4850x2 upgrades?

T

thfx

Limp Gawd
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May 9, 2002
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Any recommendations on a good site for comparing performance of newer generation cards?

I am considering building or buying an i7-920 system and popping my Sapphire 4850 reference model crossfire setup in it. Would it be better to go to a single card, say 5850?

Edit: I have a crossfire setup. The cards are the loud ones that run hot.
 
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Assuming your 4850x2 is one of the models with 1GB per GPU it should perform around the level of a 5850. All things being equal a 5850 would still probably be better but all things aren't equal - you already have the 4850x2.

Alternatively you could probably find another 4850x2 used for cheap and get a 2nd one. At that point you would still have spent less money than replacing your card with a 5850 but you will have a solution that is considerably faster.
 
Scaling past two gpu's is pretty horrible. There are maybe 4 games out there that I've ever seen that actually do scale (far cry 2 being the only one that comes to mind). With the prices you can find some used I was thinking about getting a second 4870x2 myself but there really seems to be almost no reason for it. It doesn't improve performance and in quite a few situations it seems to lower performance by quite a bit. I've also been tempted to get a 5870, but again I just can't justify the cost. 5850 xfire seems to be the best upgrade path for me cost wise but it's still around $600. If 5850's were only $200 then I'd probably pull the trigger but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

I recommend keeping your 4850 xfire until either a) prices come down or b) new cards come out.
 
What is your price range for your upgrade, and what games do you play and at what res?
 
Honeslty, The 4850X2 is a very fast soultion as it is.

In order to realy be gaining speed, I would recoemnd not buying anything less/slower than a 5970.

Anything else will feel slower/same, and would cost a lot of money!
 
gmkmay said:
Scaling past two gpu's is pretty horrible. There are maybe 4 games out there that I've ever seen that actually do scale (far cry 2 being the only one that comes to mind). With the prices you can find some used I was thinking about getting a second 4870x2 myself but there really seems to be almost no reason for it. It doesn't improve performance and in quite a few situations it seems to lower performance by quite a bit. I've also been tempted to get a 5870, but again I just can't justify the cost. 5850 xfire seems to be the best upgrade path for me cost wise but it's still around $600. If 5850's were only $200 then I'd probably pull the trigger but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

I recommend keeping your 4850 xfire until either a) prices come down or b) new cards come out.
Click to expand...

Which games did you find that don't scale well?

Most games these days scale just fine past two GPUs. The ones that don't are usually either old or niche games that few people play. It's now the norm for new games to be released with excellent crossfirex support right from day 1; Bad Company 2 and Modern Warfare 2 come to mind as examples.

So yeah, if your main games are Doom2 and Hotwheels extreme racing, crossfire with >2 GPUs might not be for you...
 
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