CrossFire Or New Card

Hardware Hub GPU
1

Hi

My current system is as follows...

-CPU: Intel Core i5 3330 @ 3.00Ghz (Turbo 3.20Ghz)
-RAM: 8GB DDR3, Dual channel @1330Mhz
-Mobo: Gigabyte H61M-S2PV
-GPU: Sapphire HD7850 2GB OC edition
-PSU: Corsair CX500

The system is 2 years, 7 months and 20 days old (According to the monitoring system I use) and at the time ran games on high settings at 60Fps without any issue and I loved it, best thing I have purchased, but now with modern titles and general wear and tear, it's become sluggish... Yes partly due to not having time to regularly maintain my HDD (Planning to sort out all my files etc before upgrading to windows 10), but also the more demanding titles that are coming out are really pushing my system to it's limits, now my question...

I have a pretty tight budget and have around £100 spare cash so do I

  1. Buy a new or used motherboard that supports crossfire along with purchasing another HD7850 2GB OC edition. If I buy used should be around £75 - £100 for both parts.

or

  1. Sell my old graphics card plus the £100 for £150 to spend (Depending on sale price) and with that money buy a new/different GPU. I'm looking at getting the best card for my buck.

Any other suggestions welcome, Not really sure what to do with my limited budget, don't really want to spend money on the computer itself as have other things to buy before hand :L :/

2

You're not going to be able to do any kind of worthwhile upgrade with just £100 + selling parts (that's assuming they sell in the first place). My advice is to bite the bullet and wait till you can afford a new GPU. In the meantime, clean up the system so it works as well as it can.

I'm assuming you game at 1080p. The GTX 960 is "the" 1080p card but imo it's not worth it because for not too much more you can get a 970 that kicks ass in anything at 1080p and is the king of single GPU 1440p right now. Plus it's more future proof. It's just a matter of saving those nickles and dimes long while you're stuck with a dinosaur. Of course there are some radeon cards that are good 1080p alternatives.

3

if you are looking for 1080p gaming, i'd suggest buying a r9 380 or a gtx 960, my opinion on used hardware is rather.... how do i put it DONT FRIKING BUY IT( no warranty in most cases, and there are some jackarses trying to rip u off or something), especially when u have a chance to spend it on newer hardware. just go for newer hardware always!

1 Like
4

Tough one. I would almost suggest grabbing an SSD, and save for a GPU upgrade. That card is actually fairly decent.

5

I agree with Huracan too though, if you want to KILL 1080p gaming get a 280 or 960. I also do not condone buying used parts, there's somethings you just don't buy used, and computer parts is one of them, if it's a RL friend, and you have seen the part working and is fine, that's maybe a tad different

6

well if u are gonna save for an upgrade and buy an ssd for now, the best thing to do would be push that card to limits by OC'ing the hell out of it!

7

I agree, OC the living crap out of it :P and get an SSD to speed up your OS :O

8

I got the same question. I have an r9 290. Would I be better off getting another one or getting a 390x when it's out?

9

Eh, upgrading from an R9 270 to an R9 280x doesn't seem worth it to me.

Save up till you can afford a $300 dollar card. Or wait until a card as powerful as a 390/970 are in your price range.

10

you might be able to pick up a used 280 or 760 that will do the trick for that price range, but this is higly risky and only buy used if you can run the card in person before you pay for it. but i will still recommend that you save your money, because the 380/390 are both very promising cards

11

what you need to know is that crossfire does not always work, and the 390x/enhanced hawaii although a fantastic card is still a hawaii chip. so the better of the two evils is to pick up a 390x. however honestly don't even bother if the card works because 250-300$ for about 5-10 frames does not make too much sense

13

Sell current (£30) + £150 = £180

Otherwise maybe hunt around for a good gtx680, 7970.
Dont bother with crossfire.

14

So I'm better off investing in better cooling and ocing it?

15

dont mind me asking, but what resolutions are u playing games at?

16

Basically, Jays2cents did a fantastic video on this, i'd recommend you watch that and see for yourself,

The 390 at $300 will beat the 970 and the 290x at most to all tests, and the 390x at $450 will under preform an 980 across the board by about 5-10fps but is still closer to the 980 in performance rather than the 970. However don't expect night and day difference between the different implementations of the same Hawaii chip.

With that said the 390/390x has some major improvements over the 290x such as:
More OC headroom
Runs cooler
More Memory
Better Performance per Watt
5-10% improvement

So the real question is is $350-450 worth a 5-10+% improvement and the additional 4gb of more memory? My recommendation is to wait about a month and see how the prices stabilize and how the new fury at the 980 price point will preform

Enjoy

17

Thanks for putting it all into perspective for me. I'm definitely not gonna spend $400 ish right now. I expect the Hawaii chips to drop, since they seem to be putting a lot of their attention on the fury gpus. The extra 4 gigs of memory would definitely be nice, but my current machine seems to be handling most modern games I throw at it on ultra.

Before the price drop I'll try to install some decent water cooling. Seems like a fun project.