Upgrade path from a HD4870

[Niode]

I currently have a HD4870, whilst it's proven a trusty workhorse playing almost everything I throw at it at more than satisfactory quality on my 1920x1200 resolution monitor it's starting to feel the strain being over 2 years old now. I've taken the thing to bits to give it a good clean and replaced the thermal paste but heat is still an issue on the card and I can definitely see it struggling on newer games like The Witcher 2 and Call of Pripyat (when it was still working) the game that is, the card still functions fine. Call of Pripyat (and all the other xray3 engine games in the series) crash on start up and nobody has any clue why.

So I'm not sure where to go. I have a crossfire motherboard and have plenty of space for 2 cards. Should I go crossfire 6870s (possibly most bang for buck)? Jump straight to the 6950 and bios mod to unlock the extra stream units (medium price - medium performance)? Or wait for the 6990 to drop in price (the most expensive option but guaranteed most performance)?

From what I can gather the dual 6870s will more than triple my current performance in most of the games that I play. The 6850 will just double my current performance but can triple in some games. The 6990 will blow my current GPU away but with that comes a MASSIVE price tag of about £500 depending on where I look. Dual 6870s will set me back £260-280 brand new or about £200-250 second hand. The 6950 is pretty much £200-220 everywhere I look.

Choices... I'm kinda leaning towards dual 6870s since they will outperform the single 6950 in most cases. However that brings stability and driver issues with crossfireX support. Has anybody got any experience with crossfire? I've never used dual GPU setups, I've always stuck with single setups for stability. However the power - performance ratio of dual 6870s is hard to ignore.

Are there are real reasons to choose the 6950s over the dual 6870 other than crossfire issues? AFAIK they're both DX11 cards and the only real difference is number of shaders/stream units (I'm looking at 2GB ram at least due to my high resolution, the 6870s will combine to give me 2GB the single 6950 comes with 2GB as standard - also, don't worry about RAM limitations, I'm running Windows 7 x64).

P.S. why is it so fucking hard to find out information about these kinds of hybrid setups almost all the reviews pit single GPU against single GPU.

[irixith]

What's most important to you? Price? Raw performance?

If you're looking for a budget friendly dual GPU setup, have a look at getting 2 5770s. They're relatively inexpensive (i.e. they can be had for less than $100 each here), and the combined power is enough to smoke any game on the market now, and likely for a long time to come. Most 5770 models only need one molex connector, and have a small enough footprint that they can actually be comfortably added to most boards. A lot of the 5xxx and 6xxx cards have massive heatsinks that eat your second slot, and unless you have a mobo with the PCI-E x16 lanes properly spaced apart, Crossfire is a no go. In terms of price, performance, the hit on your power supply .. it's probably one of the best solutions on the market.

There's no particular reason to buy anything in the mid 6xxx range, unless your wallet is fat and you really don't care about throwing away extra money for no gain. (Unless of course you're interested in the 6990 .. in which case, please buy me one too, kthx.)

[gtmtnbiker]

What's most important to you? Price? Raw performance?

If you're looking for a budget friendly dual GPU setup, have a look at getting 2 5770s. They're relatively inexpensive (i.e. they can be had for less than $100 each here), and the combined power is enough to smoke any game on the market now, and likely for a long time to come.

So what do you do to keep on top of all the various PC components? I'm very savvy techie but I must admit that I would be overwhelmed if I had to choose a graphic card. Maybe I need to read some blog/forum to stay on top of the choices when it comes time to build my own PC.

One project that I would like to do is to build a HTPC that uses low power but can still do 1080p, DVR, etc. So I need to get more knowledgeable on PC components.

[Niode]

What's most important to you? Price? Raw performance?

If you're looking for a budget friendly dual GPU setup, have a look at getting 2 5770s. They're relatively inexpensive (i.e. they can be had for less than $100 each here), and the combined power is enough to smoke any game on the market now, and likely for a long time to come. Most 5770 models only need one molex connector, and have a small enough footprint that they can actually be comfortably added to most boards. A lot of the 5xxx and 6xxx cards have massive heatsinks that eat your second slot, and unless you have a mobo with the PCI-E x16 lanes properly spaced apart, Crossfire is a no go. In terms of price, performance, the hit on your power supply .. it's probably one of the best solutions on the market.

There's no particular reason to buy anything in the mid 6xxx range, unless your wallet is fat and you really don't care about throwing away extra money for no gain. (Unless of course you're interested in the 6990 .. in which case, please buy me one too, kthx.)

