Upgrade from 4870's to 5870's

I know its possible to upgrade to 5870's, but does anyone know the CORRECT dell part numbers for primary and slave 5870's?

Also, has anyone in this forum successfully upgraded their graphics to 5870's?

My full specs are in sig...

 

Lucky

Just ordered Mine

but Please double check !!

F603N - Left Fan
F605N - Right Fan
C8245 - 5870, primary - (goes on left side)
RV546 - 5870, secondary with cable and heatsinks (goes on right side)

 

Do you mind me asking what the total price for that is?

Also, why are you ordering fans? Are new fans needed for the 5870's or are you just replacing them since you will be wrist deep in your notebook?

 

I was forced to order the above parts directly from dell cos of warranty issues with my local dell authorised supplier

I only ordered the F605N and the RV546 but I listed the 4 parts for your info.

the 2 parts costed me Euro 268.45 (18% VAT Included)

 

^^

Hmmm...that's about $300.00

I guess its really not bad

 

per card for a minimal improvement is NOT worth it at all.

 

That really depends on what you are doing with it, and if DX11 is important enough to you or not.

 

I use it for video editing, cad rendering and games with 8gb ram to remove swapfile

 

It is not a good idea to disable the swap file on modern operating systems (particularly Vista or Windows 7). It doesn't matter how much RAM you have installed.

I know that a number of people will claim otherwise, but frankly they are wrong. Disabling the paging file was a viable performance strategy in XP and earlier, but that is not the case with newer operating systems and hardware.

 

Interesting info, I will look deeply into it . .

comments are welcome

Thanks !!

 

Thanks for the info...what I want to do is run IZ3D and play games in 3D on my new 120hz hometheater projector. Are the 4870's compatible with running IZ3D or comparable technologies?

 

Interesting stuff chiefs.

Can you please elaborate. This makes for interesting reading. eheheheeh
Pros and Cons. Why is it bad to do so and so forth. Performance hinderance difference?
Thanks.

Cheers.

 

Older versions of Windows simply used the swap file as a place to page memory once your physical RAM is exhausted. Newer versions aren't as naive.

Pagefile is required for several operating system features such as performance counter (perfmon), bugcheck dumps, hibernation, etc.

The pagefile itself is used by the memory manager system, which takes rarely-used data and writes it out to the paging file (one data page at a time - hence the term "paging"). This memory then becomes available for other things. Such as the disk cache or other programs.

I found a really great quote out there from a random comment on an article about this topic: "Best advice concerning the pagefile: leave it alone unless there is a specific need to change it. Windows designers know more about memory management than you do.".

You can find a great many supporters and naysayers out there: why should I not disable paging file in windows 7 - Bing

By and large, those who suggest disabling it generally really have no deep grasp of how Windows manages memory, while those that say you shouldn't mess with it tend to be well-known and highly educated in the subject.

 

Ah nice nice thanks for that in depth response chiefs. Awesome stuffs.
So I might try re enabling my VRam then.
I have noticed in the past that certain games don't even allow you to start or run them if you have virtual mem pagefile disabled.
I actually disable all those perf mons and hibernation and event viewer monitoring stuffs LOL.

Cheers.

 

I've actually tested this in the past on windowsXP. The recommended 700+MB of RAM as advised by Microsoft is not enough, not even close. The system will, some reasons unknown, use up the RAM and begin to choke due to the lack of a pagefile. In addition to this Windows OS behavior, there are no performance benefits that I have found in disabling it. In fact, as someone have already stated, some programs/games will complain and refuse to run if the pagefile is not found. However, these are mostly old programs have the check hard-coded.

I've even used RAM space for the pagefile and found little benefit. Unless you're really starving for HD space or something silly like that, just leave the pagefile alone as you gain nothing from disabling it.

 

You would gain a much larger performance using the extra RAM as a ramdrive to temporarily hold game textures, game mods, or even web cache.
In fact, if you could properly organize it, I would have the entire AppData directory in RAM, as long as it was written back to disk before shutdown. i find this to be a highly active space that would benefit from some ram goodness

 

The operating system's disk cache already does these things, and it is very good. It will use whatever memory is available and will grow/shrink when needed. This will almost always be superior to configuring a fixed ramdrive.

