Graphics Card upgrade

OmegaRed

Hi Guys,

I've had a SAPPHIRE Radeon Toxic HD 5850 for about a year now: http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/sapphire_hd5850_toxic/

Since buying this I haven't really kept up to date with whats late and great in graphics cards. Any recommendations?

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K
MB: MSI P67A-GD55 (B3)P67
RAM: 4GB-Kit Corsair DDR3 PC1600

deconduo

Well depending on if your power supply can support it, best thing might be to get a 2nd one and crossfire them:

http://www.pixmania.ie/ie/uk/9583388/art/sapphire-technology/radeon-hd-5850-xtreme-1-g.html

If you don't want to do that, then you'd have to go for at least a 6970 or a 570 to see a noticeable difference.

Komplett-Tech: Ryan

To be honest, that is still a good card. Are you upgrading because you are noticing a FPS drop in new games, or is the money just burning a hole in your pocket If you have a crossfire board, you could just add in another. Or you could upgrade to something like a 6870.

*Edit*

Hmm. I see Deco beat me to it!

OmegaRed

Well I tried overclocking the card with MSI afterburner and nothing seemed to happen (no extra performance or noticeable extra strain on the card).

Like Ryan said, i've seen a small drop in FPS with things like crysis 2/portal and to be honest, for the money i paid at the time, i though i might see a higher performance with games like crysis/farcary 2.

I was thinking of Xfire but I play a lot of City of Heroes MMO these days which is not Xfire supported (yet). Maybe I should revisit the OCing issue and see if I can get that working first...

Ryan - I wish money was burning holes in my pockets

Monotype

Don't run out and "upgrade" to a 6850 anyway because it is a weaker card in general.
I'm surprised that portal 2 would cause any problems for a setup like that, given that it even worked pretty well on a 4250.
I hope that you've overclocked that processor a bit too - most games will be constrained by graphics card, but there's always a few that could use the extra CPU power.

KilOit

Unless you're planning on upgrading to top of the range cards you won't see much of a increase, i have that card and it's fantastic, still haven't got max performance out of it with my gimp cpu

here's few benchmarks for you

http://www.hwcompare.com/6354/radeon-hd-5850-vs-radeon-hd-6970/

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/303?vs=292

So another 5850 for 120€ for better performance vs 360€ single 6970 is a no brainer once you got a decent 650watt power supply.

A single 5850 should max City of Heroes, but i haven't played it.

5uspect

I'd upgrade to about 6-8GB of RAM before I'd consider changing that card.