If it does support DDR3, I don't think that would be a good upgrade on its own[If that is what you were implying], unless a better graphics card was also utilised , so that it would give a better performance overall (I think ?)
Remember that the 5970 is a dual GPU card, so that has crap power efficiency as well. The 5970 has a TDP of 294w, which is about 18% higher than the GTX480. Meanwhile, the performance is about 20% higher. It's not such a big deal, the GTX480 is quite efficient when it comes to dual GPU cards. This is certainly not the case for the 5870 and other Evergreen single GPU cards. Yes, but it's dual channel. An LGA1366 system would use triple channel ram, so he'd probably need to buy some more. No big deal, his old system will still work that way.
I know the 5970 is a dual GPU Card, I bought one, and have it waiting for me to install it Your right in your numbers, but i think the Radeon 5970 is more efficient than the GTX 480 when under load. As for the 5970 i think its TDP being 18% higher than the GTX480 is not a surprise as the 5970 is a dual GPU so I would expect its TDP to be slightly higher Edit: Im tired, I don't think I meant more efficient maybe I did, but the 5970 produces alot less heat compared against the GTX 480 (i think) , less heat the better in my opinion Sorry if I am rambling on now ... been a long day at work lol...
Yeah, you sound tired Basically, the 5970 is a dual GPU card, which means it's less efficient. This means that it draws more power from the mains, and exhausts more as excess heat. The TDP is the amount of energy that it outputs as heat. The 5970 outputs 18% more heat than the nVidia, and is only 20% faster. This implies that the 480 is not inefficient, in comparison to the dual-gpu 5970 (although it is inefficient compared to the 5870 and suchlike). Having said that, we all know that TDPs are fiddled as much as possible to improve the numbers.
It's not fiddling, as such, just how different manufacturers record their respective TDPs. It means that whilst you can compare TDPs from the same manufacturer, it's hard to compare TDPs from different manufacturers because they might be recording them in a different way.
Do it. I went from a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz to a 980X and I notice a difference in everything. Including gaming.
Basically if your going to do this you have to do it properly, like the Dork above ( ) but with better graphics. If I could, I would. Screw holidays, too much stress and £1000 for one week? sod that, I want something for atleast a year. And as for a Car, £1000 wont cut it. And blowing it all on booze... just get out... leave and never return!!!! I say do it. Do it and don't look back. Do you need it? Unlikely, but do you want it? I personally love the R3E, I wish I had enough money for one. Do I need it? No. Does the price reflect how much better it is that the rest? No. Do I realy want it? More than I can describe. Do it
I'm in the same boat as you. My PC is almost identical to yours. Whether it's worth it depends on what games you play and what resolution. If you overclock your current chip well, then it's not really worth upgrading. Mine can overclock to about 3.3ghz quite easily. So I play 99% of my games cranked to high/maximum already. BBC2, Crysis, GTA4 and the expansions, X3 Terran Conflict, Supreme Commander 2, etc.. My PC eats most of them. The 8800GTX is still a powerful card. The only game I have which struggles a bit, is Arma 2, and that is mostly ok in multiplayer. I play at 1680x1050 so the other games all play fine.
Sli 480s basically requires a water cool setup for things not to melt. It's the fastest solution available though unless you crossfire duel 5970s gl on that And if you put a £151 motherboard with a £880 CPU you deserv it to crash and burn. Need to spend money on a high end board closer to £250 you also need top end ram if you intend to overclock + water cooling loop for maximize You don't get this setup unless you want to max it all out And it's not a beginners setup at all the 980 is supported out the box by very few motherboards which means you either need a second CPU or you have to request the bios is pre updated. 6gb of ultra fast ddr3 ram 1600 min 2k gives more head room
Thanks for all you peeps advice, sat and thought about it and ive decided to just upgrade the GPU and apply a small o/c to the q6600 (sure i saw somewhere on here how to do it). Thanks again Millhouse
You don't need to have ultra-fast ram to overclock. I'm at a BCLK of 205, about as good as you're going to get unless you're lucky or do LN2, and I'm running my ram at 1230MHz (haven't got round to OCing it yet). It's nice to have expensive ram, but it does not increase the overclocking headroom in any way, and above a certain point it's only really good for benchmarks. To make things clear, at 205 BCLK, you'll be running your CPU at up to 6GHz, so it's clear that nice fast ram is not a must. SLi 480s won't melt, it'll just get very hot. The inside card at full load will be near 100c with 100% fan, but the outside card will be lower. Watercooling isn't a must, it's just nice. As far as speed goes, three or four 5870s will also beat two 5970s. Finally, if you want to buy an expensive CPU you don't need an expensive motherboard also. A EX58-UD3R will for the most part suit you fine, whatever the price of the CPU.
