HD 5770 Crossfire vs GTX 550 ti ??

What!??!? Where did you read that? Single GTX 550 Ti is around the same speed as SINGLE HD 5770. Crossfire would be way faster.

Wow. See? That's why I post on forums   . Okay so that idea is gone. In the 150 range, do you think anything will beat a 5770 xfire?

not to nit pick but you don't use Bing for "research" or something do you? lol. cause if you Google " crossfire 5770 vs 550Ti" the very first link is a solved toms hardware forum post that tells you exactly what sunius just did.

I suppose for $150 you cannot get ANYTHING better than 5700 crossfire. That's your best pick  .

For $150, that'd be a hard thing to beat as far as maximum framerate. But if you're looking for more consistent framerates (i.e. from a single card) you might just want to get a 6850 or a 560 non-ti. You might be able to pick up a 6870 used for $150.

Also your CPU might bottleneck the 5770's. I'd suggest selling the one you have and upgrading to a better, single card.

One of the reasons I'm trying not to crossfire my 5770 is because it's an old card. I'd rather have a single card anyways and crossfire it in the long run. I think I'm gonna gonna go with a 6850 then buy another one in a few weeks. Thanks guys. And @Flying Toilet; what CPU do you recommend I upgrade to?

Also, where would I sell my old card? Ebay? Sorry for double post.

I would suggest the 960T, it's a pretty versatile chip and usually has some good overclocking headroom. You will need a pretty decent overclock to crossfire in the future. The 970 at the Egg is sitting at $109 right now though, and most people can get that over 4 Ghz pretty easily. If it's still that price when you're ready to xfire, I'd go with that.

You can post a classified here I think, not sure what the minimum requirement is. Other forums will allow you to sell once you meet a certain requirement. Otherwise, Ebay would be a good place to start for a more secure transaction but you might not get as much as you would on the forums.

5770 cfx will perform close to gtx 570 or higher, with a lot of microstuttering. it will perform higher than a gtx 550ti.
your cpu is a possible bottleneck for 5770 cfx even with overclock. if you wanna upgrade, aim for a phenom ii x4 965 b.e. or higher and overclock it.
for your rig, a single powerful card is a better bet. i'd recommend a radeon hd 6870. it's 'close' to $150 (actually $170~) and better performing than a 5770 or 550ti. nvidia's 6870 equivalent is a gtx 560 non ti. imo currently 6870s are of better value.
if possible, i'd recommend a complete pc switch to an intel core i5 based one for better gaming experience in the future (unless amd comes out with a better gaming cpu with piledriver).

Okay. So, either crossfire PLUS get a better CPU which will cost around $270 (too much), but will perform the best, do a complete pc swap for intel (which I'll do, but in the near future), or go with a 6850, or 6870. I'm still undecided. I'm doing constant google searches. I just want 60 FPS at 1680 x 1050 with high settings. No multi-display or anything crazy. Looks like I'm gonna wait a little bit and settle with a 6870. Still not sure yet. You guys are awesome by the way. Thanks for all the feedback!

er.. i meant to say that - skip crossfiring 5770 cards entirely. higher theoretical performance does not always mean better gaming experience. that's especially true for entry level cards. crossfiring entry level cards don't make sense because of their weaker gpus usually cause microstuttering - if you're susceptible to it, it'll be problematic. if you wanna crossfire amd cards, look to radeon 6950/7850 and higher and latest amd catalyst drivers... and at least core i5 2500k.

Yeah, I'm just finding out that an Intel build is way more expensive. $180 is the cheapest quad and it's only 2.8 ghz. I'm with this this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... and this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... in about a month or two. And I might get this today http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... Total $539.37 Damn!

Why don't I just get this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... OC it plus a 6870 and call it a day for about a year? It's got 6mb of L3. I know you're saying go with Intel, which I will in the future, but it doesn't seem like a bad choice, especially for the price.

if you live near a microcenter, check out these (i am not asking you to get it, just notice the price):
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml...
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml...
only problem is, these are in-store pickups.
the 6870 card looks good. make sure it fits into the case.

i'm not sure about the 1045t, the base clockrate looks too low. if you oc it, then no problem i guess. if this saves you a year, you can go for haswell later.  

Stay away from 6 core CPU's for gaming. It hasn't been until recently that a majority of games utilized quad core processors, and up until that high clocked dual cores reigned supreme. A higher-clocked quad will certainly beat a lower clocked hex-core at least 90% of the time, if not all the time for gaming.

Thanks for the advice Flying Toilet. I'll avoid the 6 core cpu's. Now, back to the crossfiring with my current CPU. Are you POSITIVE there will be micro stuttering, even with an OC? I'm only asking this because I stumbled across this today http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/ite...
It's basically the same setup I have except the motherboard has 2 x16 slots instead of 1 x16 and 1 x8 slots. I was told that wouldn't make a difference with 5000 series. What do you guys think?

here's tom's look at microstuttering, came out last year:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stut...
driver updates could alleviate some issues, but high end cards typically get the most attention.
pcie bandwidth (x8 vs x16) won't make any difference with the entry level gfx cards like 5700 series.

Not Sure if im too late to the party but ive benched my own system recently
I run crosshair v formula
sapphire hd5770 in crossfire (x2) @ 930core 1300mem
Amd fx 6100 6 core @4.5ghz all cores active
8gb ddr3 1866 memory
xfx xxx series 650wpsu
my results show my system perfoming at gtx570 lvls graphically
i have 0 microstutter in my games and i used this review for comparison
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 196-4.html
i only post this to you cause i found those results interesting as i was looking for some hd 7870 info as thats my next card
im going to get for crossfire
later hope these shed some light i read this post and couldnt believe soem of what i was hearing
about 5770 crossfire. ive been running it for 2yrs now as the mb and processor seemed like the better upgrade from athlon 2 640 (and it was ) people who arnt running 5770 crossfire in dual 2.016x slots underestimate its gaming greatly.
hope this helps if you havnt made a purchase yet

my 3dmark 11 scores are
E9511
P5605
x1739
unigine benches
Powered by Unigine Engine
Heaven Benchmark v3.0 Basic

FPS:
46.1
Scores:
1160
Min FPS:
11.1
Max FPS:
98.8

Sanctuary demo
benchmark edition v2.3

FPS:
77.0
Scores:
3266
Min FPS:
38.5
Max FPS:
98.0

1 thing i forgot was i was running my crossfire on the mb you have m4a785tdv-evo in 16x2.0/4x2.0 and while it performed well enough to see scaling i got a huge improvement on them going to the crosshair v with its 16x2.0 slots So yeah hope im helping if im not late already lol