Should I buy another 5850? - Hardware & Software

Heres my current system specs: i7 920 D0 @ 3.4Ghz Asus P6T G.Skill 3x2GB DDR3 1600 Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB DDR5 Haf 932 Samsung 24" 1080p I told myself after 6 months if nothing better has come out I would buy another 5850 to crossfire. But I was curious how much of a performance boost would i actually get out of another 5850? Like for instance I play battlefield bad company 2 a lot just wondering if it would show a good FPS boost in that game. Thanks

You will get an Fps boost but tbh I don't really think that it's worth the money. As appealing as cross fire is, I don't think it is greatly stable. 1 5850 is easily sufficiant. Although having said that, I own a 4890 and do not know about what tesselation stabily and good fps requires. So perhaps from that point of view It may be worth it.

Wait. Southern Islands should be here around this fall. As for BF:BC2, assume a 50% increase in FPS.

You would probably get more performance cheaper than upgrading to a 5870.

Well of course you would BmB You would see just under 50% increase. If you have the money, do it. What's your PSU?

Corsair TX750

I believe that's 54a on the 12v, you're more than fine. Also, derlicious, I think he'd see a bit better than that.

There is next to no point for games like BF:BC2. I average well over 60 FPS on BC2 at [B]highest settings[/B] (no AA) + 1680 x 1050 res with only a 4870 and Q6600. With an OC'd i7 and a 5850 you're going to already have more than enough FPS. Wait until you actually need it, by which point you will probably be seeing 6850s and 6870s.

Like I said above; Southern Islands is out this fall.

Oh I thought you were talking about a game or something. [QUOTE]ATI IS ON A ROLL, having taped out its next generation GPU family called Southern Islands. ATI might call it the HD6xxx series, and it could be out before Nvidia gets its GTX4xx line of GPUs fully fleshed out and to market. The news is straightforward enough. Southern Islands (SI) taped out recently, and is now moving through TSMC. Although the schedule is very tight, if all goes really well we could see a demo or two at Computex in just over a month. This puts SI slightly behind where Evergreen was a year ago, but not by much. Southern Islands is said to be a hybrid between the all new Northern Islands (NI) and the current HD5xxx Evergreen family. Those in the loop say that Northern Islands was meant to be on TSMC 32nm before that process was killed. Due to the ever-slipping nature of TSMC's 28nm high-K metal gate node, the SI hybrid GPU was slapped together to be fabbed on TSMC's current 40nm process. Sources tell SemiAccurate that SI uses some of the NI uncore (unshader?), and wraps that around a mildly updated Evergreen shader. RAM is more of an open question. NI was set to use GDDR5+, but since DRAM makers might not be ready, we may end up with only GDDR5 on SI. In any case, Nvidia has come out fighting with its GTX470 and GTX480, shipping hundreds, some say thousands, of units since ATI shipped Evergreen last September. If all goes well, and it appears to be doing just that, ATI might have Southern Islands on sale before Nvidia gets all of the GTX4xx variants out the door. The end of 2010 will see Nvidia fighting a new ATI line with a year late part that doesn't work within the promised specs, and can't be manufactured. By the time Nvidia gets to 28nm next year, or possibly in 'GTX480' quantities this year, it is going to be fighting yet another new generation of ATI parts, Northern Islands. If the rumors are true, and the upcoming Fermi II is on TSMC's 28nm bulk process, and NI comes out on GloFo's 28nm high-K metal gate process, Nvidia won't even be in the game. At this point, you really have to ask yourself if Nvidia will survive. Its chipset business is gone because it didn't understand Moore's law. Its GPU business is like a floating goldfish circling the drain. Its GPU compute business is wounded. And Tegra is being laughed out the door. Meanwhile, ATI is on a roll.[/QUOTE]

boy that would suck if nvidia died. monopoly for the lose realistically though, doubt they'd go under.

As long as there's fanboys, nvidia will never die.

First, nVidia won't die. They're chopping the GF102, GF104, and GF106. Read semiaccurate's latest article. It's extremely interesting. It shows you how bad yields are for nViddy, but they'll manage. Southern Islands shouldn't change much besides efficiency, and the new un-core. 20% perf increase I'd think.