6860FX upgrade and its future?

Im looking to upgrade my stock cpu to a x9000 or x7900 oc'ed to 3.0ghz and upgrading the HD to a dual 5400 HDs in raid 0.

im wondering with these upgrades, if i would see great performance and high in game graphic settings with my setup that would last me into year. I'm contemplating whether an upgrade would be suffice to power me through this fall's game line up easily, or will my specs come up short.

 

Well the graphics card is the biggest bottleneck for games, but if you go with Andros's mod you can run Crysis in max settings, which in my opinion is the game with the best graphics. Crysis 2 is supposed to offer better graphics with lower system requirements than Crysis 1. So whether or not game graphics requirements go up in the near future, if the games are optimized then the graphics will still look really nice (even if you are only running them in medium-high.)

As for RAID 0, there won't be much of an improvement unless you are running out of space with your current hard drive (do to the inner part of the disk being slow.) If you want faster load times and boot times, get an SSD and use the hard drive for music, videos, and games you don't play very often. SSDs are wicked fast btw.

 

It depends on what games you play. CPU intensive games will play better while other games will not get that much of a boost from the extra cpu power.

 

what kind of settings are you getting in bc2? are our 8800s becoming too dated to get us max settings on the current games?

 

I use all medium and low shadows with no AA/AF @1440x900. stays above 30 fps in heavy action. I think the 8800m gts is starting to show its age but can still play most games with high settings.

 

The 8800m GTS is sure showing its age when today the 480m got annouced. Besides these 8800m GTS's sure like to overclock nicely. I got my at 600 core and 950 memory.

 

Yeah finally nvidia is using something other than a G92. I am still going to go ATI with my next GPU.

 

I still play everything jsut fine on the 8800GTS. It might not get 100fps with all settings on max with the newest games, but with the right settings just about everything is still playable.

Now it is getting older (its 3 generations behind now) but its a quite capable. Dont take the 480 release as anything spectacular, its just another release. In 3 years the 480 will be antiquated as well, so its just how tech goes.

Plus the 480 is only really good for boiling water

 

The 480 is Vaporware untill we see it in quantity and running reliably on some systems.............

Edit; Kamin, we can fry eggs, pop corn even keep our coffee boiling hot, Ah too hours on and at the terminal with perpetually hot coffee............ )

 

I had an x7900 in my 6860. It was considerably faster than the wimpy T5550 obviously. On the downside, it ran a lot hotter. It was easily getting in the high 90s C under load. I also had dual Hitachi 500GB 7200RPM drives in RAID 0. Honestly, I didn't notice a huge difference. For RAID to truly be fast, the system must use a hardware RAID with write-back enabled. The 6860, and all laptops with RAID that I know of, use CPU assisted RAID. Want to see fast RAID, check out servers with dedicated RAID controllers. Now that's hard drive performance.