Re: Upgrade advice needed!
I'd either go for HD 7850 (slightly cheaper) or GTX 660 (a bit more expensive). See AnandTech's GPU 2012 bench for a quick comparison of what sort of performance improvement you can expect. Both will leave you with spare change from £200.
You can postpone the major upgrade that is changing CPU/chipset/RAM for a while (a year or so) longer, I think.
Re: Upgrade advice needed!
I would go for this card no question:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-g...098mhz-cores-9
Has recently dropped in price and is now somewhat of a bargain.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/660?vs=512
Oooh, just noticed the id for the GTX660 is 660! Neat!
Re: Upgrade advice needed!
I think the question is what are you using your graphics card for is it for gaming or anything that uses extreme graphics, I use my PC for Eve Online and then I do a bit of photography so I upgraded to a 2GB EVGA Geeforce GTX 650 Ti, but that is adequate for what I want but if you are going to be playing muscle games then you would need a Geforce GTX 660 and upwards, a bit of a minefield out there and it takes careful research.
All the best on your choice.
Re: Upgrade advice needed!
The 650 Ti is too small a step up justify the expense imo.
the 7850 is borderline.
The 660 and 7870 are significant improvements, the 660 being slightly cheaper and slightly more power efficient.
Re: Upgrade advice needed!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jimbobgod1969
My current gaming PC is a few years old now, with the following spec:
E8400 Core2Duo processor @ 3.6Ghz
4Gb DDR2 800 RAM
Sapphire 1Gb AMD HD 5850
80GB SSD
1TB HDD
I've got about £200 for an upgrade, and play mostly FPS games at 1080p res. My questions are:
1) Which graphics card should I upgrade to next, so as to gain an appreciable improvement in performance?
2) At what point will my processor become the 'bottleneck' for performance? So,
3) When should I upgrade the processor, & to which one (again, to achieve a noticeable performance improvement?). Bear in mind that this would involve a motherboard, CPU & RAM upgrade. My preference is generally for Intel CPUs.
Many thanks for your advice!
What games do you play and what CPU do you have?? Have you tried overclocking your HD5850 1GB?? You can hit HD5870 1GB level speeds with many HD5850 1GB cards.
If I were you I would hold off for the time-being. If you are playing games based on older engines,the CPU will be fine. OTH,anything based on newer engines,the CPU will start to be a bottleneck. I had a Q6600 at around 3GHZ with an overclocked HD5850 1GB. In some games like Crysis2 I was seeing 99% CPU utilisation on all 4 cores. I upgraded primarily for reliability reasons last year to a Core i3 2100,and in some games I saw no measurable difference,but in some games like Crysis2 the framerates were much more consistent.
Re: Upgrade advice needed!
Many thanks for all your replies, definitely some food for thought. I tend to play mostly FPS, at the moment games like Battlefield 3 & Borderlands 2, both of which tend to favour nVidia architectures, I believe. The Gigabyte GTX 660 suggested by Willzzz looks like a good offer, but as ever where upgrades are concerned, holding off for a bit might result in something more capable or cheaper being just around the corner :)
Re: Upgrade advice needed!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jimbobgod1969
Many thanks for all your replies, definitely some food for thought. I tend to play mostly FPS, at the moment games like Battlefield 2 & Borderlands 2, both of which tend to favour nVidia architectures, I believe. The Gigabyte GTX 660 suggested by Willzzz looks like a good offer, but as ever where upgrades are concerned, holding off for a bit might result in something more capable or cheaper being just around the corner :)
Both BFBC2 and BL2,see gains going to a quad core or a dual core with HT. Not to say that they will not run a dual core,but I would probably look at upgrading the CPU and GPU TBH.
Re: Upgrade advice needed!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jimbobgod1969
Many thanks for all your replies, definitely some food for thought. I tend to play mostly FPS, at the moment games like Battlefield 3 & Borderlands 2, both of which tend to favour nVidia architectures, I believe. The Gigabyte GTX 660 suggested by Willzzz looks like a good offer, but as ever where upgrades are concerned, holding off for a bit might result in something more capable or cheaper being just around the corner :)
Given how recently the GTX 660 has been released, we won't see anything new from Nvidia for around a year.
We might see the AMD 8800 series around March/April next year (speculation!), but as you say the games you play are Nvidia favoured.
There is ALWAYS going to be something better just round the corner, you have to bite the bullet some time!
I don't see the GTX660 getting any cheaper than £170 any time soon.
