What to buy?

Waynos_Face

Waynos_Face

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I recently built myself a PC with considerable help from the peeps here (thanks).

The Rig is;

AMD 9850 Phenom, MSI K9A2 Platinum, 2 x ATI HD 3650 512mb, 4Gb OCZ/ATI Gaming RAM, 650 Watt PSU, Maxtor 250Gb HDD, 2 x Liteon Lightscribe, Creative Extreme Sound Blaster.

I was on abit of a budget and got the two graphics cards for free.

Am now in a position to upgrade the Graphics cards. They work well in XFire and was impressed how well i can play some decent games. However they are always running quite hot (idle at 45 degrees C, about 57 playing Crysis) and i want to replace them.

Am thinking of ATI HD 3850 1 Gb or ATI HD 3870 512mb, which one is better overall? Budget of £130.

Also i am going to put in 2 x 750 Gb HDD, so with these and the new card will i need to upgrade my PSU?
 
Oh have purchased 2 x Antec VCool VGA Cooler, they came highly recommended, so this will add to keeping the future card cooler as they will bracket it.
 
I'd go for 3870. The 3850 1GB sounds like a gimmick to me. Try getting the cards below.

Sapphire ATI 3870 Toxic would go £2 over your budget (including VAT and delivery). For the price you get a pre overclocked card with a single slot cooler that cools the card well. Keep in mind that this will be a bit noisy under load REVIEW HERE
This will be great for Crossfire or CrossfireX as you wont need to sacrifice other slots.

If you dont mind having a dual slot cooler then I'll suggest a Powercooler ATI 3870 with a aftermarket cooler pre attached to the overclocked card.
 
A graphic card running between 45C & 57C is quite normal and nothing to worry about.

Third party cooling will help and will lower temps as well.

For £130.00 to buy a single card I'd be tempted to say stay as you are with the two ATI HD3650's in Crossfire, add a pair of VGA coolers and overclock them a little using Riva Tuner.

You won't notice a significant performance increase between a single card for £130.00 and what you have now so imo you may as well stay as you are until you can afford a more major grafix upgrade.

Just my opinion :)

If I were going to spend that budget on a single card, I'd get This One
 
What floppy said is true and you might also want to wait to see if rumours that ATI will be releasing new cards is true aswell. You might have more money then.
The 8800GT is a great card but I'll avoid as I double checked your motherboard and it is a AMD chipset which might case compatibility issues.
 
thanks for the input guys, have decided to save the bulk of my cash for a bigger upgrade later, thanks for the info on temps, i thought they were a little hot but obviously not, have purchased a 3rd HD 3650, so will see how that goes instead.

Have used rivatuner, its awesome, am getting about 10 fps more on crysis.

cheers guys.
 
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