I'm contemplating a video card upgrade myself, wondering about the HD5770 now.

I have an HEC Raptor R500 (500W) PSU, for gfx I'm still using the HD4650 that came with this rig. How much of boost would the new card give me? Most of my games are at least 2-3 years old, in fact SH4 is probably the newest one I have and I haven't even installed it yet.

Lol, here's a question, what's the most hard-core card I could go with, without upgrading anything else? Considering that I'm not going to be playing any of the latest and greatest games any time soon, of course. And then I'll work my way down from there to a more reasonably priced selection. :D

Rest of the specs:

AMD Athlon II X2 240 2.8 GHz AM3 processor
Asus M3A78-EM motherboard
Win7 64-bit
8 GB RAM

And it will need to be one PCIe 2.0 x 16 card since that's the only slot I'd have open for it. There's an empty slot below it so there's plenty of room there though.

@Frau: a HD5870 1Gb GDDR5

according to sapphire the system requirement is a 500 watt PSU (the same goes for the HD5770)

as for the HD5770 compared to your current card the HD5770 should in theory be about twice as fast then your HD4650.

HunterICX

Thanks.!

Wow... after a casual comparison there appears to be quite a price difference between the 5770 and 5870. The former is more in my price range. :D

Any particular recommendations on brand name?

Well if you pick ATI you can't go wrong with Sapphire they are the largest supplier of AMD/ATI based cards ( I've got a Sapphire HD5850)
just make sure the HD5770 you're going to purchase is the 1Gb version and not the 512mb :03:

HunterICX

That's good, because they seemed to be priced better. :yeah:
Hey, I didn't fall off the truck yesterday. It was, like, last week or something. Monday at the very latest. :D :O:

Edit: Okay, looking now at Amazon... what is the difference between

http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Radeo...5397828&sr=1-1

and this

http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Vapor...5397828&sr=1-2

and this

http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Radeo...5398647&sr=1-6

?

Other than the price, and the fact that one appears to have some kind of cover over the whole underside.

sorry, its a bad habbit from work... just to make things sure as I sometimes have to explain so much to bloody tourists that I wonder if they are qualified at all to ride motorcycles :dead:

so....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXTWx...eature=related

:O:

HunterICX

:rotfl2:

It's okay, I didn't even know video cards had memory until a couple years ago. :doh:

1.This is the standard version of the Sapphire HD5770

2.Same as standard but with a better fan on it, so it works at lower operating temperatures and is a lot quiter.

3.this iirc is the first card that supported 3 DVI monitors in ATI/AMD's eyefinity mode that delivered a true SLS work area on your desktop (Single Large Surface)

Unless you plan to use eyefinity I would say your options are #1 and #2

HunterICX

Well all I need in the way of output is one DVI for the monitor and one HDMI for the TV I've got hooked up. So I may go with #2 for the better thermal performance. Quiet is also good. :yep:

Thanks for the info!

I run the 1GB 5770 Sapphire and can definitely vouch for it - so far it's been 1.5 years of nothing but solid performance. Runs all the games I throw at it very reasonably. It's above the rest of the specs in your system, and actually I wouldn't even go for a faster video card with your particular set-up (since the performance cap in games would be set more by your processor than the video card).

The cooling on the Sapphire cards is pretty solid and has coped very well for me. You may want to go for the somewhat quieter one just for the quiet, but the temperatures haven't been a problem for me even with my non-fancy cooler - just be sure that the rest of your case has good air flow.

But yeah, I've had 0 problems with it so far, and at the price it's going for now, I honestly can't not recommend it. :yeah:

Thanks, it was your recommendation upthread that started me looking at that card more closely when I was surfing around trying to get a general idea of what was out there that wasn't too expensive or too hardcore for my system or my needs. And yeah, the price on the Vapor-X version of it is pretty sweet, especially when compared with the 5870.

As for cooling I've got the fans that came onboard when I bought the rig plus one each for each internal HDD and a third extra that provides some additional airflow over the MB, specifically the expansion slots for the gfx/sound cards. Plus the one that's on the gfx card itself. And all the RAM sticks came with those heat-dispersing covers, I don't know if that helps a whole lot but I figure it can't hurt. TBH I wasn't sure what I was doing when I set it up, I just added as much extra airflow as I could with the space and power connectors available, lol.

A comparison table for graphics cards:

http://tpucdn.com/reviews/ASUS/HD_58...es/perfrel.gif

Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...Matrix/29.html

Prices here are $180 for the 5770 and $290 for the 5870. Imho the extra $110 is worth it... :D

Oh, if I was buying a system today, I definitely would go for the 5870! But I dunno, on the other hand with the rest of that system taken into the account, it feels like it's a bit of an excess that's not going to be a big performance improvement without upgrading the rest of the system, too.

The good news is that she's having an AM+ board. The AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition is very cheap these days!

So looking forward a bit, I would definitely go for the 5870 :up:

Look what I've just done to mine:
http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...970/5870WC.jpg

Buying second-hand parts is another way of saving some good dollars.

The 5770 was $119 on Amazon, the 5870 was just more than I wanted to spend right now... so I got the 5770. I'm sure it will be enough of an improvement to keep me happy for a while.

Someday though I'm gonna build a computer from scratch, and go nuts. Problem is I'd end up buying parts here and there over a long period of time and by the time I had everything I needed, half of it would probably be outdated. :haha: