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Want to treat myself for Christmas, LF Upgrade to 7950
JeffSpicoli
Member EpicPosts: 2,849
in Hardware
Would prefer to stay with AMD , What would be a BIG upgrade from the 7950 that would keep me set for gaming for the next 2-3 years.... Discuss
My other PC psecs are 850 watt PSU, 8350 8 CORE CPU , 16 GB RAM
Aloha Mr Hand !
Comments
You don't need an upgrade...a 7950 is really all you need for playing current and 2015 games. I have an R9 280 which is basically a rebadged 7950 and its runs everything I throw at it just fine. It can handle even AC Unity and Crysis 3 maxed out at 1080p at a playable 30fps framerate in most situations.
Elite: Dangerous and Elder Scrolls Online both run exceptionally well on my card, and both are very graphically-intensive games, both running at max settings at 1080p with a constant 60fps.
The only card on the market that really justifies an upgrade from the Radeon HD 7950 is the GeForce GTX 980. Your current card has 28 GCN compute units. AMD's current top of the line, the Radeon R9 290X, has 44 and is of roughly the same architecture. It's also clocked higher, but I don't think it's enough of a jump to justify the upgrade.
Rather, I'd recommend that you wait a bit. AMD probably has a new top end card coming out sometime early to mid next year, and that will be the one for you to get.
It depends on what you want to do. I disagree that there's nothing worth upgrading a 7950 from - the 290 and 290X are a substantial gain if you like to play recent games at the highest settings. You also gain things like Mantle support and extra VRAM. Techspot's review of Dragon Age Inqusition for example has your card at ~30fps while a 290X gives 56fps (which with driver updates will surely be over 60fps now).
One thing to bear in mind though with high end cards is your CPU, it'll definitely need overclocking to keep up with the top range cards.
I should probably add that my usual rule of thumb is that it's not worth upgrading a video card until you can double your performance. There are faster cards than what you have now, but the only thing that doubles its performance is the GeForce GTX 980. Doing more, smaller upgrades can get expensive quickly, in addition to having the potential to break things that were previously working.
Now, that's a philosophical position, and one that you could disagree with. But the card you want is probably AMD's next high end card, and it's likely a few months away. Upgrade now, and then the next time you decide to upgrade, you'd just get something equivalent in performance to that card, anyway, so you might as well just wait a bit and do one upgrade.
Thank You for the 2 informative responses. You saved me some money this Christmas lol. Like you said i was more or less looking for something that was going to double performance , guess the 7950 still is a decent option. Thank You
Aloha Mr Hand !