What to Upgrade the Graphics Card to?

[leky411]

So this is my setup it has gone mostly unchanged since 2009.
i7-920 at stock clocks
12GB Ram
2-5850's in Crossfire
256 Crucial SSD
An assortment of other drives
850W PSU

I've been running this machine for a while. I run triple monitors at 5760 x1080....up until about a year ago I still managed to run Mechwarrior across all three with medium settings. That has gone out the window. I played the Hardline Beta this weekend and ran it decently at 1920 x 1080.

I was going to terminate this build finally and look into a new build with a Haswell-E but don't want to spend the money with the realization that most of the games I will be playing won't be limited by the CPU but the GPU.

I'm looking for a worthy upgrade to my two cards that will give me more playability without breaking the bank. I was looking at an R9-280X.....but I am not a Fan boy so NVidia is also an option. I'm looking for an extra year of decent use, maybe 2.

Much appreciated!

 

[Embra]

The 280/280x/285 will all give you good performance at 1080p.
I would recommend Sapphire brand. The 280x would do you very well.

 

[quilciri]

A pair of 5850's performs around a 270X; if you want a significant upgrade, I'd suggest an R9 290. You might see some slight bottleneck issues with the 920, but it should tide you over well:

HIS Radeon R9 290 4GB IceQ X² Video Card ($259.99 @ Amazon)

Cheers!

 

[plywrlw]

Just to echo the above comments I'd go for an r9 290, especially if your next step is a CPU and motherboard upgrade as you could then get another and crossfire (assuming you have a PSU that's up to the job)

 

[leky411]

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate it. So I decided to give my machine a boost based on your recommendations and an extra swing from a 280x to 290 isn't going to hurt my pocket too much. So I am going to go with SAPPHIRE TRI-X OC 100362-2SR Radeon R9 290 4GB 512-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card

I also went ahead and finally looked through good tutorial and gave my i7 a bit of boost. It's running at 3.6Ghz stable now. That should help a little bit at least. The HD5850's have served me well since 2009, and the second one since 2011 so why not reward myself for what has been a solid build with minor investment down the road.