Worth upgrading my GPU?

M

MyThLoSt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 4, 2007
Messages
191
This is my current system, and im looking at building a new one next year. Would it be worth my time buying like a used 7850 for now since i see them for like $60 in the for sale section or would i be majorly cpu bound, and just hold off till i build a new system. Used for gaming and everything else.

Power Supply: 750 watt Nspire
GPU: ATI® Radeon™ HD 4870 512MB
Motherboard: Asus M4A78 Plus AMD CrossFireX Chipset
Processor: AMD® Phenom™ II 965 BLACK EDITION (3.4GHz x 4)
Processor Cooling: Corsair H50
Memory: 8GB Kingston PC2-6400 DDR2-800 (4x2GB)!
Hard Drive One: Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache --
 
What games/resolutions are you playing? How important is maintaining 60 fps to you?
 
A 7850 for $60 wouldnt be a bad idea at all and would give you a nice performance bump. You wont be CPU bound as the Phenom II's are still capable gaming chips especially if you put a mild overclock on it like around 3.6 or better. It would definitely hold you over til you were able to build a new rig. So long as youre not looking to max out Crysis 3 at 2560x1440, a 7850 and mild overclock on your 965 would be a good way to go.
 
Cmustang87 said:
What games/resolutions are you playing? How important is maintaining 60 fps to you?
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Dell 24in 1920x1200, not really important, just want something that will work for a while longer till i build my new one.

Ok thanks MacLeod, exactly what i was thinking.
 
I would think that you would be good with that CPU for a while, the cheapest way to get a little more performance might be to grab one of the Pentium 20th anniversary g3258's (microcenter has the chip and board for $99) and overclock the snot out of it. Of course you would have to buy some ddr3 so added cost there. But in reality that will only get you a little bit better on single threaded application stuff, so anything that can use more than two cores would still go in favor of your Phenom. Have you attempted to overclock your current chip?

That 7850 is a pretty healthy increase over your 4870, maybe 100% increase in gpu power and not a bad deal at all in the $60 range.
 
MyThLoSt said:
hold off till i build a new system. Used for gaming and everything else.
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This is the main focus. When will this "new" system be built, or is it just something that doesn't have a concrete time frame?

For $60 a 7850 is hard to pass up regardless. If a new system is imminent i.e. 1 < year, then I always say bottlenecks from a CPU are irrelevant. Grab the best GPU you can and when the upgrade happens watch as your already badass card gets even better without a bottleneck. If you're building 1 > year then I say wait. It's a good deal now but another new generation will already be out and for a little more you'll get much more performance most likely.
 
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