need advice on upgrades

bomberboysk said:
Home audio is never a bad place to put money, Polk makes some exceptional speakers for the money.

As far as displays....if it was me i would probably lean towards an NEC model:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824002554

As far as GPU's....whats the rest of your setup look like? The 460's right now are really the best as far as bang for the buck, although it will be interesting to see what comes about with ATi's 6000 series.

Also, the 460 in SLI is very close to performance as far as the 5970, ESPECIALLY with the latest drivers. Some games are scaling up to 95% with the 260.xx drivers.
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Intel Q9560 @ 3.2Ghz (stock)
4gig DDR Corsair RAM
Asus P5N mobo
EVGA GTX 260
Samsung 22" LCD (1680 x 1050)

I want to buy a new monitor because I am tired of having 4 computers hooked up to a KVM on a crowded desk. Gonna bust out another folding computer table up and move all my Macs to a new desk and give them their own KVM with my current 22" monitor and was looking at buying a new monitor to replace it. That I think I am going to do.

The video card I am on the fence. The games I play run at max settings with my current set up. L4D, L4D2, TF2, SC2, Alien Swarm, Fallout 3 and a few older games. The rest of my gaming is done on my consoles. I don't necessarily need it, and it is not like those games really fully support and take advantage of SLI. However, a DX11 card would be an upgrade I suppose.
 
A gtx460 1gb can handle everything I've thrown at it on 1920x1080. Runs full settings 16x/16x AA/AF with excellent frame rates nothing even close to lag.


Aastii said:
even though a 5970 is just 2 5850's on 1 PCB.
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This is not accurate. The 5970 is two underclocked 5870's.
 
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87dtna said:
A gtx460 1gb can handle everything I've thrown at it on 1920x1080. Runs full settings 16x/16x AA/AF with excellent frame rates nothing even close to lag.




This is not accurate. The 5970 is two underclocked 5870's.
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Yeah and there are plenty of games that don't take advantage of SLI, and no applications really that I use outside of games would take advantage of it. Due to the super buggy reports on Nvidia drivers and SLI I have read I am not really wanting to jump into it. Plus the power consumption and heat it would generate seems like it would not always be a plus.

Not to mention I run dual OSes on my PC and Linux has no support for such things.
 
What games don't support SLI? There's a lot more that support it with the gtx400 series that didn't with the gtx200 series in SLI due to updated drivers.

Scaling is way better on the 400 series now too.

But either way, I was only talking one GTX460. I don't have two, just one 460 1gb card and it handles everything I throw at it with 1080p.

But also as I already said, if you aren't looking to get a card for a couple months wait for the gtx475.
 
What PSU does the OP have? I have to agree with MEP here, this seems overkill for a 24" monitor. Probably better putting the money in a core system rather than a new gpu.
 
Aastii said:
Yea sorry I wasn't crystal clear enough, 5870 core underclocked to 5850 speeds with same memory bandwidth as a 5850
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87dtna said:
Right but it still has the 1600 stream processors X2.
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@bold, does that not mean 1600 stream processor then?

@bigfella a 260 and 460 use about the same amount of power under load, if his system is happy powering a 260, it will power a 460 no problems. Would need to know if we are discussing a 470 or 480 though, or 5870
 
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87dtna said:
What games don't support SLI? There's a lot more that support it with the gtx400 series that didn't with the gtx200 series in SLI due to updated drivers.

Scaling is way better on the 400 series now too.

But either way, I was only talking one GTX460. I don't have two, just one 460 1gb card and it handles everything I throw at it with 1080p.

But also as I already said, if you aren't looking to get a card for a couple months wait for the gtx475.
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Not every game has SLI profiles in the options settings, where you can adjust to your SLI set up. I am sure if the game doesn't have any advanced SLI profile/options the game would still possibly benefit a little, but that is arguable.
 
87dtna said:
Any game that doesn't have the settings probably wouldn't need SLI'd 460's in the first place ;)
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That was sort of my main point of not getting SLI. I do need a new monitor. I am having trouble finding a 27" LED back lit monitor though. At least there are none showing on Newegg.
 
tlarkin said:
That was sort of my main point of not getting SLI. I do need a new monitor. I am having trouble finding a 27" LED back lit monitor though. At least there are none showing on Newegg.
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Yeah, I would think that if a 260 is doing you good then a 460 would be fine. It wouldn't be too much of an upgrade, though. I partially agree with mep that if you don't need an upgrade then you should just save up for other things, and then when you do need an upgrade you can get the same card (or better) for less.
 
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