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4870 Crossfire upgrade

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N1GHTRA1N

Gawd
Joined
Apr 24, 2009
Messages
781
I currently have two 1GB Asus 4870 Dark Knight video cards in crossfire. My system is:

i7 920 @ 3.6GHz
12GB DDR3 @ 1442 MHz
Asus P6T Deluxe Motherboard
Auzentech X-Fi Forte Sound
Corsair HX1000 PS
1.5 TB WDD Black boot drive
24" Dell Ultra Sharp 1920x1200

I'm considering upgrading my cards to get DX11 support, I'm thinking about a 6970, I'd like a 6990 but don't want to spend that kind of cash.

What can I expect with a signle 6970 compared to what I have now. I'd likely add a second 6970 down the road if I needed more power. I was also considering a GTX 580 but have never been a big nvidia fan and I wouldn't mind being able to use 3 displays at once.

Advice?
 
You won't see much of a performance difference in most games and DX11 is hardly being used at all, though you won't have to worry about any Crossfire issues any more and will use less power, which may or may not matter to you.

I'd save your cash and get some SSD's instead. Personally I have 2x 4890's and I'm in roughly the same boat, so yes I'm holding off too.
 
I've also got two 2x4870's and have been considering an upgrade. The best reason I can see for doing it now is the 4870's still have a little value left in them. I figure if I can get $70-$80 each now it might be worth it rather then later as they are just going to lose more value.
 
I should have mentioned. When/if I upgrade I'll be moving the 4870's to my new i5 2500K build as I'm using it as a HTPC currently with onboard video. I wouldn't mind using the 4870's in it to play some games on my projection screen.

Although I have considered leaving the 4870's where they are and buying a used card or something for the i5 build I have.

Talk about it.
 
mesyn191 said:
You won't see much of a performance difference in most games and DX11 is hardly being used at all, though you won't have to worry about any Crossfire issues any more and will use less power, which may or may not matter to you.

I'd save your cash and get some SSD's instead. Personally I have 2x 4890's and I'm in roughly the same boat, so yes I'm holding off too.
Click to expand...

I have to be honest. I had an 80gb SSD Intel X25 series for booting and I really like using my main applications of of it but the space issue was driving me crazy so I ditched it. I currently have 400GB free on my 1.5TB and it's my boot drive, it's not as fast as SSD but does the job pretty well. My Windows directory is 23GB and once I installed a few applications and ran my 8GB Outlook file off the SSD I only had like 14GB free.

I have another two 1TB WD Black drives in my system too. I use a lot of storage my Steam folder is 600GB almost.
 
Personally in your case I'd get a 128GB SSD for apps and programs and keep my data on the mechanical disk which is still pretty decent at streaming instead of random access.

If you want to do a low power/size/noise HTPC build then by all means ditch the 4870's. If you don't care too much about those factors though then I'd keep it for now.

Good luck.
 
I upgraded from an HD 4870 CF setup to a single HD 6970 and the performance gains are great, not spectacular though. In scenarios where the GPU isn't challenged enough like Call of Duty Blackops, the FPS didn't increase by much, the game felt smoother and the fps was more consistent. In other games like Metro 2033 and STALKER COP, the performance gains were great, between 30% and 60% when exotic Anti Aliasing modes are used on my LG LCD 1920x1080.
 
Thanks, that is good to know. I obviously know two 4870's is still a good solution for gaming. I have played Metro 2033 and it can clunk along in a few areas so it is nice to see a 6970 might improve that.

What CPU are you running?
 
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