What to upgrade to run Battlefield 4

[petmr2]

Hi all,

I'm hoping you can give me some advice as I'm a noob when it comes to this. I have Rampage 3 motherboard with AMD Radeon HD 6870. 8GB memory with Intel Core i7 950 and 500w power supply. I can run it apparently but on minimum settings. Could I just get a 2nd video card to run to allow me to set the display to high? What would you do on a tight budget?

 

[hiyabusared]

I would say upgrade motherboard and cpu get a better graphics card 960 or a r9 280x. But I don't know the tier your psu is so that hinders a good answer. By chance do you know the model and maker of your psu

 

[petmr2]

No idea about the PSU... So I practically have to get a new machine? I thought rampage 3 are good or decent enough...

 

[hiyabusared]

Honestly I know i5's that out do that 1st gen i7 I myself had a i7 930 on a EVGA board and went to skylark all I can say is what a massive difference. Though I will say this even the i7 930 I have didn't bottle neck a 7970 OC Windforce which is better than a gtx 960. Sorry I was stating if you can upgrade but again it never hurts to move up.

 

[petmr2]

thanks man... ok if that's the case then I'm going to save up and get something decent to last a while.

 

[photonboy]

Hey,
Just upgrade the graphics card.
I don't recommend Crossfire or whatever it's called now normally. On the other hand they recently upgraded their support with the recent Crimson drivers so I'm not sure how well that works.

If you can find another HD6870 for cheap (or comparable card to Crossfire) it may be worth it though then it's another $60 or so for a power supply that can handle it.

*I would strongly suggest the best single-GPU setup you can afford with at least 3GB of VRAM though, but probably 2GB is your max budget. ROUGH comparison of cards:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_380X_Strix/23.html

Your CPU will end up with lower results and same GPU's but you can see how they COMPARE here, then add price to see value (other factors too).

**AMD DX11 drivers are very inefficient and eat up CPU code. With a weak CPU you should go with NVidia GPU's even if the AMD looks slightly better in benchmarks.

$230 R9-380X http://pcpartpicker.com/part/sapphire-video-card-100383ntocl
$200 GTX960 4GB: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-video-card-04gp41962kr
$140 GTX950 2GB: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-video-card-gtx950m2gd5

*You didn't list a budget however, and yes that would need a new power supply for a 2nd HD6870 if you can even find one on Ebay.

So...
Due to the low budget, power issues, and AMD driver issues for DX11 I'd say you probably should stick with a GTX950 2GB card, and also update to Windows 10 64-bit if you can (have W7 or W8) for free and haven't done so.

 

[photonboy]

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/27.html

stock GTX680 is 75% faster than HD6870..

Crunch some numbers and the GTX950 is roughly 1.5X more powerful than an HD6870.

(It's hard to compare exactly as newer games should optimize a bit better to newer hardware so on average newer does better, but then you have some CPU bottlenecking so... hard to compare).

So you may get say 60FPS when you get 40FPS before.

Other than building a new system which you apparently can't I don't know what else to tell you. Going Crossfire doesn't make sense, and the GTX950 is the minimum I'd bother with for an upgrade to your system and probably your upper budget.