Hi everyone!

I was reading the forums here and most seem to really know a lot about hardware (far more than me) :) so I was hoping to get some opinions.

I got a fairly new pc and Im curious what I should focus on upgrading. I was considering putting a second video card in for crossfire but I really don't know if that's a worthwhile investment or not. Currently, I can play most of my games on high settings but when I start getting into the top-of-the-line settings for games the FPS takes a huge hit.  I also have a clean install of Windows 7 with barely anything on it - so I should be ok from an operating system point of view (I should mention, I also have the latest CCC drivers).

One last thing - I usually play at a fairly high resolution (1920x1050) on my 42 inch TV. Im considering buying a monitor instead and using that as my output... the TV is nice but its a bit hard to get a resolution that works for me.

Here's my specs

Antec Nine Hundred Mid Tower Gamer Case 900 ATX 9 Drive Bay No PS TOP USB2.0 1394 Audio    
       
Western Digital SE16 320GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB Cache 8.9MS NCQ Hard Drive OEM 3YR MFR Warranty(I also have a second hard drive I use for movies/music, etc)    
    
G.SKILL F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL Ripjaws 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1333 CL9-9-9-24 240PIN DIMM Memory     
       
Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 AMD870 ATX AM3 DDR3 1PCI-E 2PCI RAID HD Sound GBLAN SATA3 USB3.0 *IR-$6*     
       
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban 6 Core Processor 2.8GHZ Socket AM3 Retail Box     
       
Seasonic M12II 620W EPS12V 20/24PIN ATX PFC 80+ Bronze Modular Connectors 6PIN PCI-W 120MM Fan     
       
ASUS Radeon HD 6850 DirectCU 790MHZ 1GB 4.0GHZ GDDR5 2XDVI DisplayPort HDMI PCI-E Video Card     
       

Hopefully I didn't miss anything.... I kinda copied and pasted from my invoice. :) Suggestions/thoughts?

Appreciate you all helping out this noob :D lol! Thanks!

It's your graphic card. Crossfire is the best, cheapest way to get an fps boost for you.

To clarify: The 6850 isn't a very good card. You're CPU isn't top pf the line either really, lots of people get fooled by the awesomeness of having 6 cores. However your CPU should still be good enough for all new games for a while.

The 6850 is a nice mid-range card. It's excellent for low power/low heat situations (like a HTPC), but it does lack some of the horsepower that upper end video cards have.

As far as gaming on a TV goes. These are tricky, because computers aren't really meant to go on big screens and be played from several feet away. Sure, they can do it (as in your case), but it's often times really hard to read the small font text when your sitting on the couch. For my HTPC, I actually have the resolution dropped to 1280x720 - sure it's not nearly as many pixels, but when your sitting 10ft away, you can't really notice, the text looks a lot larger and easier to read, and it's much less strain on your video card.

I'd give dropping the resolution a try before you invest in new hardware.

As far as actually upgrading your video card goes. You have a few options without having to upgrade your power supply. The 620W can handle nearly any video card out there, so you did good picking that out. Crossfire you can get another 6850, and that is probably the easiest option, but honestly, I don't think it would be worth it. Sure it will be faster on current titles, but you won't have much longevity with it, as it won't be long before games outstrip even your Crossfire setup and your seeing the same situation you are now. Alternatively, you can look at going up to the 6900 series. That's going to cost a bit more money, and you can't Crossfire them with your current card (6800 series Crossfire together, 6900 series Crossfire together, but you can't across to different generations). A single 6970 would be a huge performance bump, but it's going to have a pricetag (~$320 US w/ rebates), and the 6950 is a very good card and also decent bump (~$210 US w/ rebates for 1G). You could probably run a pair of 6950's Crossfired on your current system (provided you didn't overclock/unlock them), but I think you would probably only want to try a single 6970 with your current power supply.

So there are options to get you more speed. But if it were me, I would drop the resolution and just wait. We are right in the middle of a release cycle right now, so the next line of GPU's are only a few months away (I would bet mid-fall for the new 7800 (assuming they use a similar naming system) series). There are paths to upgrade now, for me personally the price versus benefit probably wouldn't be there, but that's a call you ultimately need to make. When the next generation comes out, we'll see them come out at current price points but essentially one tier higher in performance (that's how it's traditionally been anyway: you would get something that performs about as well as a 6970 (7950?) for the price of the 6950, and something even faster would come out at the existing price of the 6970 (7970?) ).

