XFX 5850 - Tight Squeeze?

[mkell]

Hey guys,

I'm wanting to buy this XfX 5850 http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1GB-X...-DL-DVI-I-HDMIbut Im not too sure if it will fit in my coolermaster elite 330?

anyone fitted a 5850 into one of these cases?

I am running a c2d e6750 at stock speeds 2.66 and have 4 gig of ddr2 1333 ram. I will be using a 19 inch monitor for now but I will be looking to upgrade to a decent size monitor soon. Will the rest of my hardware cause any noticeable bottleneck. I will be upgrading to a i5 system at the same time as getting my new monitor so I will just be playing at 1440x900 at the moment

Cheers in advance

[Pob255]

That's a standard cooler/pcb so it's 9.5" or 24 cm long.
A standard ATX motherboard is 24cm long/wide, so probably as wide as your motherboard is.
Shouldn't be an issue for the cm330, only issue might be the position of a hard drive, so you may need to lower or raise a hard drive.

[mkell]

Thanks for the reply Pob. I'm going to order it now

[KidChameleon]

I am running a c2d e6750 at stock speeds 2.66 and have 4 gig of ddr2 1333 ram. I will be using a 19 inch monitor for now but I will be looking to upgrade to a decent size monitor soon. Will the rest of my hardware cause any noticeable bottleneck. I will be upgrading to a i5 system at the same time as getting my new monitor so I will just be playing at 1440x900 at the moment

Cheers in advance

I would say for now, yes. I had a Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocked to 3.2GHz when I bought a 4770. It was all fine and a big improvement over my old x1950 pro, but when I upgraded to an i5 system with the same 4770, I noticed at least 10fps more in most games over the E6300. That can be the difference between playably juddering and silky smooth.

However, if you're planning on buying an i5 system in the not too distant future, I would say there's no problem getting a 5850 now. It helps spread the cost out and you will quite likely see an improvement over whatever graphics you have now.

[Pob255]

Well he shopuld be able to overclock the e6750 to 3ghz easily

As to the sudden speed increase, that could be down the a fresh OS install or better memory performance (from both ddr3 + onchip controller) or the more direct pci-e access from the onchip pci-e controller.

What you'd need to do is monitor cpu usage while playing games to see if it's sturggling, however I doubt it, I rarely go over 60% load on my e6600 @ 3.2ghz. and inthoery the other hardware shouldn't be bottle necking it, 2x 4850 in crossfire would be a different matter.

What I'm getting at here is that in theory the cpu it's self shouldn't be an issue yet, and changeing to an i5 setup is changeing far more than just the cpu.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

When I went from an overclocked E4500 at around 2.95GHZ to a Q6600 at around 2.92GHZ it did improve frame-rates. However while this could be due to the extra cores it was probably more down to the doubling of L2 cache per core and the increase in speed of the FSB which does help with games. Hence overclocking the E6750 to around 3GHZ or more would probably help with framerates IMHO.

If you compare the Core i5 750 and a E6850 it seems only in a game like FarCry 2 which makes use of multiple cores does the Core i5 have a major advantage in games:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=59&p2=109