Equivalent or better to Radeon HD6950?

[bobham]

Hi:
I have a system I put together ~4 years ago based on an Asus Crosshair IV Formula MB with a 1090T AMD six core processor. I originally had two Radeon HD 5850 cards running in Crossfire but after a year or two I switched to a single Gigabyte Radeon HD 6950. I have been quite happy with the system but this morning when I switched it on the computer sounded like it booted normally but the monitor did not display anything. After re-booting a couple of times it still did not display anything. I dug one of the HD5850 cards out and swapped it for the HD6950 and the computer booted fine and the monitor display is normal. Based on that I am assuming the video card has died. I do intend to upgrade my entire system within a year or so.

I cannot remember at this time why I was dissatisfied with the HD 5850 card(s) and changed them for the HD6950. I have not yet attempted to play any of my games (mainly Skyrim at this point) to see if peformance will be affected enough to be unbearable. It may be that I can just keep this card in place until I am ready to upgrade.

My question is what cards would provide equal or better perfomance to the HD6950 if I decide I can't live with the HD5850 even for the year until I upgrade? I do some video editing for Youtube, although I haven't been doing much lately. The range of cards and prices available is overwhelming and the descriptions and specs listed seems very confusing. I don't think I want to spend the money for a top of the line card now when it probably won't be top of the line anymore when I do my full system upgrade, so if I buy a card now it will likely be a short term fix and I wouldn't want to spend more than ~$200 on it.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Bob

 

[Gradius1981]

For a <$200 gfx card, your best bet would to get the r9 270 or r9 270x ($150 -$200) which would offer a good upgrade from the 6950. If you look closely enough, some of the r9 280s are also on sale ( around $199.99 after the rebate) which is even better than the r9 270s and the r9 270x-s

R9 270 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202090&cm_re=r9_270-_-14-202-090-_-Product
R9 270x - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161442

R9 280 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150706&cm_re=r9_280-_-14-150-706-_-Product

 

[bobham]

Thank you, Gradius.

The confusing part about the cards is the naming conventions, where the same base board seems to have so many add-ons and price points. I usually deal with NCIX since I am in Canada and there are no cross border shipping issues, so looking at their site I see:

R9 270 OC - http://www.ncix.com/detail/asus-radeon-r9-270-oc-18-92748-1350.htm

R9 279X - http://www.ncix.com/detail/asus-radeon-r9-270x-1120mhz-f2-91110-1350.htm

My new question is whether I would really see any difference between these cards in my system, given that my motherboard is PCI-E 2.0 rather than PCI-E 3.0? Will the higher frequency of the "X" card make much difference when choked back to the slower access speed of the motherboard?

Thanks again
Bob

 

[Gradius1981]

Pcie 2.0 x16 and pcie3.0x16 doesn't yield any noticable performance difference on most current graphic cards as most of them are still unable to saturate the full bandwidth which pcie 3.0 offers unless you are doing SLI or crossfiring high-end cards ( gtx780, r9 290x etc ).
You may try to overclock your cpu to increase the performance even though your cpu at stock speeds will not bottleneck the card ( 270 / 270x ). R9 270 and 270x are basically the same thing except 270x has an additional 6 pin power connector input to cater for more power input to achieve higher speeds when overclocking. The r9 270 can be easily overclocked to match a 270x stock speed but any higher would be difficult as its only equiped with a single 6 pin power connector input. Hope this info helps.

 

[bobham]

It helps a lot, Gradius. Thank you.

I'll see how it goes with this old 5850 for a few days and if I feel the need to change it I think I will go with the R9 270.

Thanks again
Bob