Hardware Discussions

[One Fan To Another]

     I'm seriously getting tired of my cross-fire setup and am wonder which single-unit GPU would be necessary to actually be worth upgrading to.  My current setup is two XFX Radeon 5850 cards.  They're hot, the use a lot of wattage, there's two fans worth of noise instead of just one, I always have to deal with waiting for profiles to fix issues, since day one I've had the dreaded Windows Aero frame drop problem, etc.

     If I wanted a noticeable upgrade in a single card what should I be looking for and for approximately how much?

[Organized_Chaos]

what resolution do you play at? Also depends a lot on how much you want to spend.

you probably at least need a GTX 570 on the nvidia side. not really familiar with the AMD offerings right now.  personally if I were looking for a single card solution at the moment I would be looking at the 2.5GB GTX 570's

[One Fan To Another]

     Hmm, after looking around it seems my best option would be to just wait it out until the 680s come down to the $400 range.

[Natedog51]

The HD7850's are about the same performance as a GTX 570 (some games they are the same, some have up to a 10% difference, very minimal) but use the same amount of power as your 5850's (so you can crossfire in the future) for about $250 a card. The GTX 680's won't drop for awhile but your HD5850s should be fine for atleast a year if not longer too.

[Synchronous Failure]

I also had dual 5850s. I switched to a 580 and never looked back. Seriously, f*ck multi-GPU setups. I'll never touch one again. Most of the games that mattered didn't really use the second card, some games actually performed worse, a lot of older titles will flatout refuse to work, tons of extra heat and noise, large power requirements, and copious amounts of retarded stuttering. I tried both Crossfire and SLI and whilst SLI was far superior they both sucked ass.

Not to sound like Jethro but I purposefully steered clear of ATI. Their drivers are abysmal. Support for a lot of titles will take weeks or months to come around and a significant amount of games in my library perform poorly or become a glitchy mess because ATI lacks some feature that NVIDIA has. With NVIDIA I got rocksolid drivers, support for pretty much every new game coming out, faster performance, less bugs, better overclocking, and a bunch of added goodies like PhysX. For the longest time I'd just take turns between every upgrade cycle but recently ATI has really let me down. I'm not touching another one of their cards unless there's a significant price-performance difference and some quality assurance.

And for the record, my 5850s were starting to struggle to play a lot of recent releases like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim on high settings.

[Natedog51]

I've never had a problem with my crossfire setups (nor my SLI setups) and except for a few HTPC issues, I've never had problems with either cards' drivers. Synch I think you are just jinxed.

Which reminds me, don't come near my PC

[Natedog51]

Also, unless you are gaming over 1920x1200 the 5850 1GB crossfired setup should work really well for some time to come. If you are above that resolution then your problem will probably stem from not enough VRAM, but you can always turn down the settings a bit to compensate. 

If you go Nvidia take a long hard look at the GTX660 and GTX660Ti cards. I can't remember who said it here but I agree with them that those will probably be the sweet spot for the GTX6xx cards. Someone said expect mid to low $200's for pricing on those.

[Synchronous Failure]

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Natedog51 wrote:

Also, unless you are gaming over 1920x1200 the 5850 1GB crossfired setup should work really well for some time to come. If you are above that resolution then your problem will probably stem from not enough VRAM, but you can always turn down the settings a bit to compensate. 

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Yeah, most of the issues do stem from the lack of vRAM and 1920x1200 was the resolution I was using. Although I gave the PC to my little brother and at 1920x1080 he's doing a little better. I made sure to pick up a 3GB GTX 580 and boy am I glad I did. BF3 at Ultra skirts the stock 1.5GB and with all of my mods loaded up Skyrim exceeds that.

All of my multi-GPU problems spanned from when I had two X1900 XTXs, two 8800 GTXs, and two 5850s. I've just had no luck with it at all.

[One Fan To Another]

     Well, my setup runs games like BF3, Skyrim, etc just fine.  My real issues are the ones I mentioned above.  On top of the added noise, wattage consumption, desktop frame lag issue, etc, it seems like every time I buy a game at or near release I have to wait a while for either a driver or a profile to be released to fix problems.

     When Crysis II came out I had to wait for a profile to fix the light flicker.  With Skyrim I had to wait for the next driver so that the water wasn't flashing and disappearing.  With EVERY game when a new profile comes out it says that it has "improved cross-fire performance" essentially informing me that this whole time my shit wasn't running at full speed due to driver limitations.

     Also, having to click "windows-button/tab" every twenty minutes (when not in a program) to relieve the unfixable aero-frame-lag issue is a pain in the ass.

[Natedog51]

If that's the case OFTA I would just wait till the GTX660s hit the store shelves but it might be October or later till that happens. Sounds like they are having die issues with the GTX680's so who knows when the rest will be released.

[Natedog51]

I was surfing Anantech and came up with this. Some are getting performance close to the HD7970. That's pretty impressive for $250 shipped.

[Organized_Chaos]

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Synchronous Failure wrote:

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Natedog51 wrote:

Also, unless you are gaming over 1920x1200 the 5850 1GB crossfired setup should work really well for some time to come. If you are above that resolution then your problem will probably stem from not enough VRAM, but you can always turn down the settings a bit to compensate. 

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Yeah, most of the issues do stem from the lack of vRAM and 1920x1200 was the resolution I was using. Although I gave the PC to my little brother and at 1920x1080 he's doing a little better. I made sure to pick up a 3GB GTX 580 and boy am I glad I did. BF3 at Ultra skirts the stock 1.5GB and with all of my mods loaded up Skyrim exceeds that.

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BF3 has convinced me to look for cards with upwards of a 1GB of vid memory from now on, even at 1920x1080, just to be safe. Wish I'd paid the 40 extra bucks for the 2GB 560ti. Though I can run ultra relatively fine even with the 1GB version if I turn off the performance hogs (msaa, hbao, motion blur), it still stutters from time to time when a lot of stuff is happening on screen.

[ronin410]

I have a single XFX 5850 & I love it. I've had great luck with XFX products. Let us know what you come up with.

[kyecoo]

I have a 460SE that is serving me very, very well. My only reason for upgrading this year is the energy efficiency of the newer cards, and also the 460 SE is damn hot and is super loud.

If it can cooler and was less loud, I would probably keep it for another year or two. Its great that upgrading is cheaper and less often, but it shows the state of dev/publishers not pushing hardware anymore.

Kye.

[mclaren_man]

I'm thinking wait for the GTX 670Ti. Based on what I've read it's going to be quite the performer for the price. Should cost around the same as the HD7870 ($350), but kill it performance wise.

And on that note, I'm considering waiting for it or just splurging on the GTX 680. Would be my very first Nvidia card ever. That's how impressed I am with them right now. Seems like Nvidia and Ati have reversed roles when it comes to efficiency and value for money. The card is smaller too. Color me smitten.