Sapphire 6870 bottleneck

crippler

Distinguished
Feb 4, 2009
4
0
18,510
Hi Guys,

I'm looking to upgrade my GPU from a Geforce 9800GT to a Sapphire AMD Radeon hd 6870 but I'm worried my old cheep motherboard might become a bottleneck. My
CPU is an Intel Q6700 Quad core and the motherboard is an ASRock Penryn1600sli (http://asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=Penryn1600SLI-110dB). What do you think?

Thanks

 

crippler

Distinguished
Feb 4, 2009
4
0
18,510



Sorry forgot to metion it has 8GB of DDR2 RAM as well.
 

Cygnus x-1

Distinguished
Jul 28, 2011
901
0
19,060
Make sure you put the new card in the white 16x slot. That has plenty of speed to handle the 6870. Maybe give that good ole q6700 a little overclock.
 

crippler

Distinguished
Feb 4, 2009
4
0
18,510
Cool, do you think there will be problems with the board being an Nvida one in terms of drivers etc? Guessing it would be best to clear all the Nvidia drivers off 1st?
 

Gamer-girl

Distinguished
May 29, 2010
404
0
18,860
There might be issues with your PCI-e slot.

I can only find information that says it has a PCI-E x16 etc and does not specify which version which makes me think it is v1.0.

The HD 6870 is a v2.1 card so it might have driver issues with your motherboard, I checked the BIOS updates and there is no mention of PCI-E updates. This probably means it is incompatible.
 

darkling

Distinguished
Feb 24, 2010
210
0
18,690
Newer cards work on older mobos (that have PCI-E of course). The opposite doesn't work. OC that processor too, the CPU will bottleneck the VGA not the mobo.
 

crippler

Distinguished
Feb 4, 2009
4
0
18,510
Well i'm in a lucky situation where i'm buying the card off a mate and he has agreed to let me test it 1st so i guess i will just have to give it a go.

Thanks
 

TRENDING THREADS