There are nVidia options as well, that I haven't really mentioned. Your motherboard can run a single nVidia card, and a 570GTX isn't a bad option all things considered (on par with a 6970, I would go with whichever I could find cheaper, they will perform about the same), but you won't be able to run SLI on that motherboard.

There are two important lessons to learn from this.

1)  No matter what hardware you have, a sufficiently badly coded game can make it choke.

2)  No matter what hardware you have, unreasonably high graphical settings can make it choke.

The solution is to get pretty good hardware, and then not go overboard trying to make it choke.  You've got the first part down already, it seems.  There are some settings that bring a huge performance hit, but don't really make a game look any better, and sometimes actually make it look worse.  SSAO, depth of field, and shadows are probably the most common ones.  Don't go overboard with trying to max those settings and you should be fine.

CrossFire isn't a good answer on that motherboard, as x16/x4 bandwidth will hold it back considerably.

If you really want to upgrade something, I'd try your storage.  You've got a rather slow hard drive, and that will make your system sluggish.  Move the OS and main programs onto an SSD and your system will be a lot more responsive.  That usually won't help you with frame rates in games, though.

Thank you guys for the great responses, I really appreciate it.

I think I'll hold off until the next set of cards come out and see which chipset performs better. Im usually pretty good at looking at reviews, but I built this PC myself for the first time so I'm glad I did semi-ok with the hardware :) I had a less than 1k budget so I managed to build what I thought was good for that price (including tax, shipping, etc). 

So, one last question if I may... in your guy's opinion (when the new cards are released) will my PSU be adaquete enough to power those new cards or is it hard to say? I know mine isn't completely top of the line but it seems to run my PC perfectly for the time being. I was a little concerned I wouldn't have enough power - but so far so good in that regard. Is there any way to check how much power I'm currently consuming?  I'm hopeful I will be able to upgrade my card, without having to upgrade too much else in the process. :) 

I admit, I cheaped out a bit on the hard drive but I have an external drive for anything not-game related. Still, I realize it's probably a slow down on my system overall though I hope it's not a huge bottleneck. Eventually I most certainly plan to upgrade that though it'll probably be a few months down the road. 

Appreciate all the replies and tips, thank you all kindly :) 

600-700W seems to be a sweet spot, as it can run most any single GPU/CPU combination with a bit of overhead to spare (and even some SLI/Crossfire setups). I think you'll be just fine with that power supply. Newer generations are increasingly becoming more efficient: that doesn't mean that they necessarily use less power, it just means they are getting more performance out of the power that they do use. But I don't think we'll see any huge increase in power demand such that a good 600-700W power supply that works fine today, won't continue to work fine for the next several years - at least until we move away from the ATX form factor and you need to upgrade it then anyway for plug compatibility.

There is a relatively cheap device (~$30 for the base model, they get fancy with timers and reporting and such if you like) you can get at many department stores, and online in many places, called Kill-O-Watt. It plugs inbetween the wall and whatever you are going to measure, and tells you how many watts whatever you have plugged into it is using. Now for a computer, keep in mind there is some inefficiency with your power supply, so it actual pulls more power from the wall than the parts inside are using (only about 75-80% actually gets used inside the computer, there are some power supplies that can get upwards of 85%), but it's a good reference point. Keep in mind, that number will likely be low when you check it (maybe as low as 125W or so), but as your GPU and CPU throttle up, and your hard drives spin up and down, those take a lot more power (especially hard drive spin up, which only needs it for a brief period of time and may not even register on the device). So you always need a good bit of overhead.

Late post.

Cammy - I have a very similar setup to you. I added a second 6850 and my GPU benchmark score under 3DMark 11 Extreme went up 90% (from a score of X1170 to X2230). My FPS in Rift also went up dramatically on ultra settings.

Also if you check the benchmarks on this site:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU11/188

you will see that crossfired 6850s will hang pretty well with a single 580 or 6970. So there you have it - if you have $160 burning a hole in your pocket just add a second 6850 card. Now the only question is if your mobo has 2 16X PCI-E 2.1 lanes as on my mobo (GA-890FXA-UD5). If not you wont maximize the output of crossfired GPUs.

To answer your second question: My crossfired rig seems fine on a 700 watt PSU.

So long as you're leaving things at stock speeds, a pretty good 620 W power supply (which is what you have) will have plenty of power for any PCI Express compliant video card.

