Need Enthusiast Upgrade Advice - 5870cf, or......

[Killahills]

Hi all, first post - new to Nexus: I need your expertise...

 

I consider myself to be an enthusiast and currently I have what I consider to be a pretty good custom build:

 

Cooler Master CM600

Phenom II 965 [Themaltake SpinQ]

8GB G.SKILL DDR3 1600

ATI 5870x2 in CF

2TB Seagate x2 (one for backup)

Creative X-Fi Titanium

850w Themaltake

 

Periphirals: 5.1 Logitech Surround, Tritton AX Pro 5.1 'phones, steelseries Merc, MadCatz RAT-7, 360 controllers, Air Cooling (6 120m)

 

What prompted this is seeing the new 6970 come out... wondering if it would be worth selling my dual 5870's and buying dual 6970's. Or, switching to NVIDIA and doing like a 570 SLI. Right now my machine owns everything. Metro 2033 / Crysis & Warhead / Stalker COP, etc. etc. Only game I struggle with is GTA IV, which sucks cause I love it - but understand it to be just a bad port.

 

So bottom line: recommendations would be appreciated - I'm not looking to squeeze an extra 10fps from Crysis. I want to make sure I'm future proofed (at least a year) and get your take on best video card configs and general setup. Also, is an i-7 really needed? Should I go six core? I want 3D capability so plan to buy a 120hz monitor and pair it with 3rd party software with ATI. But has anyone tried that?

 

Thanks for any comments, just wanting to make sure I have a system "up to par" (including accesorries) THANK YOU!

[urbex]

As far as gaming goes, you don't need an i7 and hexacores are overkill in general.

 

I don't know much about 6970s besides ati sanded down the plastic on the power connector to save space. A single 570 is better than a single 6970 but I'm unsure of what stacks better in sli/crossfire.

[mcole254]

Quite honestly it would be a waste of money to upgrade to either of those cards. Like you said your rig runs any game great, the small improvement you would get wouldn't be worth the extra money. Just wait for the next series to come out when the shrink the die again.

[Feltmarskal]

I'm impressed it has problems with GTA IV and not Crysis! :o

[Erik005]

Do not worry about GTA IV, that game needs a VERY strong processor.

 

It mainly uses the processor probably because it is a bad port.

[prandiningrat]

What prompted this is seeing the new 6970 come out... wondering if it would be worth selling my dual 5870's and buying dual 6970's. Or, switching to NVIDIA and doing like a 570 SLI.

If you not consider price, i dont know exactly 6970..but this replace your 5870's. if match, you can also try tri-fire.. I think 570 SLI is not worthy than 6970CF, and if you use 3-fire its should be better than 580SLI..

Personally, i prefer using single graphic, because driver is still big problem when using multi GPU.. if you wish to use single graphic, you should waiting for ATI 6990..

[Killahills]

Thanks everyone! Much appreciated, I will stay where I'm at for now - good to have that confirmed.

 

Bandit - agreed, but honestly: I have never seen a performance improvement like when I threw the 2nd 5870 in... Crysis (Very High / 24xAA 16xAF) became steady 40+fps and Metro 2033 (Very High, all DX11 options, Physx) runs at 80fps. Before I could run it on High with no options and it was under 30. Same type thing with Just Cause 2. Crossfire - at least with this card - has exceeded expectations.

[prandiningrat]

keep your 5870CF, 6970 i've heard in about $500. might be best you waiting for HD 6990, that's using multi/dual GPU. problem of 'micro stuterring' that often occurs in mutli/dual GPU, hopefully can be resolved on the HD 6990. here is leaked specification of HD6990

 

The Radeon HD 6990 has no less than 3840 Stream Processors (1920 per Cayman GPU), 4GB of GDDR5 memory and a bandwidth of 307.2 GB/s, up to 6.0 TFLOPS of single precision and 1.5 TFLOPS of double precision, plus a TDP of 300W. Rastering 64 pixels per clock.The upcoming uber-card likely takes up two PCI slots and includes two DVI and three mini DisplayPort outputs.

 

you can crossfire it too, and get Quad GPU..That's probably you need i7 if you wont get bottleneck..