Do I really need to upgrade?

Kur4mA

Hi guys,

I'm preparing for upcoming games (Skyrim, BF3 and GW2 mainly) and thinking of any upgrades my machine might need to run these games on high settings. It's a fairly new build but just thinking of plugging any gaps that might be there that I'm not seeing if ye could help? I'm considering an SSD to speed things up a bit and more RAM.

Spec:

4GB-Kit Corsair DDR3 PC1600 C9 Classic
Cooler Master 690 II Advanced Midi-Tower PURE Black
Corsair TX750W 750 Watt
Creative Fatal1ty Pro Gaming Headset MKII
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3, Intel P55, ATX, DDR3, PCI-Express
Intel Core i5-760 Box 8192Kb, LGA1156
ASUS HD 6850 Direct CU 1GB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI
Samsung SyncMaster P2450H

deconduo

An SSD would be nice, and would give you a good boost in boot and loading times. That motherboard supports crossfire (albeit only x16/x4) so adding a second 6850 would help with gaming. A single 6850 will max out most games but won't max skyrim or BF3. It will handle them at high though.

You won't see much of an improvement by adding on more RAM, unless you like to have mutliple game running at once or something :P

Kur4mA

Hmm, I'm liking this idea although I've never run dual cards before or been mad on the idea. I can see they have my card on dabs now for just £114.99 here!

http://www.dabs.com/products/asus-ati-radeon-6850-hd-790mhz-1gb-pci-express-hdmi-779C.html

Is crossfire really the way to go or just sell this card and upgrade again?

Tea_Bag

crossfired 6850s will outperform almost any single card configuration in most scenarios. would be alot cheaper to just get a second one.

Serephucus

AMD's Crossfire scaling can be a bit glitchy though. I'd have a look at reviews online, particularly ones that mention minimum framerates as well. AFAIK AMD hasn't fully sorted out microstuttering yet.

CF is cheaper yes, but you pay for the fluidity of a single card.

Kur4mA

Ok nice one, cheers! I've ordered a 2nd Asus 6850.