I have a motherboard with the PCIEx16 slots spaced apart (I bought it with this flexibility in mind. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered with a crossfire motherboard). Considering the 5770 isn't that much more powerful than my existing HD4870 it seems silly to upgrade to that when I could just as easily get another HD4870 and have comparable performance at a MUCH lower price point (if I went 2x 5770 I would have to replace my HD4870 therefore costing more money than a single extra HD4870). I'm simply not interested in making such a meagre upgrade. I want my upgrade to last at least 2 years.

I'm most concerned with bang for buck. I don't want to pay the minimum possible to have something that's going to be outdated in 6 months (or worse). My budget is £200-300. Of course I don't want to splurge money for no reason.

@gtmtnbiker: Most ION class PCs are more than capable of what you wish. Especially if you don't bloat the crap out of them with windows and stick to Linux. A lot of them come in very small form factors IE mini-ITX as well which is a bonus when you're sticking it under your TV.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

This thread is giving me some insight as well as I'm currently saving up to build myself a new gaming PC luckily, I don't need much power pushing a 1680x1050 monitor.

I finally had to put away my Dell XPS 410 a couple months ago. That thing lasted me 5 years with only 2 graphic card upgrades. Everything else was stock, 550w PSU, 250gb, 4gb DDR2, and it went through a Radeon x1600, GeForce 8600, and a GeForce 9600. Surprisingly the 9600 ended up being quite a large upgrade at resolutions over 1280x800.

Would anybody recommend the Radeon 6770? Sorry about the highjack though, just seemed like a good place to ask.

[isiolia]

Would anybody recommend the Radeon 6770? Sorry about the highjack though, just seemed like a good place to ask.

Depends on your specific wants/needs. As a gaming card, it's not bad, but I think digging a little deeper to get a better card would be warranted for current/future games.

If you're not aware, the 6750/6770s are basically just rebadges of the 5750/5770, which in turn were not much of a performance increase over the 4850/4870 (which, at release, were price-competitive to them).
AMD did update the BIOS/driver for 3D Blu-ray...but other than that it's just a 5770, which (taking rebates into account) is likely cheaper - maybe only by $20 or so, but at the ~$100 price point that's a fair bit.

(I'm looking at 2GB ram at least due to my high resolution, the 6870s will combine to give me 2GB the single 6950 comes with 2GB as standard - also, don't worry about RAM limitations, I'm running Windows 7 x64)

Actually, it doesn't work that way. Crossfired 6870s still effectively have 1GB of video memory because each card needs to hold its own copy of the data.

While I'm not normally a fan of multi-GPU solutions as an initial setup - compatibility/variable scaling as mentioned, plus basically closing off that upgrade route for the future - dual 6870s are pretty appealing around now. Particularly with some of the rebates going around. I'd probably go with that.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Would anybody recommend the Radeon 6770? Sorry about the highjack though, just seemed like a good place to ask.

Depends on your specific wants/needs. As a gaming card, it's not bad, but I think digging a little deeper to get a better card would be warranted for current/future games.

Just looking for a mid-range card in a mid-range pricerange that can run games on medium or higher detail at 1680x1050. I'd be mainly investing in this for The Witcher 2. As that requires at least an 8800, which unfortunately is still better than what my MBP offers.

[isiolia]

For that, I'd have a hard time recommending the 6770 - most of them are in the $120-130 range on Newegg. There are 5770s to be had at $95-100 after rebate...or you can find 6850s for about $150 after rebate and 6870s for $170, again after rebate.
Same performance for less, or a decent leap in performance for not much more...nothing terribly wrong with the card itself, but it's just not priced right at the moment.

[Niode]

Remember that both the 6850 and 6950 cards can be BIOS modded and overclocked to stock 6870 and 6970 speeds respectively. If you can find a 6x50 card that is considerably cheaper than the 6x70 equivalent it might be worth the gamble.

They both have the same silicon inside them, they are just binned (as in the batches they are placed into before they go to manufacturers) and limited separately depending on yield. This kind of quality control has been used in the industry for years to decrease costs and increase overall yields.

A similar situation occurred a few years back with the 6800LEs and the 6800GTs you could get the 256-bit bus 6800LEs and mod the bios to re-enable the extra pixel and vertex units so you could get 6800GT (a then; £250 part) performance out of a 6800LE (a then; £125-150 part). It wouldn't work on every card but it worked on a surprisingly high number.