Countless hardware failures (likely to do with the mobo)! And now I have no choice but to do a major upgrade to the PC after 5 years. I will be keeping the 600W power supply, DVD drive and the WD Cavier Black 1TB HDD. Here is a list compiled by a netizen from another forum for me: Intel Core i5-3330 Ivy Bridge ASUS P8H77-M H77 Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz 8GB MSI GTX660Ti TWIN FROZR 3GB GDDR5 SSD Plextor 256GB M5S Series 2.5" SATA3 However, I read that the 192-bit memory bus would handicap a GTX660 Ti so it is not that better than the 256-bit 5850? If I kept it, is the 5850 good enough for an i5 CPU and not be a painful bottleneck? Please educate me.:infinity: P.S. I plan to play Battlefield 3 on 1920 x 1200, no AA, HQ.
Bus width is just one of many specifications. Alone it means close to nothing. GTX 660 Ti is much faster than HD 5850. You can buy a HD 7950 if you want. Or keep HD 5850, if you think it's enough. I'd switch CPU and MB to i5 3470 and ASRock Z75 Pro3 and OC CPU to around 4 GHz. Should help, since BF3 is quite CPU heavy.
As Xbeast said, the bus width is a small part of the specs, it may not have any impact on performance when other features change also. Choose a gfx card for the games you play. Read some reviews, thats what they are for!
Yeah that 5850 should still serve you well. I would suggest to wait and see how the 5850 does with all the new components, if you feel it's too slow or you want more, you can upgrade. And definitely get the 7950. However, doesn't it fit your budget to get the 3570k? Would be a bit safer with the OC capability, in the future, if it's necessary.
Thanks everyone ^. But no, I ain't overclocking. So I might just pay more for a higher clock speed i5. That makes a lot of sense to put the VGA as the last component to swap. I'll do the upgrade in a week and we will see what this 5850 achieves with its new friends.
You should overclock, but not too much. It's very easy to do. i5 3470/3570 can be overclocked to about 4.0-4.2 GHz very easily. This would be a nice improvement over i5 3330's stock 3.0-3.2 GHz in a CPU heavy game like BF3.
A 5850 is pretty slow to be putting in a computer in 2013....The card that your friend picked for you is def way faster or you can get a 7950 at the very least a Radeon 7800 series card. This is assuming money is not a major issue. If you just don't have the money to buy the GPU an thats why you want to stick the 5850 back in then yea itll work fine but only 1GB of VRAM is a serious limitation at this point even at 1080p. I guess the question really is weather or not it's good enough for you. I personally would not stick a station wagon motor in a Ferrari.
In what game does 1GB of RAM actually limit your ability to play at 1080P? It's not like using tons of antialiasing is a requirement to play games. It's not "pretty slow" either. Games haven't changed much in terms of performance requirement since the 5850's release, and excluding a handful of titles like Crysis 3, you aren't going to have to lower settings for the vast majority of games. I mean, I guess when you're on Cloud9 hardware wise, a 5850 would seem slow to you, but it's really not. No doubt something like a 7950 is going to be much faster, but I think the OP will find once he gets his new system assembled that he won't really find a need for one. A 5850 can easily play BF3 on high quality at 1080P pretty smoothly.
OP back. Now using Win 8 32-bit (bought the upgrade version), I saw the climb in 3DMark 11 score isn't impressive after the upgrade. At least my PC is up and running again. Thanks for all your suggestions. My HD5850 lives to see another day thanks to you guys. :nerd:
you can always crossfire your HD 5850 if you find a good deal on a used card. Plays BF3 at 1920x1200 just fine.
As much as I wish, my mid-tower just wouldn't have enough space. Also, this mobo [asrock h77 pro4/mvp] is actually broken - the front audio port gets in the way of the PCI-E 3.0 slot, which is a must use for a Crossfire set up.:bang: