7950 or 5850

[Amitojc]

Currently, I have 2 5850s crossfire. I am looking to upgrade to a better system. I was looking line that the 7950 is out for a good deal. Is it better to sell those two 5850s and get 1 7950?

Thanks!

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Yes. A highly oced 7950 comes close to a 6990 most of the times.

 

[Amitojc]

What about two 5850s?

 

[aaksheytalwar]

6990 is like 2 6970s.

A single 6970 is like 40-50%+ faster than a 5850.

And then you wont have ms either.

It is like going from a downclocked 5970 to overclock 6990 without ms and much smoother.

 

[KingFatty]

Are you playing any recent games? If you end up going with the 7950, could you update us about the performance increase, whether it was worth the upgrade or if it's just not really noticeable except in certain memory constrained games where the 1 GB VRAM was holding you back? Or do all games improve a lot?

 

[Dark Shroud]

Sell those 5850s while they're still worth $50 a piece and buy a decent 7900 card with the free game bundles.

 

[Termie]

A stock 7950 Boost will be about 10% faster than your dual cards at stock.

Are you currently overclocking? Do you plan on overclocking whatever card you buy? They both have similar overclocking headroom, if you have voltage control, with a slight edge to the 7950.

Overall, except in situations where 1GB VRAM is a bottleneck (which is increasingly common), this isn't a huge upgrade, but you do have the advantage of running a single card and getting the free games being offered.

 

[KingFatty]

except in situations where 1GB VRAM is a bottleneck (which is increasingly common)

Could you elaborate on the bottleneck? I think I recall Skyrim with mods being a huge example of bottleneck, apparently the FPS drops low or something? And another game I heard about where you couldn't even adjust certain settings with 1 GB VRAM, it was was more than just being slow, it just wouldn't work on certain settings because of huge textures?

Also, I'm confused about what happens when you switch to eyefinity? From what I understand, memory constraint really becomes important when you have anti-aliasing.

But, without anti-aliasing, if you can fit all the textures in 1 GB of VRAM, why would the card care whether you displayed them on 3 monitors or 1? I'm not quite certain how eyefinity increases the demand for VRAM, or if it is a simple multiplication of raw pixels (e.g., if you take 0.5 GB of VRAM at 1080p, then you'd need 1.5 GB of VRAM at eyefinity 3x1080p?)?