I have been reading over the many excellent comments and suggestions on this board and have been looking to the new ATI 48xx cards with both interest and skepticism. Skepticism because I simply hate dropping a good chunk of change on a marginal upgrade. It is just so hard to get a good feeling for when is the right time to pass what used to be a good couple of cards down to a lesser system or friend and go with a new single or pair of cards. My setup at times struggles with FPS playing at 2560x1600 on a 30? when there is a lot of action/effects on screen, but I am wondering how much a single 4850 or 4870 card would outperform my current crossfire setup or if waiting yet another card generation makes sense. Games like BioShock struggle with maxed out settings at about about 12-18fps..and I like smooth eye candy so this is painful. Games like WoW run great in most settings game areas (30-60fps), but can really bog down (9-18 FPS) in 10+ man settings with lots of spell effects on screen (although I read WoW is CPU bound and a gpu upgrade won?t help much in this case?) So what kind of performance increase could I realistically see with a 4850 or 4870 single or crossfire setup and is it going to buy me another year or so out of this system? I can see an entire system upgrade coming in the next 24 months anyway so I don't see myself dropping $1000 on two of the higher end 4870 at this point, but the $200-$300 priced cards seem reasonable. Comments I have seen suggest a 4870 is at least twice as fast as a 1950, but I see so few people reporting their results upgrading from a crossfire 1950 setup on a 30? like mine. Any comments/suggestions appreciated. Thanks!
MSI K9A Platinum
Athlon 64 5200+ 2.6Ghz or so
2GB DDR2 800
Crossfire setup: Two Radeon X1950XTX 512mb 256-bit GDDR4 PCI Express x16 cards
30? HP LP3065 @ 2560x1600
MSI K9A Platinum
Athlon 64 5200+ 2.6Ghz or so
2GB DDR2 800
Crossfire setup: Two Radeon X1950XTX 512mb 256-bit GDDR4 PCI Express x16 cards
30? HP LP3065 @ 2560x1600
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