Upgrading undervolted HD 5850?

[friend'scatdied]

Here's the quick and dirty:

HD 5850 with stock, 0.975v (RBE)
Q9550 stock, 1.00v
8GB DDR2, 1.825v
X25-M G2 160GB
1TB 7200RPM DeskStar (can you undervolt these?)
A BluRay drive I never use
300W 80 Plus Power Supply (Shuttle PC60)

18 months. IBT, Prime 95 tested for 72+ hours and passes every time. FurMark without problems. Many hours of BFBC2 and Crysis (among other titles) without a hiccup.

I know a stock HD 5850 pulls around 150W under load with a vcore of around 1.08v. I have no idea what my undervolted GPU and CPU pull though.

Are the newer GPUs produced conservatively enough that I could get one and have the possibility of undervolting it sufficiently that it would consume around the power of my undervolted 5850? I'm interested in going straight to a HD 69xx series card if it's within the shadow of a possibility. Haven't been paying attention to the NVIDIA camp but I'm game.

I'm mostly interested in securing similar performance in BF3 as I have in BFBC2 right now.

(ITT: "I'm too cheap to upgrade my PSU" because it's $100 for a 500W that only fits this Shuttle, and I don't want to throw more money into LGA 775)

 

[IAMEVIL]

If you are thinking of going to 69xx to get more performance for the same watt then no it won't. Current generation cards are still 40nm and the 6950 does not actually improve much at all from the 5850 in terms of performance per watt. If you just want more performance without much power increase, remove your 5850 undervolt and just overclock it. At stock voltage 10-20% more performance is possible from overclocking.

 

[friend'scatdied]

Wouldn't I gain more by OC'ing the processor though? I can get up to 3.4GHz stable @ 1.10v (G45 mobo permanently fixed into the Shuttle won't go any higher). Resolution is 1080P.

 

[IAMEVIL]

You will need to test in game to see if cpu or gpu is bottlenecked. My guess is your Q9550 will definitely benefit from clocking to 3.4Ghz looking at how cpu intensive BFBC2 is.