Video card & CPU upgrade advice sought

[nikko]

Hi, all. Hello, all. I've not really kept up with the latest and greatest since I bought my last system. I'm thinking of upgrading, for gaming reasons, and I think my video card and/or CPU are probably the components that would make the biggest difference. I currently have a AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB GDDR5 16X PCIe Video Card and an Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30 GHz 6M Intel Smart Cache LGA1155 CPU. What would be the next reasonable step up in terms of performance? FWIW, I'd prefer to spend $150 or less on each.

Thanks in advance, everyone.

 

[Demoralized]

Rest of system? Overclock the i5 and put all that cash into a video card. The 2500k is still a solid chip with lots of life left in it.

 

[Termie]

Definitely go for the video card upgrade - your CPU is more than sufficient. Coming from a 6950, it will be very hard to get a significant upgrade, however, for $150. Your best bet would be an HD 7870, which would be about 25% faster, but is now in short supply. It's been replaced by the $180 R9 270, which is actually slightly slower.

FYI, while some may suggest the HD 7950, it's completely out of stock and unavailable at this point, unfortunately.

Honestly, if I were you, I'd consider raising your budget cap - something like a $240 GTX 760 would provide a 35-40% boost in performance and is in good supply.

 

[denis280]

Honestly, if I were you, I'd consider raising your budget cap - something like a $240 GTX 760 would provide a 35-40% boost in performance and is in good supply.

So do i.+1

 

[lehtv]

Agreed, spending $150 on a video card doesn't count as an upgrade to a 6950. Not yet. The GTX760 is nice but I don't think even that is a proper upgrade, ideally you want over 50% more performance with each GPU upgrade. So either spend $300 on a 280X or keep waiting.

The CPU doesn't need upgrading, it needs overclocking.

Any particular games you play? That'd help us judge whether there's any particular reason to prefer NVIDIA.

 

[Morbus]

If you go for the 760 route, get one with a good coolers, because those things can overclock like crazy. And if you go the gigabyte route, they are nearly silent, even under strain. Fantastic piece of kit.

 

[Termie]

Agreed, spending $150 on a video card doesn't count as an upgrade to a 6950. Not yet. The GTX760 is nice but I don't think even that is a proper upgrade, ideally you want over 50% more performance with each GPU upgrade. So either spend $300 on a 280X or keep waiting.

The CPU doesn't need upgrading, it needs overclocking.

Any particular games you play? That'd help us judge whether there's any particular reason to prefer NVIDIA.

Ah, yes, the 280x is a nice upgrade, but it is not in good supply. It's completely out of stock due to LTC mining. And if it were in stock, it's twice the OP's budget, so at this point maybe he should just buy used.

 

[mfenn]

I agree that you need something of at least R9 280X or GTX 770 to be a worthwhile upgrade from your 6950. Those are both around $300.

As for the CPU, if you don't have an aftermarket HSF, grab yourself a Hyper 212 EVO and overclock. Then sit back and enjoy very-cheap Ivy Bridge/Haswell level performance.

 

[nikko]

Thanks for the replies, folks. If I can get by with my current CPU, then I can up my video card budget. I don't really have any issue running most of my games, but I purchased Rage last week and even at low/medium settings it was tearing like crazy. I can't remember which video setting it was, but one of the ones I tried to adjust wouldn't work cause my CPU allegedly doesn't "have enough cores". Could just be a Rage issue. Otherwise, I typically play L4D2, TF2, and some Battlefield.

Thanks again!

 

[lehtv]

I don't really have any issue running most of my games, but I purchased Rage last week and even at low/medium settings it was tearing like crazy.

Tearing doesn't imply bad performance, it actually implies the exact opposite. Your monitor operates at 60hz, it refreshes 60 times a second. Tearing can usually mean only one thing: your in-game framerate is higher than your refresh-rate. This results in tearing because the PC feeds frames to your monitor at a rate higher than it can refresh, thus every once in a while a refresh gets split between two incoming frames. The only known fixes to eliminate it are Vertical Sync and buying a monitor with 120hz or higher refresh rate (which does not require vertical sync). What Vertical Sync does is it synchronizes the framerate with the refresh rate, resulting in smooth output.

Besides that, I'm confident your framerates in RAGE are fine because it's not a tough game to run. This is exactly how RAGE was designed as per an official statement from id Software - they wanted it to run at perfectly smooth 60 fps with VSync even on a bit older hardware. The only catch is it uses up quite a bit of VRAM, but without going balls to the wall with texture resolution, it should still stay below that 2GB which your card has. You can use GPU-Z to monitor this. So just enable Vertical Sync and enjoy the game! :thumbsup: