Newegg Black Friday Graphic Card Conumdrum!

Newegg just started their Black Friday sale today with about a dozen video cards on sale, mostly older Nvidia cards (560 ti seems to show up the most often). I'm currently sitting on a 5850 Sapphire Toxic, that mostly does the job, but I've been toying with the idea of upgrading for a while now. Is now the time to do it? And if so, what are the best options? Been hearing good things about dual 7850s which I can get for under $300 dollars now. Or dual 560 ti, which are also under $300 dollars. Or a single 7970 which is $330 now and comes with 3 games. I can't make up my mind/don't know enough to make a choice. So I have turned to you, Gamespot forumers. What do do!?

What resolution? What is the rest of your system?

1900x1200, 12 gb RAM, Athlon II x4 965.

A stock 7850 is better than a GTX560Ti and worst case it is equal to it. Without finding a direct review benchmarking dual card setups, I would have to assume that the 7850CF is going to be the better choice.

Now, 7850CF vs a 7970... this gets a bit murky. You are going to get better FPS from the 7850CF, about 10-20% in some cases, but you have the complication of having two cards. For some people, it is pretty painless but for others it can turn into a hassle. You also run into the problem occasionally, with new games or non-popular games, that CF simply won't work and on even more rare where your FPS will drop to less than a single 7850. These problems happen to both AMD and Nvidia but people really badmouth AMD about it for some reason and AMD has been getting even better in the last couple years fixing this stuff but it still happens. You can always disable CF and get single card performance if CF is borked but again, some people don't like having to deal with that.

So in summary. 7850CF is better than GTX560Ti SLI and slightly better than a 7970 but 7850CF has a potential headache in store.

On a side note, you might also want to take a peak at a 7950. They seem to be going for ~$280 after savings/MIR at newegg and can handle 1900x1200.

My rule of thumb is never do CF/sli if there is a better single card available, and in this case there is at a very competive price.

You need to remember that sli/CF is only really any good if the games scale correctly with the profiles, and trust in me this isnt always the case. New games often wont have working profiles to start with, and some games may never get profiles meaning that you are only using 1 card, or worst case scenario is the CF/sli causes worse performance than the single cards. Look at the single 7950 rather than any dual card configurations.

1900x1200, 12 gb RAM, Athlon II x4 965.

Martel100

You may also want to sort out your memory mismatch that may be doing more harm then good when playing games

My rule of thumb is never do CF/sli if there is a better single card available, and in this case there is at a very competive price.

You need to remember that sli/CF is only really any good if the games scale correctly with the profiles, and trust in me this isnt always the case. New games often wont have working profiles to start with, and some games may never get profiles meaning that you are only using 1 card, or worst case scenario is the CF/sli causes worse performance than the single cards. Look at the single 7950 rather than any dual card configurations.

5SI-GonePostal

[QUOTE="5SI-GonePostal"]

My rule of thumb is never do CF/sli if there is a better single card available, and in this case there is at a very competive price.

You need to remember that sli/CF is only really any good if the games scale correctly with the profiles, and trust in me this isnt always the case. New games often wont have working profiles to start with, and some games may never get profiles meaning that you are only using 1 card, or worst case scenario is the CF/sli causes worse performance than the single cards. Look at the single 7950 rather than any dual card configurations.

superclocked

You can do but that does not guarantee you will get the performance you are expecting, or if it will even be better than the single card.

[QUOTE="superclocked"][QUOTE="5SI-GonePostal"]

My rule of thumb is never do CF/sli if there is a better single card available, and in this case there is at a very competive price.

You need to remember that sli/CF is only really any good if the games scale correctly with the profiles, and trust in me this isnt always the case. New games often wont have working profiles to start with, and some games may never get profiles meaning that you are only using 1 card, or worst case scenario is the CF/sli causes worse performance than the single cards. Look at the single 7950 rather than any dual card configurations.

5SI-GonePostal

You can do but that does not guarantee you will get the performance you are expecting, or if it will even be better than the single card.

I've never had an issue with SLI scaling. Alot of games get nearly double the performance using 2 cards, and the rest get a very nice performance boost with SLI as well... http://www.anandtech.com/show/4012/nvidias-geforce-gtx-580-the-sli-update/2http://www.anandtech.com/show/4254/triplegpu-performance-multigpu-scaling-part1/4superclocked

Yeah, with popular games. It does happen from time to time.

BTW- Those reviews prove nothing other than how much Nvidia controls review sites with their guidelines.

[QUOTE="superclocked"]I've never had an issue with SLI scaling. Alot of games get nearly double the performance using 2 cards, and the rest get a very nice performance boost with SLI as well... http://www.anandtech.com/show/4012/nvidias-geforce-gtx-580-the-sli-update/2http://www.anandtech.com/show/4254/triplegpu-performance-multigpu-scaling-part1/4LordEC911

Yeah, with popular games. It does happen from time to time.

BTW- Those reviews prove nothing other than how much Nvidia controls review sites with their guidelines.

[QUOTE="Martel100"]

1900x1200, 12 gb RAM, Athlon II x4 965.

5SI-GonePostal

You may also want to sort out your memory mismatch that may be doing more harm then good when playing games

[QUOTE="5SI-GonePostal"]

[QUOTE="Martel100"]

1900x1200, 12 gb RAM, Athlon II x4 965.

JigglyWiggly_

You may also want to sort out your memory mismatch that may be doing more harm then good when playing games

Very good point - thanks for pointing that out, was commenting late at night so i prob jumping to conclusions. My bad and sorry to Martel if this is the case