Graphics Card Upgrade advice

Jaegermeister

Hi,

I bought a Dell XPS Desktop 8300, i7-2600 3.40GHz, 12GB ram a few months back and I'd now like to upgrade the GPU which is currently a GT 530.

I was going to go for one of the new AMD 7850s given their rave reviews for performance and low electricity/temps, however there appears to be serious problems with these cards and World of Warcraft (which I play a lot of) and Blizzard games in general.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7870-review-benchmark,3148-21.html

A search around the web shows that this appears to be an ongoing problem.

Now, I would like to be able to play WoW on ultra and other games like Battlefield 3 etc on reasonably high settings so what should I do?

I had thought to wait a few more months and hope that as it's a newish card the problem will be resolved or go for an Nvidia based card (which apparently WoW etc are optomised to run on), however these appear to offer less value for money and run hotter and draw more electricity than my 460w Dell GPU can handle comfortably.

The other alternative I guess is go for an older AMD card which should have any problems with WoW solved by now such as the 5850/6850/6870.

Any advice/suggestions greatly appreaciated.

Thanks in advance.

Eboggles

Jaegermeister wrote: »

Hi,

I bought a Dell XPS Desktop 8300, i7-2600 3.40GHz, 12GB ram a few months back and I'd now like to upgrade the GPU which is currently a GT 530.

I was going to go for one of the new AMD 7850s given their rave reviews for performance and low electricity/temps, however there appears to be serious problems with these cards and World of Warcraft (which I play a lot of) and Blizzard games in general.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7870-review-benchmark,3148-21.html

A search around the web shows that this appears to be an ongoing problem.

Now, I would like to be able to play WoW on ultra and other games like Battlefield 3 etc on reasonably high settings so what should I do?

I had thought to wait a few more months and hope that as it's a newish card the problem will be resolved or go for an Nvidia based card (which apparently WoW etc are optomised to run on), however these appear to offer less value for money and run hotter and draw more electricity than my 460w Dell GPU can handle comfortably.

The other alternative I guess is go for an older AMD card which should have any problems with WoW solved by now such as the 5850/6850/6870.

Any advice/suggestions greatly appreaciated.

Thanks in advance.

Budget?

Jaegermeister

Eboggles wrote: »

Budget?

Ah yes, apologies for not adding that at the start.

I would say tops €250. If a much cheaper card will suffice all the better.

Any suggestions over the budget are fine too but I think they would probably be overkill on my current setup.

Eboggles

Jaegermeister wrote: »

Ah yes, apologies for not adding that at the start.

I would say tops €250. If a much cheaper card will suffice all the better.

Any suggestions over the budget are fine too but I think they would probably be overkill on my current setup.

WOW is pretty CPU limited so I'd say a HD7770 could do it, but I don't actually play the game so I'm not 100% on that.

If you wanted to spend your budget, get a HD7850 from here, or wait for the GTX 660 which should be released in the next 4 weeks (rumour).

Bazzo

Eboggles wrote: »

WOW is pretty CPU limited so I'd say a HD7770 could do it, but I don't actually play the game so I'm not 100% on that.

If you wanted to spend your budget, get a HD7850 from here, or wait for the GTX 660 which should be released in the next 4 weeks (rumour).

The problem he has with that is that he said the WoW has issues with the 7850. Personally I'd just bump it up to a HD7870, though they seem to be out of stock at the moment.

Eboggles

Bazzo wrote: »

The problem he has with that is that he said the WoW has issues with the 7850. Personally I'd just bump it up to a HD7870, though they seem to be out of stock at the moment.

Most problems with cards are fixed with driver updates, and WOW being as popular as it is I couldn't imagine that problem being around for much longer.

As for the HD7870 it's a killer card (I may actually pick it up soon) but not worth it when playing an older game that is CPU limited.

Jaegermeister

Thanks Bazzo and Eboggles for your replies.

I believe the 7870 also has/had issues with WoW.

The 7770 appears to be a pretty good card for WoW alright, not sure how it would manage with other titles when I eventually drag myself away from WoW though but I'll check it out.

Thanks for the link for the 7850, that's a lot cheaper than most versions out there. Will the smaller 1 gig memory on the card matter much for performance?

I'm leaning towards waiting for a while longer so to see what the 660 you suggested is like, also it increases the chances that a fix will be found for the 7850 and WoW.

If you're gonna get the 7870 it might be worth waiting a little, AMD announced price cuts a few days back

Bazzo

Eboggles wrote: »

Bazzo wrote: »

The problem he has with that is that he said the WoW has issues with the 7850. Personally I'd just bump it up to a HD7870, though they seem to be out of stock at the moment.

Most problems with cards are fixed with driver updates, and WOW being as popular as it is I couldn't imagine that problem being around for much longer.

As for the HD7870 it's a killer card (I may actually pick it up soon) but not worth it when playing an older game that is CPU limited.

This is what I would have imagined too but it seems the issues have actually been around for a while. I notice on some older benchmarks that it's noted that there were problems with crashes while testing on WoW.

I can't seem to find nearly as many issues with the 7870 though(I'm actually planning on picking up one of these for my new build too, great value for performance card) so that's why I suggested it.

Still though, waiting a bit and seeing how the upcoming "standard" gtx 660 performs and is priced is a good plan. The 7770 is a good value card by the way, but definitely on on the lower end of the spectrum for gaming.

Jaegermeister

I did some checking up on the 1gb versions of the 7850 and apparently up to 1080p they're as fast, and sometimes faster than the 2gb versions and should work out at less than €200.

I guess I'll wait and see how the 660 shapes up and maybe the driver issues with the 7850 will be sorted by then.