If the initial read from disk is the concern, then a decent SSD will do wonders for that.

 

I decided to order the cards today. It only took me three tries with dell!

1st women hung up on me when I told her it was none of her business where I got the part numbers from.

2nd dood said the system was down and he couldn't give me the pricing.

3rd guy was like one second... found it.. do you want to put this on your dell prefered account?

So the two cards were about 670 shipped with taxes. I'm sure I can get 400 or so for my 4870's on ebay. Not really a "bad" upgrade price. I really wanted the direct x 11 compatibility for WOW.

Now for the i7-940xm ES upgrade from Shirley!

 

Any updates for this Matt?

I'm curious what items come with each part number etc. Some people say you need to order fans separately but I have also heard that you don't?

I'm probably going to get my 2nd card sometime in the near future.

 

I'm thinking of downgrading my 5870's to 4870's since I don't game much these days and save the difference for the soon-to-come R3. Need to get my friend to return my 4870's quick.

 

I'll trade you mine with some cash...

 

I already have the 4870's so I'll probably sell'em here.

 

I'm thinking about upgrading but can't justify the cost. If I can sell mine I might consider it...

 

Well im looking for the secondary 4870 card/cable and fan/screws if any one is selling them .

 

I ordered the fans. Not sure i'll keep them though. I should have the cards by the 12th.

 

Why did you order fans, are they different from the 4870's?

 

I was pretty sure that i didn't need them, but if I had to replace them, i figured i'd might as well have them onhand. They're going back when I get the new cards in and everything is running right.

delivery date is now 11/17! suck

 

Hey matt, just wanted to follow up and see if you were able to complete the upgrade.

I think crossfire and an extreme processor might be a christmas gift to myself hehe.

 

I just got the confirmation 10 minutes ago that they shipped! I placed the order on 10/30/10.

I'll have them by the 24th.

Soo... who wants to buy a pair of 4870's?

 

Im looking for the secondary 4870 and cable/fan/screws .... pm me if your interested in selling the secondary card and price

 

Hi, has anyone got a price for upgrading via Alienware for a pair of 5870. The last person i spoke to at Alienware said 200 euros for the pair with fans and crossfire cable, which i did not believe.

 

that price is way too low lol

but if they sold it to you for that price it would be sweet lol

 

I was quoted $675 + taxes & shipping

 

Nice! Just in time for the long weekend.

If you could, take a few pictures of what is included in the kit.

It would be helpful to clear up any confusion on these boards.

Thanks!

 

Hrmmm.. I just put them in!

Master Card has the card and heatsink attached. No screws.
Slave Card has the the card, heatsink, x-fire cable. No screws.

I'm wondering how do I know if I need to do the BIOS update on the cards? I have the newest driver from Dell installed. No bluescreen.

 

Do you have the Catalyst Control Center installed? I would use the info>graphics section to confirm the BIOS version of both cards, do NOT use GPU-Z as some of us had GPU-Z show they were the same when if fact they were different.

Mine was not blue screening even with them being different. I went ahead and updated to avoid any oddball problems in the future.

 

This is want i thought, i have the alienware tech support name i spoke to and will be ringing again to find out.
The only reason why i want to upgrade is to expand to 2-3 screens and use eyefinity

 

Eyefinity only uses one card right?

That’s the main reason I haven’t messed with it yet. So you go 3x the resolution, with half the GPU horsepower, wouldn’t that be 1/6 the FPS? So say you averaged 90 FPS on a single screen with crossfire, with eyefinity you’re down to 15 FPS

Unless of course you lower your resolution and options a bunch, but then what’s the point?

 

Nice!

So they don't come with screws. No fan either eh?

I would assume you would want to update the VBios regardless, as it increases compatibility with future driver releases, as well as non-dell drivers.

 

No fans. I ordered them seperately. I dont think i'm going to switch them out. The ones that came with the laptop work just fine. Probably just keep them just in case.

So.. No screws and no fans.

Updated Vbios. It needed it!

 

matt-helm

Any updates? I am ordering another 5870 to upgrade and was wondering how your upgrade is going.