Alright so I currently have a single 6850 which has been doing remarkably well still on most games. However Skyrim demands more horsepower for texture packs. >.> Well not really, it runs rather well with the big packs but once I add a hefty ENB and lighting mods it all goes downhill.
Anyway suffice to say I have seen heaven and now I cannot look upon the earth that is Skyrim without the ENB I set up, but I get a lot of wierd mouse lag with current hardware + ENB.
So I am trying to figure out, do I grab a second 6850 (for $60-90) and crossfire them (which was my originally planned upgrade path) or do I try to stick it out to black friday and cross my fingers for a super deal on a 7850/7870 etc. (Hopefully in the $120 ish range on sale?)
I've never really dealt with going from non Crossfire into Crossfire before, I had crossfired 4850s before this, but they were always in crossfire from the beginning because I bought one for myself as a birthday present to me, and someone else bought me the other one...so they went straight into crossfire. I really don't know how much of a performance bump to expect from adding another 6850 as a result though.
What differences am I likely to see between 6850 x2 vs a single 7850? Is it going to be a fairly large difference?
Skyrim already got it's own super fast SSD...it's is a tad spoiled, but if I can make it look better, why not. Besides with a single 6850 I figure I'm due for an upgrade soon anyway.
i am running 2 6850s right now. i have not fully moded skyrim yet and i get about 45 fps with a bit of tinkering on high. once i disable xfire i get about 25 fps. so that should be about the performance difference.
Those are still a tad out of my price range currently. I'd love to throw a 7990 in but it just isn't happening. 7850's seem to currently be going for around $160 ish, which should really be out of my price range too...but that's why I'd be crossing my fingers for a black friday sale.
Also a few other small graphics mods enabled on the stairs to Dragonsreach in combat with a bunch of guards and surrounded by Wall of Flames, wet from jumping in the water, my FPS drops to about 15.
Down in the lower part of Whiterun it sits around 24, everything on ultra. Throw a dragon in there and it would prolly drop about 4-5 more for the effects from the attacks they get with Deadly Dragons.
That said I suppose this means I should be getting another boost as I will be replacing my motherboard at the same time as my current board is quite aged and though I have a good AM3 processor that handles everything no problem, my ram is only DDR2 as a result, new board will have DDR3.
I suppose I should probably expect around ~40 with dual 6850s from this, maybe more if I work more on making sure all my mods play nice when I reinstall everything for the new motherboard.
Now the question is, what should I expect should I go with a 7850/7870?
(I have a 955 BE that is currently overclocked to 3800MhZ, dated yes, but it still doesn't max out in Skyrim from what I can tell, or really anything else I play for that matter...)
I would try and shell out for a 7870, on Cyber Monday. You will probably find a great deal on Newegg for one, equal to if not better than a 7850 price that day as it is more popular.
Oh yeah I always forget Cyber Monday is a thing until we're almost there. Still curious what the actual performance difference will be though for the extra $40-80 though...
Edit: Scratch that, the more I look into it, the more I see tons of stuff about Skyrim not getting along well with CrossFire unless you get pretty lucky...I think I'll just attempt to budget out for a 7850 or 7870 on Black Friday/Cyber Monday. I can give the gf the 6850 then since she is currently on a 6770. Throw the 6770 on my old motherboard for a Guest gaming rig or something...