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Mid-life GPU upgrade?

R

Ruahrc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 8, 2009
Messages
451
My AMD 6950 is starting to get a little long in the tooth (I notice I cannot play with maxed settings in some recent games, and do not get steady 60fps a lot) and I was thinking about getting a new GPU to tide me over till my next major upgrade.

Even though I know that AMD recently came out with the R9 series and nVidia is supposed to release the 800 series soon I don't think I need to get the latest and greatest card to tide me over? I plan on doing a system overhaul after the 14nm Broadwell chips are available and I will likely get a higher end GPU then along with new mobo, RAM, etc.

I was thinking of picking up an nvidia 770 card, based on passmark scores it looks like the 770 is about double what my 6950 is right now which would be a good step up and I would not need to worry about playing stuff on ultra. What do you think?

Unless there is another card you think might fit better- I thought maybe to pick up one of the midrange R9 series cards but I was also thinking to give nVidia a try this time around since I have not run an nVidia card since the 6600GT days (nothing against nVidia it was just always when I upgraded, the AMD stuff was the most recently updated so I went with those). I also heard the R9s run really hot and I have a SFF case and would like a cool and quiet GPU.

System specs below.
i5-2400 (I think this is quad core sandy bridge @ 3.1GHz)
8GB RAM
512GB Samsung 840Evo SSD
6950 2GB MSI Twin Frozr
Seasonic X series 650W PSU 80+Gold (should have no difficulty running nearly any GPU with my current setup, no?)
(I game in 1920x1080 single monitor, no immediate plans to go higher than that)

Games in my backlog or am looking to play:
Arma 3
Borderlands 2
Bioshock Infinite
AC3 (and AC4 which I don't have yet)
Witcher 2
Skyrim
Dishonored
GTA V (if it comes out for PC... otherwise I will play on 360)
 
You mean overhaul after Haswell Refresh chips are available?

Skylake is your next stop.

Are you not able to handle turning a few things down? $320+ to "tide you over" sounds like an expensive upgrade for only a modest upgrade that you will replace not too far down the road.

Don't get me wrong, the 770 will be an improvement, but its not like you'd get with a 290 or 780. Its your money though.

Additionally 20nm Maxwell is delayed, and we don't know exactly when it will hit. So unless you're waiting for Skylake its possible there might not be a GTX 880 yet.
 
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I thought that broad well k-series chips would come out for desktop in late 2014? Anyhow yeah I was thinking along the lines of probably year or more before I did a large overhaul, if you say broadwell will be skipped then I may not upgrade until Skylake. So it's not like I would be spending the money to only use the GPU for a short time before upgrading to a new GPU.
 
The upgrade to an EVGA GTX770 SC with ACX http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CZIQXBA would be a very significant upgrade over an HD 6950.

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I went from a Sapphire HD 6950 2GB to an ASUS R9 280X (which is comparable to a 770) and noticed over double the framerates.
 
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the 6950 and the 7870 are basically the same other than some optimizations and some slightly newer tech the 7k series brought so other than optimized games you'll need to go up to at least a 280x but then it comes down to the game. From what I've heard mantle is amazing in BF4. If BF4 is your only game the 290 is the only card to even think about. because of shortages I'd say Nvidia 770 or higher is a smarter choice right now for OTHER games.

Radeon 6950's sell fast at $125 and slowly but still sell at $150. Occasionally higher of course but you get raped by ebay fees enough to bring it down to the $125 range anyway.
 
mkrohn said:
the 6950 and the 7870 are basically the same other than some optimizations and some slightly newer tech the 7k series brought so other than optimized games you'll need to go up to at least a 280x but then it comes down to the game. From what I've heard mantle is amazing in BF4. If BF4 is your only game the 290 is the only card to even think about. because of shortages I'd say Nvidia 770 or higher is a smarter choice right now for OTHER games.

Radeon 6950's sell fast at $125 and slowly but still sell at $150. Occasionally higher of course but you get raped by ebay fees enough to bring it down to the $125 range anyway.
Click to expand...

Smoke another one. 7870 and 6950 are basically the same wtf. Why ? because they both have 2gb of ram. 7870 is completely different. 6950s could barely clock to 950mhz while 7870 can clock to 1200 in a lot of cases. Its 28nm instead of 40nm and its basically 50% faster than 6950. Count overclocking and its significantly faster than 50% since 6950 is hardly considered overclockable. 680 to 770 are basically the same thing with optimizations. 6950 to 7870 is a completely different ball game.

To OP 770 is good price to performance right now due to inflated AMD prices. Gotta love the miners.
 
I just went through a similar decision -

I went from 6970's in crossfire to a 780ti. the MSI version is on sale at newegg for $669 and it has fantastic reviews. I wish I had some good information on how much it changed my frame rate, but my card wont be here until tuesday :D
 
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