Widescreen Gaming Forum

Guys, need your help. Recently ordered second 5850 and I see that my OC [email protected] is really weak. In most games now I have not more than 3-5% overall perfomance if compare to single card. In Mirror's Edge I have even less FPS than with single 5850.

I can't afford new platform like i5/i7. I want to order Q9450/9550 and OC it. Will it help me?

Thanks!

Since you wanted high frame rates then you should've bought a faster GPU. You already spent more than $600 (2x5850) so a 5970 would've been better. Don't expect too much performance considering you are playing at a very high resolution.

How bad is the fps really? Just lower your settings and be happy playing. No need to spend so much just for gaming.

Settings in every game are always low as possible. FPS i'm getting is 40-60. It's with single 5850 and [email protected], after I bought second 5850 I don't see any perfomance impovement as I should. I believe it's due to weak CPU.

I don't think your CPU is weak. The only reason to replace the CPU with a quadcore might be games like GTA IV which benefit from more cores. Even today most games only use one or two cores and a 4,1GHZ Wolfdale is pretty fast. The problem is not your cpu. What Mainboard do you have in use? Maybe you are short on PCIe lanes. Is CF working correctly? How much Vram the 5850s have? Post a 3dmark score and we'll see.

Already bought a Q9550, OC it to 4050Mhz, I see enough FPS now. With E8400 in BC2 I had a lot of framedrops even to 20 fps at 5760x1080. With Q9550 average fps is 70, minimum 45 in very hard scenes. I'm happy now :rockout

Really? Looks odd to me. :roll: Did you only make a test with BC2? I don't have that game.

That does seem odd, I Using a E8400 at 3.0 and I'm getting great FPS I most every game. I do have a 5870, though that shouldn't make much difference. Test have shown the extra VRAM I have shouldn't make much a difference either.

Try BC2 on E8400 with single 5850/5870 in 5760x1080 at min quality, you'll receive 30-70 fps and a lot of catastrophic framedrops while explosions and building collapsing, fps will drop to 10! After I bought a second 5850 improvement was about 5-7 fps. No fun! I read this review and realised that I need more powerfull CPU to have crossfire properly working. See this graph and how great crossfire reacts to the quad CPU

Try BC2 on E8400 with single 5850/5870 in 5760x1080 at min quality, you'll receive 30-70 fps and a lot of catastrophic framedrops while explosions and building collapsing, fps will drop to 10! After I bought a second 5850 improvement was about 5-7 fps. No fun! I read this review and realised that I need more powerfull CPU to have crossfire properly working. See this graph and how great crossfire reacts to the quad CPU

I'm suddenly finding it very hard not to justify buying a second 5870. D:

Except that if I did, I would want two of the 2G versions, and that's hard to justify.

Maybe I can tell you in the next weeks if its worth it. :D

I ran my 5870 with my old e6750 running at 3.3ghz for a couple weeks, and upon getting my q9550 i saw a pretty fair jump gaming performance. The e6750 really seemed to be choking that video card. So ya, it'll help. My ram sucks at overclocking, so the most I've been able to get our of my q9550 is 3.5ghz or so. Using the Freezer 64 Pro i used on my old CPU. It overcclocks just as easily.

But in retrospect, i should've bitten the bullet and went with an i7 system. I was jsut to cheap to get mew mobo/ram, even though i could afford it at the time

Anyone who thinks a C2D is an acceptable gaming CPU these days is far off the mark.

A C2D, regardless of speed, is antiquated architecture that seriously constricts even a GTX 280 SLI. It would definitely choke a 5850 CF.