Okay so a while back I made a post about upgrading from my HD 7850 to either a R9 280X or GTX 770. The other day I was thinking that it might be worth getting another HD 7850 instead. From what I've gathered is that it's way cheaper, being I can get a HD 7850 for about £110 but I may not always be able to use both and the gain wont always be 100% and I know this. However, this two cards will normally out preform an R9 280X. However, the card will only be able to utilize 1GB of video RAM. What should I go for in this situation. Keep with the HD 7850 for 6 months or so and wait for the next generation of hardware? Outright purchase the Gigabyte Windforce R9 280X, which is super cheap on Scan for some reason, or get a second HD 7850? Opinions and recommendations?
Thank you in advance, Joe!
Well one card solutions are always better than 2 (in my opinion). Less power, more quiet, and less issues with drives etc.. Me personally I would go with the 280x if you have the $$
That's my first thought but with the money I'd save from just getting the HD 7850 I can afford to upgrade to a 1080p monitor. I'm still running a Dell 1680x1050 monitor so yeah. The choice is really hard one to make!
hmmm well the 280x's did recently just go waaaay up in price so I wouldn't blame you.
A single 7850 is still a good card for 1080p. I say you should be more concerned with upgrading your monitor first. For around £110, you could grab a really nice 1080p IPS panel - very good colours and viewing angles.
The 7850 that you have could handle Battlefield 4 on high - possibly ultra - settings at 1080p. You shouldn't be in a rush to upgrade your GPU. I think the GPU releases of next year will give you much more to think about. Nvidia's Maxwell architecture might be a significant boost.
Waiting for a while seems like the best idea for now then! I'll wait for the GTX 800 series or whatever they're going to call them before making a decision and I can almost afford a new monitor but I've yet to decide on which... Thank you for all the suggestions!
im not a big fan of dual gpu setups, the reason for that, first of all you need a decent power supply with more power to make it work. if you don´t have a decent one, you need to spend extra money in getting one. But next to that, if you play games that are good optimized for CF or Sli then offcourse it works great, but there are still alot of games, that are not realy good optimized to run with a CF or sli, and those games gonne be a pain in the ass.
Also you need a motherboard that has good compatebility, for CF and sli. with enough pci-e lanes.
I allways recommend a decent higherend single GPU setup, over a CF or sli.
Yeah I felt the same for the longest time but I just thought I should consider it being the HD 7850's a currently so low in price and that both together in optimized games ran really well. I'm still considering all possibilities but then I've also considered going back to Nvidia because I found driver support and features to be better. Maybe it would be best to consider a GTX 800 series card when ever they are announced.
Hi, If you still haven't upgraded yet I would recommend sticking with one 7850 for now and overclock it. My Sapphire 7850 can overclock extremely well. Download Sapphire TRIXX to overclock :) and MSI Kombustor to stress test.
Stock settings 860MHz Core Clock, 1200MHz Memory, 1.075v
O'C Settings 1100MHz Core Clock, 1300MHz Memory, 1.170v
Max safe voltage is 1.225
You can get them much higher but haven't bothered as it's given me an extra 10 fps in BF4 at Ultra 1080p :D
This topic is more then 3 months old.
I guess op has allready made his decission. So i put a lock on this.
Grtz Angel ☺