7770 or 7850 1gb for 1080p gaming on single montior at max settings?

[hercules643]

Hi, I'm looking into getting either the 7770 vapor X or the saphire 7850 1gb. would it be overkill for my single 1080p 24 inch monitor at max? I'm trying to play Skyrim, fallout 3/ new vegas, and the witcher 2, and I'm used to playing on an xbox 360 so as long as it looks significantly better I think I will like it. Also, Is it worth getting the 7850 2gb for 40 dollars more?
I'm running a phenom 2 X6 1090t 6 core processor with 8gb of 1333mhz ram. my hard drive is only 5400 rpm so would this be a bottle neck?

 

[bucknutty]

I dont think the 7770 will max the games you listed. The 7850 will get close but even it might strugle.

If you want to max skyrim you might need a 7870 or better.

 

[killerhurtalot]

Neither would max a lot of games at max setting on 1080p...
Hell... My GTX 670 barely maxes all games on max settings at 1080p...

 

[Brett928S2]

Hi

7870 or 7990

All the best Brett

 

[tapko]

From all I can garner about these cards you have to solid cards. If you want VALUE and performance then the (xfx)7770. If money is not an objection then go for the 7850. But I have read many reviews about the 7770 performing well playing Skyrim as well as the other games.
As for the hard drive 5400 rpm, if that is your only Hard drive I would get the 7770 and spend the $40 towards a 7200 hard drive. ---->>> here is a review of 5400 vs 7200
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hard-drive-constellation,2630.html

The 5400 will do just fine unless you are loading maps, etc..stuff like WOW and MMO's from what I have read.

As far as your concern for a bottleneck I don't see it being caused by the graphics card performance. You have a very good set-up so I would only change 1 thing at a time and if you are upgrading the card to play then this would suffice. You have MORE than enough computer there to do it. You made a good choice.

There is no such things as overkill lol...Take care

I wanted to edit this as I am seeing reviews that say the 7770 would not be a good choice. I am speaking from experience as I run the XFX 7770 card and I am very happy with the quality and performance when on max. Yes there are cards that will perform better on max...but there will always be a card that displays better.

Again good luck.

 

[nukemaster]

Fastest card you can get. No way around it. Even for 1 screen you still want lots of power if you plan max settings.

The hard drive as said above, may be a bottleneck with some game's. The ones that load on the fly. Most other games load into memory and rely very little on the hard drive once loaded. Anything that requires lots of random read/write operations will suffer on a slower drive.

That said, you see lots of users playing games on laptops with 5400 rpm drives. Truth be told, I just tossed a 5400 rpm drive into my media center for storage to go with the SSD(Windows + most games), I have tried the game Just Cause 2 and it loads on the fly, but did not seem to have any issues with the speed of the drive.

I think the biggest place you will see an advantage for faster drives will be loading windows it self.

 

[hercules643]

Fastest card you can get. No way around it. Even for 1 screen you still want lots of power if you plan max settings.

The hard drive as said above, may be a bottleneck with some game's. The ones that load on the fly. Most other games load into memory and rely very little on the hard drive once loaded. Anything that requires lots of random read/write operations will suffer on a slower drive.

That said, you see lots of users playing games on laptops with 5400 rpm drives. Truth be told, I just tossed a 5400 rpm drive into my media center for storage to go with the SSD(Windows + most games), I have tried the game Just Cause 2 and it loads on the fly, but did not seem to have any issues with the speed of the drive.

I think the biggest place you will see an advantage for faster drives will be loading windows it self.

my monitor is a basic syncmaster Samsung 1080p so im 99% sure it only does 60hz so anything above 60fps would be a waste and would be overkill. will I be okay with a 1gb video card or should I cough up some more and try to get a 2gb?

 

[hercules643]

From all I can garner about these cards you have to solid cards. If you want VALUE and performance then the (xfx)7770. If money is not an objection then go for the 7850. But I have read many reviews about the 7770 performing well playing Skyrim as well as the other games.
As for the hard drive 5400 rpm, if that is your only Hard drive I would get the 7770 and spend the $40 towards a 7200 hard drive. ---->>> here is a review of 5400 vs 7200
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hard-drive-constellation,2630.html

The 5400 will do just fine unless you are loading maps, etc..stuff like WOW and MMO's from what I have read.

As far as your concern for a bottleneck I don't see it being caused by the graphics card performance. You have a very good set-up so I would only change 1 thing at a time and if you are upgrading the card to play then this would suffice. You have MORE than enough computer there to do it. You made a good choice.

There is no such things as overkill lol...Take care

I wanted to edit this as I am seeing reviews that say the 7770 would not be a good choice. I am speaking from experience as I run the XFX 7770 card and I am very happy with the quality and performance when on max. Yes there are cards that will perform better on max...but there will always be a card that displays better.

Again good luck.

Are you running the 7770 at 1080p or 720p? do you think the 7770 looks significantly better than an xbox 360?

 

[kajunchicken]

Don't bother buying a 7200 RPM drive. Just get a small SSD (~64gb) and use it as a boot drive / open-world game drive.

 

[hercules643]

Don't bother buying a 7200 RPM drive. Just get a small SSD (~64gb) and use it as a boot drive / open-world game drive.

if I do this I would need to re-install everything from scratch right? like windows and any programs and just use the 5400 for videos and music?

 

[nukemaster]

Most games(on a single screen) do not take advantage of over 1gigabyte of video memory, new ones may start to and some games with high rez texture packs will.

I would just like to point out that a 5870 is still faster then a 7770 and it can not max out many new games(with some setting tweaking, most games are more then playable, that was my point. Not going to MAX everything).

