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What should I upgrade?

L

LucasG

Gawd
Joined
Jul 2, 2004
Messages
677
I should be receiving a few bucks in the next few weeks and would like to go ahead and start upgrading with a good performance/price ratio and preparing for triple monitor. You can see my current setup on my signature.

I've been thinking whether to upgrade to two GTX 570 4GB to in the future do NVIDIA Surround with three monitors or upgrade the motherboard and move to Ivy Bridge and later upgrade video cards, or maybe just even go for two 680's 2GB and stick with single monitor gaming on 1920x1200.

What do you guys think I should go for right now? What would be the best upgrade best performance/longevity?
 
Your MoBo/Processor are still basically top-notch for gaming purposes. It would be throwing away money to upgrade that.

If you don't have an SSD yet you could think about getting one of those as a boot drive for a nice performance boost (although admittedly it won't help your framerates).

If you want to go tri-monitor I'd recommend 7950/70 since eyefinity is a more mature technology and they have the 384-bit bus for when you start stressing the card. Nvidia surround is adequate though, and even the 2GB cards don't max out the VRAM very often in 5760x1080 at this current time.

680 SLI is really, really overkill for a single 1920x1200 monitor, IMO. But if you stick single monitor, a single 670/680 is really the best choice right now.
 
Sn0_Man said:
If you don't have an SSD yet you could think about getting one of those as a boot drive for a nice performance boost (although admittedly it won't help your framerates).
Click to expand...

My primary hard drive is a Crucial M4 64GB SSD. So I think I'm good on that side for now.

Sn0_Man said:
If you want to go tri-monitor I'd recommend 7950/70 since eyefinity is a more mature technology and they have the 384-bit bus for when you start stressing the card. Nvidia surround is adequate though, and even the 2GB cards don't max out the VRAM very often in 5760x1080 at this current time.
Click to expand...

I'd personally rather stick with NVIDIA, just personal preference. I'd been suggesting if I want to be future proof for triple monitor I should go directly to two 570's with 4GB as another user in this forum with that setup reported BF3 using 3GB of VRAM on triple monitor.

Sn0_Man said:
680 SLI is really, really overkill for a single 1920x1200 monitor, IMO. But if you stick single monitor, a single 670/680 is really the best choice right now.
Click to expand...

You're right, if I were to stick with single monitor a single 680 should be fine. Still not sure what path to take, I'd love triple monitor gaming but also don't want to need to upgrade to Ivy Bridge as soon as I get the new cards and 3 monitors.
 
If your sig is up to date, I'd say an upgrade to IB would be silly. You wouldn't see any noticeable performance gain from that upgrade alone.

You'd get the most noticeable performance boost from a video card upgrade. Go with a single 670/680 for a single monitor, if you KNOW you're going to surround/eyefinity, go with a 7970 and add a 2nd when you get the other monitors.

The other thing you could do would be to get one of the larger SSDs when they go on sale. Your sig only shows a 64GB, you could jump to a 128/160/256 and be able to drop several games on that instead of a mechanical drive.
 
Get a Korean 27" LCD for $300.
2560x1440 resolution blows the pants off my Asus vw266H.
The colors on the 266h are absolute horrid. I have it hooked up for a guest LAN computer and even then I want to sell it and get another 27" Korean LCD.

FOR A guest comp! That's how bad the vw266h sucks compared to the 27" LCDs!
 
Larger SSD and a 670/7950 if you stay single screen, 680/7970 if you want to do surround or eyefinity.

My single 670 can max almost all of my games at a constant 60fps.

Going from a 2500k to IB is not an upgrade, its a side grade unless you need some specific features. No reason to buy a new motherboard and CPU when the only improvement is slightly lower clocks for the same performance and PCI-E 3.0 which you don't need.
 
J Macker said:
Get a Korean 27" LCD for $300.
2560x1440 resolution blows the pants off my Asus vw266H.
The colors on the 266h are absolute horrid. I have it hooked up for a guest LAN computer and even then I want to sell it and get another 27" Korean LCD.

FOR A guest comp! That's how bad the vw266h sucks compared to the 27" LCDs!
Click to expand...
Yes, the VW266H colors are horrible, I hate it, hence why I was considering moving to triple monitors once and for all and get rid of this thing.

6foot4geek said:
d w/ monitors in the near future.
Click to expand...
Not sure what you're talking about here.
 
All this VW266H hate.... but yeah the colors are terrible! I started using mine again recently and had forgotten how bad it was.
 
How about getting rid of my current two monitors and getting two new ones (Dell U2312HM) where I can be ready to get a third once I get two 670's? Also considering a 256GB SSD.
 
Last edited:
27" >>>>>> 3x 23"

Yeah, I know the 3x23" will have more resolution. But surround / eyefinity are only really good for Skyrim, FPS & racing. Okay that's a lot of games.

Do you have the patience to get them all working properly?
Are the bezels going to bug you? They are there, and you will get used to them but they are still annoying.
One 27" LCD and all you need is one 670, so you save another $400 from not having to buy another video card.

I played Skyrim on my eyefinity setup in portrait with 3150x1680 resolution. It was nice. But I don't play Skyrim anymore. Most indie games on steam either don't benefit from surround, are difficult to get working, or just don't support it.

I may change my mind once Borderlands 2 comes out and I miss playing borderlands on eyefinity.

but 2560x1440 is sooooo niiice!
 
I'm going to be selling both my monitors, grabbing a Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" and then sell both my video cards and get a 670/680. Then probably picking up another SSD and changing keyboard/headset.
 
LucasG said:
I'm going to be selling both my monitors, grabbing a Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" and then sell both my video cards and get a 670/680. Then probably picking up another SSD and changing keyboard/headset.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a plan. I love my U2412M.
 
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