My approximation to how much power you need is to add the TDP of your processor (125 W) plus your video card (126 W for what you have now) plus 100 W, and then get something rated at more than that on the +12 V rail (576 W for your current power supply).  You also need a power supply of decent quality, as voltage regulation and ripple matter, too, but yours is pretty good there.

By that approximation, any video card that stays within the 300 W cap of the PCI Express specification should be fine for your power supply.  Some of Nvidia's recent video cards have given wildly optimistic TDPs to try to mask how badly they lose to AMD in performance per watt, so I guess you have to be careful about that.  But no single GPU card from AMD will approach the 300 W cap in the foreseeable future, and I don't expect a single GPU card from Nvidia to go over it, either.

Realistically, your current system will probably never pull 300 W from the power supply.  Get a high end single GPU card and maybe you push that closer to 400 W at peak.  But that's perfectly safe on a pretty good 620 W power supply.  I'd regard it as very unlikely that you'll need to replace the power supply in the useful lifetime of your system.

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Theoretically, a full node die shrink means about twice as many transistors, each using 30% less power, so the whole chip of a given die size uses 40% more power.  That means that future parts tend to use more power.

However, I think we've kind of hit a wall of, this is as much power as most people actually want parts to actually use.  We're seeing processors stock clocked well away from how fast they could actually run, for the sake of keeping power consumption down.  AMD really tries not to go over a TDP of 125 W if they can help it, and Intel tries not to go over 130 W.  Both try to keep most of their processors under 100 W.

Gamers tend to care more about performance and less about heat and power consumption, but I think video cards are headed in that direction, too.  This is partially because they're slamming into a wall on how much heat they can safely dissipate.  The reference Radeon HD 5970 officially was supposed to be able to handle a 400 W load overclocked, but it just couldn't do it safely.  The Radeon HD 6990, with basically the best cooler AMD could build in a two slot form factor, is more or less adequate but nothing more at 375 W, and inadequate at 450 W when using the 6970 clock speeds.  The GeForce GTX 590, with its official TDP of 365 W but real-world power consumption pushing far past 400 W, is completely unsafe to the degree that it's a horrible card to buy.

Even the 6990, which can handle 375 W, has to do weird things with its airflow so that you have to design the case around it in order to get that much heat off of the card.  AMD could have gone with a purely internal exhaust card like what Gigabyte and MSI do on their premium coolers, but then you're dumping 375 W in the middle of the case, and most cases can't cope with that properly.

Furthermore, both AMD and Nvidia have designs on putting their top end GPU chips into supercomputers.  The HPC crowd is all about performance per watt, as putting 1000 video cards in a room presents cooling challenges for the entire room that just one card does not.  Often they have to spend more on air conditioning to cool the thing than electricity to run it.  If AMD and Nvidia let power consumption get out of hand, even on their top end GPU chips, they shut themselves out of that market.  For now, it's a small market, but they both believe that's going to change.  So does Intel, incidentally, whose failed Larrabee architecture was aimed at HPC, more so than at graphics.

Originally posted by jpnole

Now the only question is if your mobo has 2 16X PCI-E 2.1 lanes as on my mobo (GA-890FXA-UD5)

That question has already been answered.  It doesn't.  There's a big difference between x16/x16 bandwidth and x16/x4.  He's got an 870 chipset, and you've got an 890FX chipset.  You probably paid an extra $80 or so for your motherboard to get that.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by jpnole

Now the only question is if your mobo has 2 16X PCI-E 2.1 lanes as on my mobo (GA-890FXA-UD5)

That question has already been answered.  It doesn't.  There's a big difference between x16/x16 bandwidth and x16/x4.  He's got an 870 chipset, and you've got an 890FX chipset.  You probably paid an extra $80 or so for your motherboard to get that.

That's correct. Truth be told, I wish I upgraded to that mother board when I bought the PC but it was already really pushing my budget so I had to cut somewhere. For one card though, it works really fine. I'm definitely going to wait until the next line comes out - especially knowing my PC can handle it and should be a nice upgrade. I'll obviously pay more for the chip as it'll be new/top of the line but that should set me up for the next while, where as buying a card now for not a ton of gain seems redundent to me. 

