Am I going to notice an improvement?

[Stupidface]

Hello,

so I had a good year and decided to upgrade my GPU. However it was a bit of a impulse buy and now I am wondering if it really will be much of an upgrade.

I ordered an EVGA 660ti Superclocked 3GB for a good price to replace my HD6850 crossfire set up. I was unhappy with the noise and the power draw of the crossfire set up, and that the 1GB of memory was already limiting the settings I could choose in some games. Also, I did notice some stuttering in a number of games when looking around quickly.

I'm wondering whether the 660ti will enable me to actually increase graphics settings while maintaining smooth gameplay, and keep in mind i will be able to sell my two 6850s once the 660ti arrives to recoup a good chunk of the cost.

I game on a 27" monitor at 1080p and my current set up is:
i3 2120 3.3GHz
8GB Ripjawz X 1866
2x HD6850
Corsair CX600W (part of the reason I wanted to move to a single card, does run my set up fine though)
64GB Crucial M4 used as an SSD cache. (A 250GB Samsung 840 is on its way to replace this set up)

I play WoW, BF3, DayZ, Skyrim and FarCry3.

If anyone has experience moving from similar cards your feedback would be appreciated.

 

[mohit9206]

yes you would surely notice improvement in performance but how much am unsure of. maybe about 25-30%

 

[clarkjd]

If you are going from TWO 6850's to ONE 660ti, I don't know that you will notice an improvement in anything other than power draw.

 

[mohit9206]

If you are going from TWO 6850's to ONE 660ti, I don't know that you will notice an improvement in anything other than power draw.

i believe that a 660 ti is more powerful than 2 6850's because crossfire scaling is never 100%.
so he will definitely notice improvements in both performance and power draw and also noise and temperatures

 

[clarkjd]

i believe that a 660 ti is more powerful than 2 6850's because crossfire scaling is never 100%.
so he will definitely notice improvements in both performance and power draw and also noise and temperatures

There's the problem with the word "noticeable". What would constitute a "noticeable" improvement? I Looked at the heirarchy charts & the 6850 was only 4 tiers below the 660ti. They say that anything less than a 3 tier jump is more-or-less a lateral move (in terms of "noticeabiltiy"). You are right in that crossfire (or SLI for that matter) never scales 100%. and a single card is almost always quieter, and cooler than a two card setup.

I would like to see some benchmarks comparing the two setups before I would say that there would be a 25-30 % improvement in graphics performance.

As always, YMMV!

 

[neon neophyte]

could actually see less fps in some scenarios i would think