Crossfired 5850's a worth while upgrade?

[jamesdsimone]

So was thinking 6970/7870/7950/7970?

 

[KaRLiToS]

Tahiti, 7950 or 7970 or keep your setup. HD 6000 series are not supported anymore and they are now legacy.

 

[jamesdsimone]

The board is only PCIe 2.0 or 2.1 does that prevent me from using a 79xx?

 

[Headfoot]

No, that is fine, it wont make any difference in light of other more immediate bottlenecks in the system (like the CPU and RAM)

 

[jamesdsimone]

No, that is fine, it wont make any difference in light of other more immediate bottlenecks in the system (like the CPU and RAM)

Ok thanks. I can't do anything about the ram but I can replace the 720 BE with a 980 BE.

 

[jamesdsimone]

So popped the 5850 in and 3Dmark2006 went from ~9500 to 16000. There seems to be an issue with the crossfire. I'll replace the CPU next and see what that does.

 

[psolord]

3dmark 2006 has been very cpu limited for a long time now. It's probably not the best option to see what performance gain you have.

My advice would be to get a single decent card, than two 5850s.

I do not speak with no first hand experience. As a hobbyist benchmarker, I upload my benchmark videos raw, on Youtube. I use an external recorder to capture pure performance without wasting system resources.

Here is an example of what I am talking about (spicy wallpaper alert on all videos).

Assassin's Creed Unity 1920X1080 custom 5850 crossfire @950Mhz Q9550 @4GHz - 26fps

Assassin's Creed Unity 1920x1080 custom 7950 @1.1Ghz Q9550 @4GHz - 46fps

What I am showing here is the performance of the same system with two different gpu solutions. Same settings (low textures in order not to choke the 5850s), same game version, same cpu frequency, Windows 10 on both.

Now as you can see the 7950@1.1Ghz was 77% faster than 5850@950Mhz crossfire. The reason for that, was the extreme load put on the cpu by the crossfire itself. The Q9550 was pegged at 100% load throughout the run. I think I heard it whispering to go do something to myself!

The 5850s were running at around 60% load due to the cpu limit, so with a better cpu things could be quite better, but still the system you are using, even going to that 980BE, will not have any better IPC than the Yorkfield I was using. If you have DDR3 it could help however. I am not sure how RAM bandwidth limited Unity is. Still I was using very high clocks on everything, cpu, fsb and ram.

I have uploaded many recent 5850 crossfire videos on my channel, in case you are interested and even more so, older ones.

You will probably find the single 5850 and 7950 counterparts with a search as well. Just a personal database I like to share.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Thanks for the info. I replaced the 4850's which I had left from a old build with the single 5850 which I also have from and old build. I mentioned replacing the CPU because I already have it sitting around. I don't want to spend a lot of money on this upgrade. Hence why I was looking at a single older card. I don't want to spend more than about 80 dollars. The board takes DDR2.