Could use Radeon card suggestions

[Aerwidh]

So, I am looking to upgrade from the 6870 1 GB in my sig, especially since some games I play hit 850-ish MB of VRAM with little to no AA at 1080p and I also want to be able to up the settings a bit. I mostly play RPGs (Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, etc), some RPG/shooter hybrids (Borderlands 2, Fallout: New Vegas), a few MMOs (Star Trek Online seems to like VRAM), racing (Test Drive Unlimited) and the occasional strategy/4X game, etc.

I'm definitely sticking to Radeon for now, as I'm comfortable with them and they have served me well since the 4850, but I don't know how high I can go without my CPU becoming a noticeable bottleneck. I can probably overclock it more if needed, current frequency was just 5 minutes in the BIOS and then a few hours of stability testing this last weekend, so it's no big deal. Not looking to upgrade MB/CPU/RAM at this time, but maybe in a few months.

Also planning on replacing the PSU for a slightly stronger one that actually has two PCI-E power cables (currently using one adapter from Molex), so that's not gonna be a limiting factor.

I was thinking of 7870/7950/7970. The Windforce cards from Gigabyte are looking pretty nice, but I'm open to other suggestions as long as the cooling is good and fairly quiet. I went the Accelero route with my HD4850, but I don't want to mess with any cooler change this time.

I only have the upper HDD bay inserted in my P180 mini case, so I don't think space is going to be a huge issue. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

A quick price check showed a 7870 OC Windforce at ~?230, a regular 7950 at ~?285 and a 7970 OC Windforce at ~?370.

I would be grateful for any suggestions you guys might have, especially if you have similar hardware.

[zanzabar]

i got my 7950 for ~$235 and i have been very happy with it. i also use more than 2GB with skyrim so i think with the new consoles it would be worth it for the extra vram and bandwidth.

[CrimInalA]

Pricewise a 7950 is unbeatable in my opinion .
If you have the money for a 7970 , go with that . They have around 5% more performance , higher OC potential and higher sell value .

[Aerwidh]

Good info about Skyrim and VRAM, zanzabar. Was that with our without any major mods, by the way? Thanks!

CrimInalA: Have you tried running that 7970 of your with your CPU at lower frequencies? Got any idea if the CPU would bottleneck it?

[CrimInalA]

4000mhz is the slowest i have ran my X6 , so I can't speak from my own experience .
I can say however that in my opinion , if a 7970 would be bottlenecked by your 1055T , no one would be able to run crossfire/trifire setups without being bottlenecked

In any case I would try clocking your 1055T higher . 3.8ghz should be easy ?

[Aerwidh]

Sounds promising

Yeah, definitely gonna look into clocking it higher. Still kind of rusty, though, barely done any overclocking since the Socket A days. Man, I feel old

[CrimInalA]

I will be getting myself a 7950 today to replace my 7970 . RMA of my XFX 7970 is taking waaay too long . Will mount my corsair H70 on it

[Aerwidh]

^ Nice, though the RMA stuff is sad

I ended up ordering a Gigabyte 7970 OC and a Corsair HX650 (80 plus gold). Hoping it will arrive tomorrow, so I can start pushing pixels and stuff this weekend. Thanks for the replies, guys

[CrimInalA]

Good choice

Let us know how it goes .

To give you an idea of my 7950 : http://www.3dmark.com/fs/546261

[Aerwidh]

So, the 7970 and the PSU arrived today. I already had the 10.5 drivers, so I just switched the hardware and ran a quick 3DMark11 test: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6729187

[Ket]

Not bad, but definitely OC your CPU / RAM more if you can, on my system my bone stock 7950 score beats your 7970 by 800-1000pts

[Aerwidh]

I would if I could, but I'm pretty sure my old motherboard is holding me back. Raising the CPU multi is a no-go for even booting and upping the base clock by a measly 1 MHz more allows it to boot but not to run stable

[s1nykuL]

Your CPU/Memory is limiting performance. I would compare like for like systems.

On your GPU score you rate a few hundred below mine... My 7970 is at 1200/1500.
Your CPU is not hurting pure graphics performance.

On the physics score your system rates 3000pts below mine.... i5-2500k@4.5Ghz.
This is where your losses lie.


So, you have to lower physics if an option and providing the game code doesn't max the cores on your CPU you will notice very little difference in frame rate to systems with Intel chips.

You have good performance for your system it would be impossible to tweak another 3000 physics points out of it.
Benchmarks are benchmarks real word performance is what matters for everyday use.

[Aerwidh]

Your CPU/Memory is limiting performance. I would compare like for like systems.

On your GPU score you rate a few hundred below mine... My 7970 is at 1200/1500.
Your CPU is not hurting pure graphics performance.

On the physics score your system rates 3000pts below mine.... i5-2500k@4.5Ghz.
This is where your losses lie.


So, you have to lower physics if an option and providing the game code doesn't max the cores on your CPU you will notice very little difference in frame rate to systems with Intel chips.

You have good performance for your system it would be impossible to tweak another 3000 physics points out of it.
Benchmarks are benchmarks real word performance is what matters for everyday use.

Yeah, in actual gaming I only ever notice it occasionally in Planetside 2 and maybe one more game, and it's only when I'm in the middle of really big battles.