Hi, I am thinking of upgrading my above setup to a single card. I seem always to have used ATI/AMD cards and looking at the various reviews I feel that a change to a Nvidia GTX 4** card might be the way to go. I would like a card that will out perform the twin 5700's I have now with a view to perhaps doubling them up later. A budget of around the £200 mark is what I have. There is no rush for this upgrade, so if there is a chance of a price reduction that I should wait for in the relative near future, that is not a problem. I have listed current specs in case there is a need to upgrade the PSU along with the card. I am also a bit of a gamer hence the need always to upgrade.Sad I know. Thanks. Asus P7P55D PRO P55 Socket 1156. Intel Core i5 750, S 1156, Lynnfield, Quad Core. Overclocked. 550W OCZ Fatal1ty Modular Power Supply. Corsair Hydro Series H50 Liquid cooling system. OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz/PC3-10666 Platinum. Two Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5770 Vapor-X 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-E . Kingston 64 GB SSD V series. 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3. Hitachi 250GB SATA . Xigmatek Midgard case . Dell 2410 A01 monitor. Mionix Saiph 3200 gaming mouse. Saitek Eclipse 111 keyboard. Windows 7.
As your in no rush to upgrade I would strongly suggest holding on to those 5770's until November/December when the new high-end HD6xxx range comes out, from various rumours and articles these cards are a nice improvement in both performance, price, heat and efficiency. The only concern that I have is finding a single card that could outperform two 5770's in CF for only £200, any chance saving up an extra 100-150 by the fall of the bigger HD6xxx cards? Your motherboard is very good and has both CF and SLI at 8x which certainly gives you more options. Nvidia are rumoured to be releasing the GTX580 in the coming month(s) so that should drive down prices too. If you are certain on the £200 budget I would suggest looking at the HD6870 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/10/22/ati-radeon-hd-6870-review/1 and the GTX470 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/03/28/nvidia-geforce-gtx-470-1-1280mb-review/1 Due to recent changes in the graphics card industry concerning prices both of these cards are similiar in price however the 6870 can be found marginally cheaper and scales very well in CF. Bottom line: save up, hold on for 1-2 months and see what happens. alex
Don't forget the first rule of thumb for system building. I.e always buy the single best card you can before going for SLI or Crossfire. Inevitably some games will have zero or even negative effect from running dual cards. So with that in mind if you must buy soon then i would go for a 5870 or a GTX 470 / 480 Or follow Alex's advice and wait till round two of the 6xxx releases / Nvidia price drops.
There are no single cards for 200 pounds that outperform 5770 CF. Fastest card at that pricepoint would be a GTX470, but it isn't faster than two 5770s and is MUCH louder. Your setup was about 250 pounds when you bought, and about 220 pounds at today's prices. Your only hope of having a better single GPU experience is the 6930/50 (the lowest 69xx card), but I'd expect them to cost 260-280 for the cheapest models. And still I wouldn't expect that big of a performance increase. Unless you go for a 6970 (or whatever is the code name for the fastest single GPU card) which will probably retail at 330 or more.
stick with the CF cards... there is nothing out there for 200 to match it and nor will there be for some time.
I have 5770 crossfire also and im in no rush to upgrade, keep the £200 and carry on saving untill something worth upgrading to comes along, thats my plan anyway
