GPU Suggestions

Ozzmcom · May 22, 2013

I've decided to sell my good ol' n560gtx and upgrade to a better model.

I've been doing some research, considering my limited budget I'm leaning towards this:

MSI R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5OC Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card - Newegg.com

or, 2 of these:

SAPPHIRE 100355-1GOCL Radeon HD 7850 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card OC Version - Newegg.com

which is a little bit more expensive but the performance gap should be big. I'm not really convinced on crossfire yet though, so

thoughts suggestions ?

Camel · May 22, 2013

I'd go with the single card.

Crossfire for starters will use more power, produce more heat and probably more noise. It can also cause glitches/artefacts on some games with some games not liking it at all meaning they don't perform that well.

The crossfire solution also has less memory, although I'd imagine 2GB to be more than enough unless you're running multiple monitors.

iLLGT3 · May 22, 2013

MSI by far.

If it was a Sapphire 7950, I'd go with that. I have a Sapphire 7970 and it's honestly the best AMD card by far second to the 7990. The Vapor X cooling is simply awesome and the card has never gone above 70* under full load.

The Twin Frozr system I've heard is fantastic too. I nearly went with a Twin Frozr setup a year back. Also, a 3GB buffer really comes in handy for games like Skyrim and ArmA3 because they use massive amounts of VRAM.. And honestly, if you don't have a triple monitor setup, Crossfire is a bit pointless and Camel is right about the artifacting. I had quite a bit of it in Skyrim when it first came out.

Ryzza5 · May 22, 2013

I wouldn't touch Crossfire/SLI with a 20 meter pole after my last experience and with the common agenda. It's only useful if you're teaming up the most powerful cards available anyway. Get the best single-GPU setup you can budget for. Ideally I'd still recommend nVidia though, along with more performance in the 600 series was less PSU usage/heat/noise. Or perhaps wait for the next batch (700 series) to arrive, which at the very least would reduce the price of the current series. Probably not the best time to upgrade in that respect.

Ozzmcom · May 23, 2013

I wouldn't touch Crossfire/SLI with a 20 meter pole after my last experience and with the common agenda. It's only useful if you're teaming up the most powerful cards available anyway. Get the best single-GPU setup you can budget for. Ideally I'd still recommend nVidia though, along with more performance in the 600 series was less PSU usage/heat/noise. Or perhaps wait for the next batch (700 series) to arrive, which at the very least would reduce the price of the current series. Probably not the best time to upgrade in that respect.

well as much as I like nvidia the best my budget is not that flexible. I did consider GTX670 of some sort but it is considerably more expensive than an hd7950. I figured this would get me an additional 1-2 years before I build the whole pc from scratch again.

I do agree with the crossfire thing, believe or not years ago from now on, my system ran on crossfire cards. It was I believe the first run of crossfire's, the slots were still AGP, yeah that old. Even though crossfire seems to perform better, I don't think it's reliable enough:

A Trio from HIS: 7970 IceQ XÂ² GHz Edition, 7950 IceQ XÂ² Boost Clock and 7850 IceQ Turbo X Graphics Cards Review - X-bit labs

And the MSI is probably the best brand I've ever used. They hardly create any noise and the temperature always seem to stay low.