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Worth upgrading my 5850?

H

HellsChicken1

Junior Member
Hello,

My gaming computer is about 5 years old now, which means newer games like Dragon Age Inqusition won't really run on it. I was planning on saving up a bit longer and waiting for Skylake before doing a full upgrade.

The question I have is, is it worth just doing a video card upgrade now? I have a Radeon HD 5850 and was thinking of either going to a 290 or 970. But I'm worried I may just end up being CPU bound - I have an i7 920 (and 6GB RAM - don't remember what kind though).

Would getting a newer card now give a big difference to gaming performance or will the CPU just hold me back anyway and I should just wait until I can upgrade the CPU/Motherboard/RAM all at once?

Thanks!
 
Hello fellow 5850 owner!

I thought I was alone in this forum! 😛

This is my Youtube channel.
www.youtube.com/user/toutagamon

After a two year rest, I am back to uploading benchmarks like crazy. Unfortunately recorded with my camera for now. Will go to digital recording later.

Anyhoo, I have uploaded some recent 5850 benchmarks (do a search for 5850 in my channel) and you will see that the 5850 still fights quite well. I spare it very little on the settings as well. I usually use the same settings as my 7950s and 570s, unless the framebuffer makes it impossible.

If you use reasonable settings, the games would be more playable.

Still I would surely recommend an upgrade asap. The vram of the 5850 (1gb for standard models) is too low for new games.

I would suggest anything from a r9 280 and up. 3GBs at the minimum if you want the card to last a little while. If you can afford 290 or 970 even better.

Also keep in mind that your cpu is quite good (running a Lynnfield on my 570 SLI system-very similar IPC with your Bloomfield), but you need to have as less driver overhead as possible and Nvidia is better in this department, in Direct X.
 
Thanks so much for the replies!

psolord, thanks for benchmarking it! I hadn't yet found someone benchmarking DAI on a 5850! Looks like you have 2 5850's (to my 1), but I think (if I'm not mistaken) your core 2 is worse than my i7, so maybe that ends up being a wash? Plus you were getting about 30fps on average (though less with a lot of movement) even on ultra (minus AA). So perhaps if I tone down the graphics a bit, I'd actually get reasonably playable performance without even upgrading.

Still might end up upgrading, but I'll probably just see how it runs on its own first!

Thanks again!
 
OP a core i7 920 is still a powerful CPU. oc it to 3.8 - 4 Ghz and you can easily power the R9 290 and GTX 970 without bottlenecking. btw both these cards are 3x the perf of HD 5850. Not to forget the 4GB VRAM upgrade is a huge step up from the HD 5850 with 1GB. R9 290 is more than 2x the perf of HD 7850, which itself is significantly faster than HD 5850 :thumbsup:

http://www.techspot.com/review/921-dragon-age-inquisition-benchmarks/page4.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7850_HD_7870/26.html
 
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Can't go wrong with either a 290 or 970; both are significantly faster and more powerful than the nearly ancient 5850.
 
Usualy the games are not much CPU limited these days...
There are currently great prices, you can get a great card such as the 290
 
HellsChicken1 said:
Hello,

My gaming computer is about 5 years old now, which means newer games like Dragon Age Inqusition won't really run on it. I was planning on saving up a bit longer and waiting for Skylake before doing a full upgrade.

The question I have is, is it worth just doing a video card upgrade now? I have a Radeon HD 5850 and was thinking of either going to a 290 or 970. But I'm worried I may just end up being CPU bound - I have an i7 920 (and 6GB RAM - don't remember what kind though).

Would getting a newer card now give a big difference to gaming performance or will the CPU just hold me back anyway and I should just wait until I can upgrade the CPU/Motherboard/RAM all at once?

Thanks!
Click to expand...


You need a whole new PC. A Haswell CPU is going to be 40% faster, at least. Waiting until Skylake won't be necessary, the CPU IPC gains are so small now. You could wait until desktop Broadwell, I guess, but why? You can already use motherboards with support for DDR4 today.

As for the GPU, I would wait for 2015. If you waited this long, can you wait for a few more months? 2015 looks like a much bigger deal than 2014 in the GPU space. HBM, 14 nm, etc.
 
Consider getting a 6 core Xeon for ~$80 on ebay if your motherboard supports it, and then OC it. Go then with a 970 or 290(x)
 
HellsChicken1 said:
Thanks so much for the replies!

psolord, thanks for benchmarking it! I hadn't yet found someone benchmarking DAI on a 5850! Looks like you have 2 5850's (to my 1), but I think (if I'm not mistaken) your core 2 is worse than my i7, so maybe that ends up being a wash? Plus you were getting about 30fps on average (though less with a lot of movement) even on ultra (minus AA). So perhaps if I tone down the graphics a bit, I'd actually get reasonably playable performance without even upgrading.

Still might end up upgrading, but I'll probably just see how it runs on its own first!

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

You are welcome my friend! 🙂

You could visit the post I made in Inquisition's thread, which features my better systems as well.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37006143&postcount=247

Also you should see the op, which has some numbers from the professionals.

5850 crossfire scored 30fps with quite some cpu limits, while the single card scored 18fps. Both of these were not providing good gaming experience.

Still I did a quick test on the 5850@850Mhz and took some snapshots, with the game at various settings, so you can see both the framerate delta as well as the graphics quality difference.



Take care.
 
I went from a 5850 on an i7 860 from 5 years ago to a 760ti when it was released. That was a huge upgrade and the CPU was fine (although I don't typically push any brand new AAA titles). Whatever you choose about upgrading the rest of the system, I don't think you'd regret getting a new GPU today.
 
Shmee said:
Consider getting a 6 core Xeon for ~$80 on ebay if your motherboard supports it, and then OC it. Go then with a 970 or 290(x)
Click to expand...

This! Sell 920 for $50, get 5650 or 5670 on EBay for $100, slap a $40 Thermalright True Spirit 140 and overclock it to 4.5Ghz. Best $100 upgrade to keep the system fast for another 2-3 years:

http://m.ebay.com/itm/321176903708?nav=SEARCH

Then get a 290/290X or 970. For example the excellent Diamond 290 is $265 with Civ BE:
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=14-103-247

Alternatively wait for a GTX960 as it supposedly launches Jan 22nd.
 
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I don't think an i7-920 will cause much of a CPU bottleneck, especially with games like Dragon Age Inquisition. If your goal is simply to make games like that playable because your 5850 isn't quite cutting it anymore, I'd say an upgrade as simple as a R9-270X or a GTX 760 would be sufficient. Of course, you can always spend more money to get a better card that will last longer, my point is just what will be sufficient for DAI. Even a 270 is pretty extensively better than a 5850/5870: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1062?vs=1080
 
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