HD 5850 or DDR3

Homey D. Clown

Homey D. Clown

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 27, 2004
Messages
223
Would I see more of a performance boost by upgrading my 5770 to a 5850 or upgrading motherboard and memory to ddr3?
 
Upgrading to DDR3 will not result in any real world performance benefit. In games you'll notice going from a 5770 to a 5850 though that is a very incremental upgrade.

What's slow about your system? Not gaming well?
 
you will see a difference going from a 5770 to a 5850 easy but you wont see a difference going from ddr2 to ddr3 in gaming.
 
ok, now i'm thinking that I may be able to budget for a 5870 instead my only worry would be if my CPU would bottleneck it.
 
Try going to 4ghz on your X3 instead of 3.2 "X4" and comparing how well games run.

1x 5870 should have no problem with your CPU, 2x probably will.
 
my reason forr wanting to upgrade is in some games like crysis and fear 2 there are moments where gameplay slows down a bit and it's somewhat annoying and I have my tax refund coming soon but I don"t want to blow it all on my computer.
 
with the current prices of GPU's good luck with not trying to spend alot :) 5850 (299.99) and 5870 (399.99)
 
Try going to 4ghz on your X3 instead of 3.2 "X4" and comparing how well games run.
Click to expand...

+1. The 4th core isn't going to help all that much for gaming, but another 500 Mhz most certainly would. 5770 to 5850 doesn't sound like enough upgrade to make a fuss about. Looks like you have near top-end DDR2 memory, going to DDR3 isn't going to add much performance either, and 8GB of DDR3 isn't going to be all that cheap if you want to see a substantial performance increase. Not to mention the 720 doesn't have the new memory controller of the C3 CPUs so it won't push 8GB of DDR3 to extreme speeds.

What you have is a very nice mid-budget gaming system that is very well matched. Any upgrade you do needs to be an expensive one to gain an appreciable amount of performance. Stick with what you have imho. Just because you are getting a tax refund doesn't mean you need to spend it all right away.
 
Just a suggestions.... since you already have a decent GPU, why not wait until Fermi comes out? Not necessarily to buy one, but hopefully ATI will counter with a price drop. If Fermi is the greatest thing since USB, you might want to consider it. If not, you'll probably save some dough.

I think it is a good time to hold out unless them dollars are just burning a hole in your pocket...
 
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