfire 7850

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I am going to be putting together my first hardcore gaming PC in the next few weeks before D3, so far I have everything narrowed down but have been unable to determine if I should CrossFire 2 7850s or just get one 7970 and possibly xfire in the future... not confirmed specs of comp bellow any thoughts or ideas are welcome on any part of the build. THANKS!




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More about : radeon 7970 xfire 7850

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Completely depends on how likely you think you are to crossfire that 7970 in the future, because 2 7850s will give you more performance than a single 7970.

If you think there's little chance you'd CF the 7970, just get the 7850s. IMO if you think there's at least a 50% chance you'll get a second 7970 within the next year, get that. Also, you have a PM.

BigMack70 said:
Completely depends on how likely you think you are to crossfire that 7970 in the future, because 2 7850s will give you more performance than a single 7970.

If you think there's little chance you'd CF the 7970, just get the 7850s. IMO if you think there's at least a 50% chance you'll get a second 7970 within the next year, get that. Also, you have a PM.

Thanks for the thoughts.
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BigMack70 said:
Completely depends on how likely you think you are to crossfire that 7970 in the future, because 2 7850s will give you more performance than a single 7970.

If you think there's little chance you'd CF the 7970, just get the 7850s. IMO if you think there's at least a 50% chance you'll get a second 7970 within the next year, get that. Also, you have a PM.



I agree with this. However looking at the high end cards Nvidia 680 is cheaper and runs faster. low to med high range radeon wins in my book though. x2 7850s will kick butt now but like stated above less expandability down the road.

The 7950 and 7970 perform almost identically (difference is less than 5%) when overclocked to the same frequencies. If you don't mind overclocking, then a 7950 would be a far better buy than a 7970. Also, like some others mentioned, the GTX 680 is faster than the 7970 for almost all games (only Crysis 2 and Metro 2033 prefer the 7970) despite being cheaper and using a little less power, so the two best choices would be the 7950 and GTX 680.

Also, if you get a GTX 680 and want to overclock it, use MSI Afterburner. EVGA Precision has been shown to be ineffective on the 680 the last time I heard of it being tried by THW. MSI AFterburner seemed to work for Guru3D who claimed to have a 20% overclock and might have been able to go farther, all at stock voltage. It would take a roughly 50% overclock on the 7950 up to around 1300MHz to match the GTX 680 overclocked by 20%. However, the 7950 and 7970 are known to usually be able to hit this GPU frequency fairly easily, so long as Catalyst 12.2 isn't limiting them artificially to 1125MHz. Use Catalyst 12.3 or newer and you should be fine, that is if you go for the AMD cards.

I would go for the 7950, but not because of any gaming preference (it would be pretty close, between the 7950 OC and GTX 680 OC), but because the GTX 680 sucks for compute performance and that is important to me. If you think you might get into something like bit-mining, keep in mind that the 7970 has more than five times the Dual Precision compute performance of the GTX 680 (roughly 5.5 times, to be more accurate) and that the 7950 OCed to 7970 frequencies would also have nearly identical performance. Compute performance will become more importnat for gaming in the future as more games rely on it, but for now, the 680 is a great option. Chances are that it will be time to replace the 680/7950 before such games are common, but it is something to keep in mind.

AMD has done some price cuts, now the 7970 is $480, the 7950 is $400, and the 7700 cards also dropped a little. I don't think that 7800 dropped yet, but they weren't priced as badly as 7900 and 7700 anyway, so it's okay for now. Prices will probably drop further once Nvidia gets more cards released and gets them in high supply.

This does make the 7970 cheaper than two 7850s and I think that that is something to consider if you haven't bought something yet. Nvidia is also supposed to come out with more cards by the end of the month or the start/middle of May, so if you want to go Nvidia, the time may come soon.

With the 7950 at $400 and being able to overclock at least as far as the GTX 680 and 7970, I think it is even more of a deal than before.
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