Upgrading from 4870 Crossfire

J

Joni Nitro

Gawd
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Mar 20, 2005
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I am rebuilding my current rig because I dont really need to upgrade everything right now. I have a watercooled system with 2 4870s in crossfire. Funny thing is I never really game that much on my PC, but i thought is was cool. Now, I would like to get a newer card that uses less power. I mostly use my PC for ripping blurays, handbrake, light video editing, and photoshop. I still would like to be able to run current games but my monitor is only 1920x1200 and might eventually pic up a second monitor. I dont want it to be too much for my current hardware: Q9550/Asus Rampage/8gb ram/120gb ssd/300gb VR/700w Seasonic.

I would like a quiet card or the option to run a full coverage block or unisink on it. I am thinking about something like a 6850 even though I like having 2gb of vga ram. Is it even worth it or should I just put my 4870s back in?
 
If you want a cool and quiet card then buy a 28nm card with a custom cooler installed.My sapphire 7870 is silent and cool,it stays at 50-55 celcius most of the time and its silent.
 
Ok, what I meant by upgrade wasnt in terms of gfx power more along the lines of a card that can still do what I need but uses less energy doing it. Sorry, that wasn't clear.
 
A 6950 is a decent match for a lightly overclocked q9550. It has enough ram and enough graphics power to easily handle any of your games at the same level or better than your 4870's, plenty of water cooling options but will run pretty cool and reasonably quiet on stock air. Plus your 700watt seasonic will be plenty of power for it and then some.
 
The same and less energy, I'd say the 7850.
Noise: I've read a lot of bad things about the gigabyte 7850 and a lot of good things about the sapphire 7850.
Size: sapphire 7850 is the smallest, asus 7850 uses the biggest cooler which goes "far" over the pcb.

Note that the 7850 only uses ONE 6-pin adapter (excluding the XFX models) in stead of the 4 you are using now for crossfire.
 
+1 to the 7850 idea. I have the Asus 7850 and yeah, the cooler is longer than the pcb. It is however a very quiet and cool cooler. Also, what are your expectations for current games? I mean, a 7850 at your resolution is not going to do battlefield 3 at ultra settings. Other than in battlefield 3 it will be a solid performer though.
 
Thanks for the inputs. Like I said, I am a casual gamer on PC and could always crossfire a 7850 later when I built a better pc. I am only at 1920x1200 so nothing crazy. I used to be really into having high performance rigs and then never really using them. I just liked overclocking and running benchmarks, but now I just want to have a nice rig that does what I need.
 
I'd also go with the 7850. It will be a good compromise between price/performance and like you said you can always go crossfire later on.
 
If you're not gaming, no need to even go to a 78xx series. You could stick with a 7770 or even a 6770 to save on power. Selling the 4870s could easily finance those.
 
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