questions about upgrade

hey everybody
i dont post much but i creep around alot.

my current system is an 17xr2 w/4870x2

after having to mess with "the witcher 2" and bf3 alot just to get them to what i would consider playable 30-50 fps and still getting lots of fps drops, i think its time for an upgrade and i needs some opinions.

i have seen in lots of peoples sigs that they have upgraded to the 6990 and 6970 and im wondering how dramatic the difference is between stock and upgrade.
is the 6990 worth the extra coin. (im only going to get 1 card and drop the xfire)

second question, is my 820qm a bottleneck?
would it be worth upgrading to the 920xm? i try not to overclock to much (i managed to get my 4870's stable at 650/1033 running just over 80'c but i really didnt notice much of a performance difference.


if it matters bf3 is my current addiction with finishing witcher2 as a backlog and looking forward to skyrim and ME3


thnks everyone

 

Well prices are pretty low for upgrades right now on ebay. If you are not going to keep crossfire the 6870 or the 6990 would be good upgrades. You didn't post all your spec's but the I7 820 is not the problem with games. The gpu is the most important. If you have the coin go for the 6990 and your future proof for awhile. Once you have one in and running you can all ways at a second down the road. Ram and SSD's are down in price and help speed things up. They won't help a lot in game but do help over all. If you have the RGB screen I can see putting some money into the R2 nice screen. I would not get the I7 920 you will not see much improvement. Good luck on your choice's.

 

You're not going to see a massive increase in performance from CFX 4870's to 1 6970 or 6990.

I had CFX 4870's and upgraded to CFX 6970's. I got my cards about 2 weeks apart from each other. A single 6970 was slightly slower than CFX 4870's OC'ed to 635mhz. But then again you do get DX11.

If you're looking for a massive performance boost, your only option in my opinion is to get dual 6970's or 6990's. Dual 6970's seem to have fewer problems than dual 6990's but people do have both configurations working well.

The i7 820qm will not be much of a bottleneck -if any. (Look at my sig). You can probably get it to 2.0ghz with Setfsb.

 

I'm not so sure about this. Doesn't 4870CF score around 9.5K in Vantage? My single 6990 scores 15K in Vantage with an 800/1000 overclock. I would trade both 4870s for a single 6990 in a heartbeat. Don't have to deal with CF bullcrap, plus many other benefits that you'll get from running a newer architecture GPU with more VRAM. $450 for a 6990 right now from Upgradeyourlaptop on Ebay. I'm pretty sure it will slaughter the 4870CF. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Synthetic benchmarks don't mean a whole lot in real-world performance. However, I would have to agree, even if I got a bit worse performance (in optimal conditions for CFX or single card set ups) then I would go single card for sure. Dual cards are just a general PITA; stuttering, drivers, compatibility, heat, etc. I guess I would just get a 6970 and throw another one in there down the line, and then refresh the system as a whole after that becomes insufficient.

 

got helped out by the folks at upgradyourlaptop
6990m ordered

 

6990 is a nice step up from xfire 4870's. You'll definitely enjoy it!