I am looking at upgrading my current GPU from an XFX HD 5850 1GB and have had my eye on a XFX HD 7950 3GB as something to keep me gaming at at least 1080p with the latest games for the next few years.
The benchmarks I have seen seem to indicate that the 7950 is roughly twice as powerful as as the 5850. I can get the 7950 on Amazon for £169, which is the cheapest that I have seen it going so far.
On a side note, do your links to hardware deals only apply to people in the US or do they work for the UK store too? I appreciate your show and would be happy to support you guys that way if possible.
Do you guys think that this is a worthy upgrade or is there anything else around that price range that would be a better investment? I am not really attached to AMD, but they do tend to offer much more bang for buck.
I would expect that 7950 would be almost twice as fast in newer games that use all that video memory. Well if the rest of your computer hasn't got a bottleneck : do you have at least 8gigs of system RAM ?
Core i5 2500K OC @ 4Ghz and 16GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, so I don't think I will have any bottleneck problems with a 7950. The 5850 is probably the only bottleneck in my system for gaming, but the machine is generally a DAW (digital audio workstation).
The 5850 is still chugging along nicely in most games @ 1080p, but I am thinking now is a good time to upgrade it, sell it fairly cheap and recoup a bit of cash while it is still worth something.
I could be tempted to upgrade my CPU to an i7 at some point for the hyper-threading, but as far as I know that doesn't really apply to gaming, yet.
£169 ($272/202 Euro) with free delivery is the cheapest I have seen them being offered through Amazon.co.uk
Another place (aria.co.uk) was offering the card at £163, but for delivery to N.Ireland from mainland UK it was an added £14, which is just robbery and killed any competitive edge on their pricing.
7950 is a very good card. I would recommend getting a nice cooler to get the most out of it. Mixed reviews about the XFX 7950. I would invest in something like an ASUS, but be aware that it is a 3 slot card.