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I've been itching to upgrade for a while now, but I was advised the last time I asked about upgrading to wait for the new processors from Intel and the 7xxx cards from AMD. Well, after reading the review of the 7850, I'm really liking the idea of grabbing one of those (as soon as I can find one in stock). I also want to upgrade my mobo/processor/RAM, but I figure I'll wait until Ivy Bridge comes out and then decide at that point if I want to get one of those or go for a Sandy Bridge build along the lines of the last TR System Guide's "Sweet Spot".

I'm playing a lot Star Wars The Old Republic, and the game just isn't running as smoothly at high settings as I'd like. I also plan to pick up Batman: Arkham City the next time Steam has a good sale on it, and I'll be playing Diablo 3 the second it comes out (although I had no problems running the beta on max settings). My overall upgrade budget is around $650. Assuming I can find a 7850 in the $260 range, I think that could be doable even when I add the mobo/processor/RAM. What do y'all think?

HIS Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
OCZ GameXStream 700W
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Patriot Extreme Performance (4 x 1GB) DDR2 800
Intel Xeon E3110
Corsair Force Series 3 120GB SSD
640GB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA
Antec Nine Hundred case
24" monitor 1920x1200

What Ivy Bridge do you want? 3570K + mobo + 8 GB will come close to $450, I reckon.

A Xeon E3110. Why that instead of a Sandy Bridge-E chip?

As for the Radeon 7850, that is a great idea for your next video card.

flip-mode wrote:

What Ivy Bridge do you want? 3570K + mobo + 8 GB will come close to $450, I reckon.

How can I know until it's out? I imagine I'll probably end up with SB due to my budget, but I might as well wait until IB comes out and see what prices look like for both SB and IB at that point.

riviera74 wrote:

A Xeon E3110. Why that instead of a Sandy Bridge-E chip?

I don't understand the question. I bought it 4 years ago based on recommendations here, but what difference does it make now?

i5-3570K should be around $220, mobo....$150ish, 8GB RAM for $45-50 = somwhere in the $420 range. Obviously you can go much higher with motherboards (getting you into flip-mode's $450 figure or even exceeding it) The 7850 definetly looks like a strong contender thus far. I'm anxious to see what Nvidia's response will be to that card. So far we've only heard lots of details on their "flagship" 680 which bests the 7970. Only time will tell.

The good thing in respect to the Nvidia 680 vs AMD 7970 is that Nvidia is pricing their card quite a bit higher (~$500) than they originally planned (~$300)because of the price that AMD is asking for the 7970. At the same time, the 680 apparently beats the 7970 in more than half of tests which would motivate AMD to drop their prices. Since Nvidia seems to have a lot of wiggle room with their pricing (and I'm assuming AMD does as well since they reportedly have much better yields and a smaller overall chip size), price wars should ensue to some degree. I wouldn't get too trigger happy with the 7850 until Nvidia's cards are available.

MidnightFrost1701 wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

What Ivy Bridge do you want? 3570K + mobo + 8 GB will come close to $450, I reckon.

How can I know until it's out? I imagine I'll probably end up with SB due to my budget, but I might as well wait until IB comes out and see what prices look like for both SB and IB at that point.

Well do you want an unlocked K chip? Because that's 3570K at minimum, which will be $220 or so. So that plus mobo plus RAM will put you to $350 at a bare minimum if you go with a cheap $100 mobo and $40 for 8 GB. So I'm just trying to find out how flexible you are with the $650 total budget and trying to think it through.

flip-mode wrote:

So I'm just trying to find out how flexible you are with the $650 total budget and trying to think it through.

Ah, I got ya. I can't really afford to be too flexible. If it's going to make a huge difference, I could probably go up by about $50, but that's it. When I checked this morning, Newegg didn't have any of the ~$250 7850's in stock, but they now have the Sapphire one. I think I'm gonna go ahead and grab it. I don't usually like to buy a brand new product with no reviews from other users, but it's been driving me crazy waiting on the new stuff from AMD and Intel. And it galls me to have SWTOR running slowly on the max settings. Wish me luck!

MidnightFrost1701 wrote:

riviera74 wrote:

A Xeon E3110. Why that instead of a Sandy Bridge-E chip?

I don't understand the question. I bought it 4 years ago based on recommendations here, but what difference does it make now?

That is my mistake. That I did not know. All apologies.