Why has no one pointed this out as utter tosh? Erm, no? A single 5870 has a TDP of 188w, so the fact the 5890 has 2 of these and still pumps out less than 300w means it's MORE EFFICIENT. Oh really? You've got your argument mixed up here, the fact that 2 5870 cores use less power and put out less heat than a single GTX480 absolutely shows it up as inefficient. Bottom line is the GTX480 is monstrously fast, has a great feature set, looks to be fairly future proof but it can never, ever justifiably be called efficient. To say so is utter bollox (if you dont mind me being so blunt).
Maybe because it's not? I'm sorry, but unless you know something for sure, it's probably not such a good idea to just insult the person in the first place. That doesn't mean it's more efficient, at all. The cores of the 5970 are heavily underclocked, thus massively reducing the heat output. Put it this way. This is a chart that was made right after the 5870 was released. It's an average of different benchmarks, showing lots of graphics cards as 'percent of 5870'. As you can see, the GTX295 is roughly 10% faster than the 5870, yet according to Custom PC it consumes 38% more heat. This is what I mean by inefficient, that it uses more energy while producing less ingame performance. If you want the full 5870/5970 thing, the 5870 is about 75% as fast as a 5970, according to a series of benchmarks I gathered from review websites when the GTX480 was released. Nevertheless, the TDP (we can't use the link you posted because that takes into account full systems) is just 64% that of the 5970, you simply don't get as much performance from the power you put in because it's a dual GPU solution, more heat is exhausted as waste. (a note about the TDP, TDPs are usually seen to be reliable from the same manufacturer) Read my posts. Go on, do it. In fact, I'll quote myself so you don't have to. This is in fact the case for the GTX480, where the amount nVidia uses is much lower than the actual amount for some reason. So yeah, I think I've got that one covered, sorry to disappoint you. The 5970 is not two 5870 cores. Yes, the cores themselves are the same, but the 5970 cores are clocked much lower, hence the much lower TDP than you might expect. It's also why 5870s in crossfire outperform the 5970. My argument is not flawed or mixed up, it's just that I got my TDP for the 480 from Wikipedia, which was sourced from nVidia numbers. Those nVidia numbers were wildly incorrect, but I did comment that they would probably not be completely accurate. Oh, and by the way, there's a difference between being blunt and being insulting. A tip for the future: Don't describe someone's post as tosh unless it actually is. In this case, I used a single number wrong, thanks to nVidia's propaganda machine (which I did in fact hint might be the case in a later post), in fact your post had a much more fundamental error in, the idea that a 5970 is more efficient than a 5870.
Graph wars! That's exactly what I decided too And then I can always upgrade the other stuff some other time if I need to. I would have just done it all now, but a new cpu needs a new motherboard, and a new motherboard needs new ram, and it all ended up being so expensive :C
Yeah the RAM came as a big bad surprise for me :/ I wasn't expecting that! Last thing I knew was that 2 more gig of DDR2 was just about £20, so I hoped DDR3 would be in a similar range to that. Guess not
That's one hell of an upgrade. If you go ahead feel free to donate your current build to me I would start with upgrading the GPU first just like you have decided as well. If you do go all the way though, go nuts and get Corsairs new 24GB RAM kit
There's no point spending for spending's sake. $1350 is an obscene amount to spend on memory, even if there is 24GB of it. In 2007, everyone was wanting 2GB ram, with a possible upgrade to 4GB. Now, everyone wants 4GB ram, with a possible upgrade to either 6GB (i7) or 8GB. If we continue at the same rate, 24GB ram won't be necessary or useful for years.
