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HD4850 x2 VS HD6950

S

Silent Ricochet

n00b
Joined
Feb 15, 2008
Messages
60
I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what I want to upgrade on my PC as of yet. After overclocking my PC further today, I've decided against upgrading my CPU and am now looking further into grabbing a video card.

Right now the current rig I the same one I have in my sig:

  • Two HD4850 512M Crossfired
  • Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P
  • AMD Phenom II x3 720 @3.4GHz 4th Core Unlocked

The Current setup I have does great in most games, but the Crossfire experience so far has been a mixed bag. Scaling isn't always positive, Company of Heroes for example hardly performs better, Shift 2 has it's fair share of graphical glitches, And BF3 for some odd reason chugged even though RadeonPro indicated that I was running in the range of 50-60 FPS. On the other hand Crysis 2 ran on High quite impressively, Source games are a joke, and even Bad Company 2 runs at or over 60FPS in most situations.

The problem is that I don't like sitting around waiting for the AMD Catalyst team to create a new CAP (Catalyst Application Profile) for us Crossfire users each week, just to find out it's going to take another week for the right CAP to come out, and in the end it usually causes other problems that need to be solved by yet another CAP. By that time a whole new Catalyst Driver is out, and the cycle repeats.

With everything stated above in mind, I'm considering actually upgrading to an HD6950. This one to be exact. It comes at a hefty price of $260, and after both my HD4850's maybe fetching $60-$70 on ebay; that makes this a decent amount of cash to drop on a video card.

According to Tom's Hardware Graphics Charts from 2010 Two HD4850s Crossfired are on par with the Nvidia GTX 460. Moving ontoTom's Hardware Graphics Charts from 2011 the HD6950 scores an average of 30FPS more than the GTX460. Benchmarks are benchmarks though, and I'm not really sure what to think at this point.

Any suggestions? Observations? Insight? Please help me out.

Thanks in Advance,
Silent Ricochet
 
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Single card solution hands down & had MSI come out with that version versus the reference XFX I had the option of at the time I would have that very same card. Pull the trigger, sell the 4850's to get some cost back & enjoy. MSI makes some top notch products :cool:
 
the seller or the card? i'd try to go with the 2gb version of the 6950 if you can. i think it's worth the extra $40 or so, and you may get lucky and be able to unlock to 6970.
 
stainremover said:
the seller or the card? i'd try to go with the 2gb version of the 6950 if you can. i think it's worth the extra $40 or so, and you may get lucky and be able to unlock to 6970.
Click to expand...

The card, I've looked at the seller's profile already lol. From reviews on newegg, it seems like a lot of people got this card DOA. But I couldn't find benchmarks or much else. 2GB of VRAM is out of the question at this point. I'm not running a huge resolution and for a college kid, $40 is 60 beers :D
 
samuelmorris said:
Even in a best case scenario you'll see a 25% gain going from two 4850s to a single HD6950, and if you're having problems, all the more reason to go for it.

Also, 2GB really isn't out of the question:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102945
If you go HIS, you can actually get it cheaper than the MSI 1GB card.
Click to expand...

True true but the reviews are what is concerning me about that card. I usually like HIS because of their heatsinks, but it seems on this one that they just slapped a crappy plastic one on.

25% increase in performance in the BEST case scenario? At 50FPS that's a jump to 62. Respectable, but if that's the max i'd be able to squeeze out of it, for $260, it's starting to seem a little much..
 
No, 25% in the best case scenario for your 4850s. With anything less than excellent scaling on your 4850s, the advantage grows higher than 25%.
 
I'm normally pretty happy with Gigabyte's cards that use coolers like that. Should be fine.
 
I upgraded from two 4870 1gb cards to a single msi 6970 lighting and I'm very pleased with the improvements. I'm sure you'll see similar results moving from 4850's to a 6950. But I would suggest a 2gb version. I've seen memory usage up to 1480mb already on my card with 1920x1200. I'm sure it would be more if the resolution was higher.

I REALLY like this 6950. It is overclocked pretty high out of the box and often matches stock 6970 performance.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127575
 
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