Upgrading from an 8800GT to 6870,6850, or 460. CPU limited?

Urraca

Gawd
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Sep 13, 2002
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Well it's about time I ditch my 8800GT, it's served me well for a few years.

Right now an XFX 6870 is $190 on NewEgg. And incredible deal.

However, since I have an E8400 as my CPU, is it even worth going that high end? I was going to go with a GTX-460 until these AMD price drops. But now, that price is too good to ignore, even though I really prefer nVidia.

So is there ANY reason for me not to buy a 6870...I don't want to spend more than $200.

I guess the 6850 is also an option, since that pricing is good as well.
 
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it depends on what games you play id say. I was using e6400 @ 3.8ghz and i could barely stable 40-50fps on black ops or bfbc2 with my 5850 1gb and 4gb DDR 800mhz Ram.

More and more games are using triple core right now and quad core is pretty much the near future. I wouldnt invest unless you are using games that dont use more cores.
 
An HD6870 will definitely be a noticeable upgrade on an E8400. Per-core the E8400 is pretty fast, it'll just bottleneck you in multi-threaded titles like Bad Company 2.
 
I'm in the same boat!

Personally I'm thinking about a whole system over haul.

Subscribed.
 
I certainly wish I could do an overhaul. But I also have buy a new laptop.

Maybe the ASUS 6850 @$165 from NewEgg might be a good deal.
 
The only bottlenecking you might see is for games that really want a quad, for everything else the 6870 will more or less double up on your FPS at the same settings.
 
Well, I was in the very similar situation. Running my 8800GT for a few years I took the advantage of the XFX 6870 deal, and couldn't be happier. I've only had the board for 2 days now, but it's a day and night difference. STALKER with the Complete mod never looked so good before, not to mention the overall smoothness of the gameplay. Just in time for the upcoming games.

I'm playing at 1920x1200 with qx6800 and 8gb memory, so slightly different setup from yours, but I'm sure you'll benefit from the upgrade just as much as I have. I didn't want a complete system upgrade, so at $200 this is a very nice and worthy improvement.
 
You know, I was just thinking. It wouldn't even hurt just to try upgrading our cards to see where we end up right?
 
I actually do a lot of security work as well, so the 6970 would give me a better advantage in cracking of password hashes as well...think I'm about to dive into that.
 
^500 is a bare minimum for this card. Remember, you need 2 x 6 pin plugs, instead of one needed for the 8800gt
 
A 520W HX can handle an HD5970 with ease. An HD6870 will certainly be fine. The minimum PSU you should use with a 6870 is 430W, as that's the smallest PSU you find with two 6-pins. In terms of wattage, with an adapter you could run a 6870 off down to a 300W PSU. I probably wouldn't go any lower than that.
 
If you go crossfire, the 6850's will keep up with the 6970's and 580GTX's pretty fairly. They scale pretty good in crossfire compared to older cards. I was sitting to older 4850's for a while and when I got these, "WOW" is all I can say. One by themselves is a pretty good bump from where you are at too. That 6870 you got picked is also a good card. a good solid 500w-600w psu will push it along fine.
 
If you go crossfire, the 6850's will keep up with the 6970's and 580GTX's pretty fairly. They scale pretty good in crossfire compared to older cards. I was sitting to older 4850's for a while and when I got these, "WOW" is all I can say. One by themselves is a pretty good bump from where you are at too. That 6870 you got picked is also a good card. a good solid 500w-600w psu will push it along fine.

That might be what canned benchmarks say, but where real-world gameplay is concerned, crossfired 6850s will in no way match a 2gb 6950! I know that from personal experience. They microstudder quite badly.
 
it depends on what games you play id say. I was using e6400 @ 3.8ghz and i could barely stable 40-50fps on black ops or bfbc2 with my 5850 1gb and 4gb DDR 800mhz Ram.

More and more games are using triple core right now and quad core is pretty much the near future. I wouldnt invest unless you are using games that dont use more cores.

Quad core increases are here today, not in the future.....
 
That might be what canned benchmarks say, but where real-world gameplay is concerned, crossfired 6850s will in no way match a 2gb 6950! I know that from personal experience. They microstudder quite badly.

I've seen an HD6850CF setup in action, and that simply isn't true.
 
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