Here you can see some benchmarks with both the 7770 as well as the 7850(a great value for the performance from both cards to be honest.)
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_7770_Vapor-X/6.html

EDIT, this should give you an idea of the 1gigabyte cards cs the 2. Spoiler, singe screen 1920 x 1080, not much of a difference(within the margin of error.).
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7850_RoyalQueen/6.html

 

[kajunchicken]

if I do this I would need to re-install everything from scratch right? like windows and any programs and just use the 5400 for videos and music?

Unfortunately, you would. You don't have to erase your old drive though. Just set the SSD as a higher boot priority in your BIOS. That way you can keep all of your old files. You could still run your already installed programs from your old drive.

 

[nukemaster]

You can NOT always run already installed programs from the other drive since some of these programs will have created registry entries.

Steam and its games(best to install steam over it self) as well as many open source programs and most MMO games will be able to be run this way, but other stuff "may" generate an error, in that case, you can just reinstall it over it self(recreating the need registry entries.).

 

[kajunchicken]

You can NOT always run already installed programs from the other drive since some of these programs will have created registry entries.

Steam and its games(best to install steam over it self) as well as many open source programs and most MMO games will be able to be run this way, but other stuff "may" generate an error, in that case, you can just reinstall it over it self(recreating the need registry entries.).

^ Didn't know that as I only use steam

 

[bak0n]

I've been going through the same thing right now but between the 7850 1gb, 2gb and 7870. If you want to try your luck newegg has a 7870 for about 210 + rebate. Issue is there are good ones (newer skus) and bad ones (ending in3 and under)http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202010 is the product.

I don't trust newegg.com with this as they could pull the old product (skus) but instead they are hoping to sell them off and get people to just eat them outside of the return date. That and if you return it they will charge you the $70 for the gaming coupon if you've redeemed it. Really shady if you ask me but if you want to gamble, it could pay off big in bang for buck.


Otherwise stick to the 7850 2GB for the games you listed. Older games on anandtechs review showed only improvements on newer titles, one being sky rim with maxing resolution/aa/af.

 

[hercules643]

Most games(on a single screen) do not take advantage of over 1gigabyte of video memory, new ones may start to and some games with high rez texture packs will.

I would just like to point out that a 5870 is still faster then a 7770 and it can not max out many new games(with some setting tweaking, most games are more then playable, that was my point. Not going to MAX everything).

Here you can see some benchmarks with both the 7770 as well as the 7850(a great value for the performance from both cards to be honest.)
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_7770_Vapor-X/6.html

EDIT, this should give you an idea of the 1gigabyte cards cs the 2. Spoiler, singe screen 1920 x 1080, not much of a difference(within the margin of error.).
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7850_RoyalQueen/6.html

okay based on that chart you gave me, the 7850 seems perfect because it can do 1080p at around 60fps with 4XAA lol what else do I need? If I wanna play bf3 I can scale down to 720p remove AA or something, but they tested the 2gb I'm guessing the 1gb version is close to it? also forgot to mention my mobo only does 2.0 pci-e.

 

[hercules643]

Most games(on a single screen) do not take advantage of over 1gigabyte of video memory, new ones may start to and some games with high rez texture packs will.

I would just like to point out that a 5870 is still faster then a 7770 and it can not max out many new games(with some setting tweaking, most games are more then playable, that was my point. Not going to MAX everything).

Here you can see some benchmarks with both the 7770 as well as the 7850(a great value for the performance from both cards to be honest.)
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_7770_Vapor-X/6.html

EDIT, this should give you an idea of the 1gigabyte cards cs the 2. Spoiler, singe screen 1920 x 1080, not much of a difference(within the margin of error.).
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7850_RoyalQueen/6.html

they seem very close not sure if the 2gb version of the 7850 is worth an extra 40 dollars

 

[kajunchicken]

This is a rare case and I don't think that even Tom's experts were able to explain that one. At 1080p you really don't need more than 1gb of GDDR. Only upgrade the ram if you're planning on multipanel gaming.

By the way I disagree with the people saying that the 5870 is better. That is a Directx 9 game. The 7000's graphics core next architecture is A LOT better for any directx 11 games.

 

[nukemaster]

By the way I disagree with the people saying that the 5870 is better. That is a Directx 9 game. The 7000's graphics core next architecture is A LOT better for any directx 11 games.

What? the 5870 IS a direct X11 card. its tessellation unit is not too good(but improved with drivers), but with all the console ports flying around it is still faster then most mid end card.
I was not linking one game either, I was linking the full list.

Here you go. DX 11 enabled games

Now for the DX11 when the 7770 came out ahead(even if both provide less enjoyable frame rates).
Not sure why, these should show up, but be some kind of image limit.

I would say for most 5870 users a 7770 would NOT be a worthwhile upgrade unless you needed less power consumption. It was and still is a quite good little card.

 

[nukemaster]

testing..Yup some kind of limit.

 

[tapko]

Are you running the 7770 at 1080p or 720p? do you think the 7770 looks significantly better than an xbox 360?

Thanks for the question....I am running 1080p. I am also running a single monitor.

As far as spending $40 for the 2g version you would not need the 2g unless you are running on more than 1 monitor. As you know there are only a few games that can use 1 g at 1080p....which is a long story in itself.

If you plan on using more than 1 monitor in the future or other upgrades then the $40 would be a good choice.

 

[trout_11]

I run the 1gb 7850 sapphire and can max out skyrim at 1080p. other games give it a little bit a trouble such as far cry3 still, I just turn off aa. I am thinking of switching to nvidia kind of on a whim, just because of the built in features for v sync and I like to tinker...

 

[hercules643]

are you using the texture pack with sky rim?