Keep 6970 Or Upgrade

[alexleov]

Hey all I have ended up with a sapphire hd6970 and a sapphire toxic hd6950.

I have a 1440p monitor, i5 2500k and a hx650 psu.

I have been happy with the 6950 for 18 months. I was going to replace it as I thought it was loud but it turned out its one of my fans on my CPU cooler.

I thought the hd6970 was faulty as it would shutdown at boot. But it seems to be working fine with a 2nd reset of the motherboard bios.

Question is what would you do?

I don't think my psu would handle crossfire.

I don't play FPS mostly RPG

I plan on doing a refresh of my rig late this year early next anyway. New case, fully modular psu, thinking about custom loop, if haswell is a lot better then sandy may swap that also.

My current thought is to sell the HD6950 now use the 6970 till I refresh and replace everything.

[Near]

I would suggest in a bigger monitor, but that's just my opinion.

[alexleov]

Bigger then 27" 2560x1440?

[kaneandtaker]

I'll definitely stick to AMD if their frame times will be fixed. Currently I own 2x 680s (see my sig) and I'm NOT HAPPY with them. They can't overvolt and they downclock when temps get too high. They pissed me off and I'm never going green again for next upgrade.

As for your situation, I suggest CFX them since only Nvidia is rumored to have their next gen soon. No news from AMD yet.

[TechFan@ic]

I would suggest selling your 6950 & upgrading within a few months, even if you don't end up buying a 700 series card, their release is bound to have an effect on pricing.
Last we heard the first of the 700 series is coming in about three weeks.

[caplus12000]

definitely get a next gen 700 series card...some series improvements there. and besides the old 6900 series of cards by amd weren't that great in my opinion. just tweaked 5870s. but anyway 700 series is right around the corner. probably get a gtx 770 or 780 if u have extra cash :)

[TechFan@ic]

definitely get a next gen 700 series card...some series improvements there. and besides the old 6900 series of cards by amd weren't that great in my opinion. just tweaked 5870s. but anyway 700 series is right around the corner. probably get a gtx 770 or 780 if u have extra cash :)

The 6900 series wasn't tweaked 5870s, it was a completely new set of GPUs.

The 700 series on the other hand is just a re-badged 600 series, the 770 is a 680 & the 760 Ti is a 670. (Allegedly)

[killerx525]

Just hold it off for now and but your power supply should be able to handle the 2 cards as my pair of 6950 peak usage was 550W under full CPU and GPU load.

[GamerDude]

Assuming your PSU can handle them, CF them since you have a pretty high res monitor. You'd need all the rendering power you can muster and the HD6970 + HD6950 would make a pretty potent combo. With them in CF, you should be able to handle most games High - Max @1440P.

[rodrigorodrigues]

Get yourself a newer card with the ram to sport such a large monitor. If you CF those cards, you'll just be bottleneck by the 2gig ram each have for such a large screen.

[brownninja97]

a 7870 will beat the 6970 and the 7850 can even beat the 6970 in some games. If you can get the 7870 LE then that is better

[killerx525]

Get yourself a newer card with the ram to sport such a large monitor. If you CF those cards, you'll just be bottleneck by the 2gig ram each have for such a large screen.

2GB of vram is fine for large resolution.