Cheap 5870's

itsgrandpa

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Jun 17, 2009
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I understand that the 58xx series is being phased out, but is there any reason why it seems that it is being sold for cheap?

For the past month, I've seen reference 5850's go for <$130 and reference 5870's for ~$150. I already jumped on the 5870, I'm considering CFing just because of the price.

For the price/performance, should i CF or should I wait and get the 7xxx's?

I game on 1920x1080 and considering 2560x1440 in the next couple months.
 

jjtober1

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Oct 4, 2011
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I am using a pair of 6870's right now, and although it's a definite improvement over one card, and in a lot of cases it spits out twice the frames, there is no way I would say it is twice as good. There is a lot of annoyances with a crossfire setup, and in some cases you'll have a high framerate but not a particularly good experience. I would say it works great more often than not though.

Personally I am going to get a 7 series card instead, and probably wouldn't get another 6870 if I only had one right now.

On the other hand, you will get a huge amount more performance for only $150 more and it is a lot of fun getting another card to play around with.
 
@itsgrandpa
You shouldn't consider Hd 5870s for several reasons;
1- The have 1 GB of VRAM, if you're going 2560x resolution, you'll need more than 1 GB of VRAM.
2- They consume a lot of power compared to HD 6k series and they are louder with a lot of noise specially in CF.
3- HD 7K series will use less power consumption, less heat due to 28nm process, equipped with 2 GB of VRAM, and the high end are XDR2 rambus memory which is twice faster than GDDR5.