You guys have been awesome, thank you so much for all the advice, I really learned a lot from you. You're all far far smarter in hardware specifics than I ever will be :D Im glad I picked up the unit that I did, seems like a fairly good rig based on your comments and its been impressive for me so far. Truthfully though some stuff I just guessed at and tried to research as best I could. Still, I have no complaints at all. One thing I did notice though (and maybe its just me being a noob) but with the case I have, it doesn't "look" like the fans are spinning on the front. The one on top and on the back are both doing so... but these two seem off?  Maybe they're just really silent or maybe it hasn't been hot enough to turn on... my machine runs very cool, even when playing high end games (which is a huge change from my old PC which I swear felt like it was going to meltdown everytime I booted up a game).

If some case fans look like they aren't spinning, then it's probably because they aren't.  You might have forgotten to plug them in.  Look for a power connector on the fan.

You usually want all of the fans running.  More fans running slower can get you just as much airflow as fewer fans running faster, and more running slower will make less noise.

If you don't have a problem with heat and noise now, you probably won't see anything dramatic when you do hook them up, and your 100% fine leaving them as it is.

Quiz is right, they probably have a power cord hidden somewhere in the case that just needs to be plugged in somewhere. It's a crap shoot if it has the micro-3pin for the motherboard fan headers, or a big plastic 4-pin molex adapter. It's possible your case could even have a built in fan controller (to adjust the speed, of you have a little dial or switch for it somewhere), in which case those fans are plugged into that and that would need power.

It certainly wouldn't hurt anything to power them up (provided they don't sound like jet turbines), but your computer is running well as it is, so it won't hurt anything to leave them as is either.

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Originally posted by Cammy
That's correct. Truth be told, I wish I upgraded to that mother board when I bought the PC but it was already really pushing my budget so I had to cut somewhere. For one card though, it works really fine. I'm definitely going to wait until the next line comes out - especially knowing my PC can handle it and should be a nice upgrade. I'll obviously pay more for the chip as it'll be new/top of the line but that should set me up for the next while, where as buying a card now for not a ton of gain seems redundent to me. 
 

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If you hadn't planned on running Crossfire to begin with, then the motherboard you originally picked out was just as good as any other. Honestly, I don't recommend Crossfire/SLI to anyone unless they plan on running top-of-the-line cards to get performance that otherwise can't be obtained through single card upgrades. Relying on driver profiles for performance makes them extremely hit or miss (especially for new titles, which can sometimes take months to get proper profile support), along with the additional power and heat, and the need for higher-end motherboards (at least x8/x8, with x16/x16 preferred) really means you need to plan for Multi-GPU to begin with. If you can already get similar performance in a single card, in ~most~ cases your better off to do so, because by the time you get the better motherboard, the beefier power supply, the better case ventilation, and the two cards, you've probably spent more than the single faster card would cost in the first place, and then have to roll the dice on driver profiles every time a new game comes out anyway.

Originally posted by Ridelynn

 

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Originally posted by Cammy
That's correct. Truth be told, I wish I upgraded to that mother board when I bought the PC but it was already really pushing my budget so I had to cut somewhere. For one card though, it works really fine. I'm definitely going to wait until the next line comes out - especially knowing my PC can handle it and should be a nice upgrade. I'll obviously pay more for the chip as it'll be new/top of the line but that should set me up for the next while, where as buying a card now for not a ton of gain seems redundent to me. 
 

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If you hadn't planned on running Crossfire to begin with, then the motherboard you originally picked out was just as good as any other. Honestly, I don't recommend Crossfire/SLI to anyone unless they plan on running top-of-the-line cards to get performance that otherwise can't be obtained through single card upgrades. Relying on driver profiles for performance makes them extremely hit or miss (especially for new titles, which can sometimes take months to get proper profile support), along with the additional power and heat, and the need for higher-end motherboards (at least x8/x8, with x16/x16 preferred) really means you need to plan for Multi-GPU to begin with. If you can already get similar performance in a single card, in ~most~ cases your better off to do so, because by the time you get the better motherboard, the beefier power supply, the better case ventilation, and the two cards, you've probably spent more than the single faster card would cost in the first place, and then have to roll the dice on driver profiles every time a new game comes out anyway.

