Upgrading from 4870 1024mb. Advice please

[man_from_uncle]

Hi all,

I've been putting off upgrading for a while and I'm still not prepared (financially) to do a total rebuild. However The Witcher II is giving me nothing more than medium settings and even that isn't as smooth as i'd like. It's the first game that i've wanted to play that doesn't run up to the standard I expect. My current set-up is as follows:

Q6600 @ 3.5ghz
ATI 4870 1gig
4 gig ram (limited by XP 32 bit)
750w Corsair
1920x1200

Now I know that i'm skatting on thin ice still using a 32 bit OP, but I think that if I'm going to spend another £100-150 or so to get the best gaming experiance possible from what i've for, it's best done on a new graphics card. Everything else, Windows 7, CPU, RAM maybe an SSD, can wait just a little longer. Of course as and when I do have that extra £500 to build a new platform, i'd like my new graphics card to still be decent enough. I'd prefer an ATI card right now as i'll lose less sleep not having to worry about accidental driver conflicts when i install it, but I've had plenty of nvidia cards i've loved too and I will suck it up if i have to.

Any and all advice would be welcome.

Uncle

 

[triggerthat]

You running XP?

 

[man_from_uncle]

To my shame, I am

 

[triggerthat]

You don't need to upgrade, then. I have a similar spec machine and I play it well on high. Upgrade to Windows 7 (you'll see a nice performance difference).

 

[man_from_uncle]

I wasn't expecting that answer.

Could you be more specific though about what your set-up is, what res you play at and if you've playing on anything other than default 'high'.

Thanks.

 

[opethdisciple]

Considering that the witcher 2 is a dx9 game, xp isnt such a hindrance.

However, buying a dx11 capable gpu its a shame to not have access to dx11 graphics just becuase you still running xp.

If your budget is around £150, I think you'v got a choice either a 6870 or a 5850

However, your bottlenecks are still your cpu and winxp.

Benchmarks here.

Next thing to upgrade would be operating system to Win7 x64

Edit*

Depending on psu, if you could find a dirt cheap second hand 4870, then you could xfire.

 

[triggerthat]

I'd get a 5850 and then a another one (xFire) 6 month's later.

 

[rolypolyman]

Though the 5850 has a bit more grunt and will probably overclock more I would recommend a 6870 as its newer tech and has better tesselation which may matter in the future. Very good prices around for the 6870 just now.

 

[man_from_uncle]

Thank you all.

I have been tempted by getting a second cheap 4870 to go crossfire with, but I think that with my motherboard, I'm limited to x16/x4. And i don't think its PCI-e 2, so the bandwidth hit will make it a very modest upgrade at most.

If I do go for something in the range of 5850/6850/6870/5870, to what extent will I appreciate the upgrade? How far does a Q6600 @ 3.5ghz bottleneck this range of cards? I can push the CPU quite a bit further with alternative cooling, I've had it stable at 3.9ghz using low pressure water from a beer pump, but on a colder day condensation starts becoming a problem. Never really got my head around how to make it work without running that gaunlet. And from what i was reading back when I set it up, I didn't really think the extra few hundred mhz made that much difference. Things changed now?

Finally if I do save up a little extra, would there be any point in getting something from the range above, a 6950 or the like, with the bottlebnecks in CPU, OS and RAM?

Cheers chaps.

 

[arc@css]

Don't worry too much about the cpu just quite yet, I run mine at 3.4 with an overclocked 480gtx and games run very well indeed. Get a new OS first.

 

[rolypolyman]

Have a wee look at this review of several cpu's and how they perform with a 580, quite interesting.

 

[man_from_uncle]

Interesting. The newer CPUs make a lot of difference in games at modest resolutions, but considerably less when you get to 1920x1200 and beyond.

I don't have much call for video encoding, and I either game at 1900x1200 or 2048x1536 depending on which monitor I use. I'm inclined to think that I don't need to upgrade my CPU as soon as I thought.

Now I've got to work out how much of a limit i'm imposing on myself by using Windows XP 32-bit. Obviously I'm not getting DX10/11, but am I losing much DX9 performance by not using 7?

 

[1kiwi]

GTX 480 for that money.