Since reading this forum helped me make decision to get this card i thought it would be nice to write some impression after a week of usage.
I went from HIS 3870x2
I run everything @ 1920 x 1200 with no vsync
Rest of my spec is
C2D E8400 (OC`d to 4GhZ)
Zalman Aero flower cooler
Abit X38 Quad GT mobo
Antec Neo HE 550 PSU
4 Gig OCZ reaper ram
X-fi xtreme music sound
All My flight sims work better with 5870, better quality, much smoother, even Microsoft flight sim x which is largely CPU bound works better, 5-10 fps improvement across the board. Other sims i play are Lock on Flaming cliffs, Black Shark, IL-2 sturmovik 1946 (patched to 4.09) and Third wire Strike fighters series.
My proper racing sims are all older gen (Rfactor, GTR2, RBR and Simbin Race series) have all seen nice FPS improvement, they all run fine, with more frames and better image quality. They all did run fine with my old card, but are now so much better experience.
Wanna be pretty looking racing games Dirt 2 and NFS Shift have really seen huge performance and image quality increase, shame they are not so sim as they could be, but i give them 10/10 for looking amazingly well.
AvP and runs fantastic in DX11 mode (not tried DX 9) and Battlefield Bad Company 2 with anti-alias at 8x and aniso at 16x, Anti aliasing mode set to Super-sample AA.
My dilemmas were mostly lying with CPU bottlenecking the card and my ageing but good mobo, (Microsoft Flight x excluded as it is a lot CPU bound so i was not expecting miracles there) i am glad i went for 5870 as it is really doing its job even with my archaic setup, i am sure it will give me at its current state at least 12 months of fun.
I will deal with quad coded games when time comes, i will hopefully have enough cash to upgrade to decent quad setup then and still be able to use my card for good while.
If in doubt about pairing new card with dual core setup, OC your cpu and you are good to go
I went from HIS 3870x2
I run everything @ 1920 x 1200 with no vsync
Rest of my spec is
C2D E8400 (OC`d to 4GhZ)
Zalman Aero flower cooler
Abit X38 Quad GT mobo
Antec Neo HE 550 PSU
4 Gig OCZ reaper ram
X-fi xtreme music sound
All My flight sims work better with 5870, better quality, much smoother, even Microsoft flight sim x which is largely CPU bound works better, 5-10 fps improvement across the board. Other sims i play are Lock on Flaming cliffs, Black Shark, IL-2 sturmovik 1946 (patched to 4.09) and Third wire Strike fighters series.
My proper racing sims are all older gen (Rfactor, GTR2, RBR and Simbin Race series) have all seen nice FPS improvement, they all run fine, with more frames and better image quality. They all did run fine with my old card, but are now so much better experience.
Wanna be pretty looking racing games Dirt 2 and NFS Shift have really seen huge performance and image quality increase, shame they are not so sim as they could be, but i give them 10/10 for looking amazingly well.
AvP and runs fantastic in DX11 mode (not tried DX 9) and Battlefield Bad Company 2 with anti-alias at 8x and aniso at 16x, Anti aliasing mode set to Super-sample AA.
My dilemmas were mostly lying with CPU bottlenecking the card and my ageing but good mobo, (Microsoft Flight x excluded as it is a lot CPU bound so i was not expecting miracles there) i am glad i went for 5870 as it is really doing its job even with my archaic setup, i am sure it will give me at its current state at least 12 months of fun.
I will deal with quad coded games when time comes, i will hopefully have enough cash to upgrade to decent quad setup then and still be able to use my card for good while.
If in doubt about pairing new card with dual core setup, OC your cpu and you are good to go