Thank you again, this is such a good explanation! I learned a lot in the past few days, you guys are a huge help! Im glad now I went with the MB I did, I am going to simply take your advice, wait for the new line of cards to come out and then pick up a top of the line one then. I'll get a huge boost and won't really have to upgrade anything else :)

As for the fans, I think they're just really silent and barely noticable. Its hard to say but when I put my hand over them on the front (IE: Fans in question) I can feel a small breeze... my pc runs very cool - I suspect you're correct in saying it has a built in speed censor and probably just runs what it needs. Of course, I could overwrite that through the CCC control panel but for this machine I've never needed to. I guess I could try it to see if the small breeze turns into a hurricane :D 

My advice is that the decision to go CrossFire/SLI should be made when you build the computer.  Either get two cards up front and build around them, or just go with a single GPU setup.

One problem with CrossFire and SLI is that buying the extra card isn't the only cost.  Rather, you need a bigger case with more airflow to cool two cards, a stronger power supply to power two cards, and a more feature-laden motherboard to have the proper PCI Express slots and bandwidth.  That might easily add $100 to the total system costs, excluding the cost of buying the extra video card.  Given a choice between a $300 video card, and a $200 video card plus the option to go CrossFire or SLI in the future, the $300 video card wins.

Furthermore, even if you pay $100 in assorted other expenses to get the option of CrossFire/SLI, you'll probably never actually go with CrossFire or SLI if you didn't do it up front.  By the time your single GPU card is inadequate and in need of an upgrade, it will probably be off the market, and newer generations of cards will be out.  It will be more sensible to buy a newer single GPU card than a second card of whatever you had, unless you can get a good deal on a used card.

Now, there are people with huge budgets who believe that a single high end video card isn't good enough.  That's who CrossFire and SLI makes sense for.  But on a new system today, I wouldn't go CrossFire or SLI on anything slower than a Radeon HD 6950.

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I have an Antec Three Hundred Illusion, and the fans on that case have Molex power connectors that you have to plug into the power supply.  They also something to adjust the fan speed, with three speed settings.  They can be pretty noisy if you turn the fans on high speed, but at low speed, they're pretty quiet, and deliver plenty of airflow, which I need more than I used to now that my reference Radeon HD 5850 has become an internal exhaust card.

I don't know if the fans on the Antec Nine Hundred work the same way, both in the power and the fan speed sense.  But they might.

Quizz, for me at least that tends to depend on the price of the second cards in the future. More often than not there comes a time where a second card will give as much of a boost (or close enough to matter) as a more expensive single one. Occasionally though, by the time the price comes down far enough the extra performance from the newer single is more than worth it.

It's a bit of a gamble but with decent odds.

Video cards don't become much cheaper to produce as time passes.  If a card costs $200 to build and sells for $300, then a year later, if it has to be priced at $150 to be a good value for the money, they're not going to sell it for $150.  They're going to discontinue it and sell newer cards for $300.  Well, they might sell the card for $150 if they have some left over that they just need to get rid of, but that doesn't necessarily last very long.

Now, low end cards can hang around for a long time, as those are very cheap to build.  But high end cards get discontinued and disappear.

Raw performance isn't the only factor, either.  A newer card is less likely to break than an older card, because it doesn't have the wear and tear on it.  Two older cards will use much more power than a newer card for the same performance.  A newer card will have a better feature set.

How big these gaps are depends on how much later you want to get the second card.  If you're going to buy the second card a few months after the first, then you should buy it when you assemble the system and not wait.

I don't live in the US so things may be different there. It's quite frequent that top end cards hit the sub £100 eventually over here.

Besides, $300 cards are only worth < £200 here and those, well those are garunteed to be under £100 in a year or two as they are mid end cards, unless of course they get discontinued. In which case Ebay is always a refuge.

Less likely to break? That tends to depend on the batch rather than the model. Power I agre on these days, the top end new ones tend to use less than mid end from 3 or 4 years ago.

I can see the case for upgrading at a later time via Crossfire/SLI - I even did it once myself. But it really only makes sense if you can get that second card for dirt cheap - used on Ebay/Craigslist, for example, or find a retailer who has them on clearance to clear inventory. I ended up only using that SLI setup (a pair of 260's) for about a year, the noise started to drive me crazy (two cards, no matter how quiet, put off twice the noise as a single card...), and SLI performance wasn't very consistent.

Cards generally don't get cheaper (at least in the states), they just get moved to box stores like Best Buy where people who don't know any better will pay full price plus 25% for a video card that's been on the market for four years or more ("Hey, 9600 is a bigger number than 580, right, so it must be faster. Besides, it's says gaming 3D card and the girl has bigger boobs on this box").