I'd pick the 5850, even at +$50. I agree two 5770s will give higher framerates but I'd rather take the less issues. Your choice, just giving you some guidance.

I am also looking for a new card and would like advice so I post questions here instead of starting a new thread. Games Im hoping to play are Crysis, Dead Space, Red Alert 3, Crysis 2.


1) I think that 5750/5770 suit my budget and I've seen its pretty popular choice right now so I think I'm gonna settle for one of those. But I've noticed that all 5750/5770 aren't the same and I'm not sure on which paramters shoul I look on before buying. I'm sure that memory size is important but what else? Also is it important which manufacter I choose? If so which one would you suggest?

2) I've got AM2 motherboard with Athlon X2 4000+ (2.1Ghz) with 2 GB of Ram. Is't the processor or RAM going to be a huge issue in games? I do expect it to be a bottleneck of my system but I would like to stick with my mobo for a while (I'm also buying harddrive and PSU so my planned budget is already exceeded). Eventually I could consider buying another 2 GB of RAM.

So, what do you think, guys?

First, Crysis will kick your computers ass, regardless of how good it is. On the highest settings anyway. On lower settings you would be able to play it rather well with a 5750. Dead Space and Red Alert 3 will run without any problems at all. They aren't even half as demanding as Crysis.

1) I have always heard that you should go for the cheapest manufacturer, since there are only tiny differences between them. There are overclocked cards to buy, though you'll have to pay a hefty premium for that. My advice would be not to.

2) More and faster RAM can speed up your system dramatically, but only if the programs you run demands it. On the other hand, your motherboard might not support faster RAM, and if so I would suggest upgrading the RAM and the Mobo at the same time. The processor will certainly be a bottleneck though. You should change it with the ram and mobo, and if you cannot afford that right now I'd suggest you wait.

We really can't know yet what will play Crysis 2, since the specs haven't been released yet. That said, don't expect to run it on anything higher than medium settings no matter what hardware you buy now.

But to answer your questions:

1) The manufacturer for video cards generally doesn't matter. The only one I wouldn't buy from is Diamond, a company generally known for their high percentage of defective units. For the 57XX line, make sure that they have 1 GB VRAM, and you may want to invest an extra $5 or so to get a better cooling unit if you plan on overclocking. Either way, the 5750 isn't that great of a value at this point in time, so spend the extra $20ish to get a 5770.

2) That CPU will indeed bottleneck you in modern games. If you're interested in Crysis and its sequel, you should definitely have a modern CPU and 4 GB RAM. Socket AM2 is obsolete now, so you'd be well advised to invest in an Athlon II X3 435, Socket AM3 mobo, and 4 GB DDR3 RAM as well.

Thanks for answers. It is not obligatory for Crysis (not to say Crysis 2) to run on max setting just to run decently on med-high settings.

As for mobo I have this one.
It supports only DDR2. I guess I could put some older Phenom on it but I'm not sure if it's actually worth it. I think that Athlon II and Intel's i5 are more popular right now.

Looking at Gigabyte's CPU support list, with a BIOS update it can actually support almost all of AMD's latest CPUs, so you could even get away with still using that motherboard. Jumping from DDR2 to DDR3 doesn't make that much of a difference either, so you could cut costs by just getting a new CPU and another 2 GB of memory.

As far as i am aware there is not a single american pc shop that would ship me these gfx cards and importing them from anyplace in europe doesn't help since euro is more expensive than a dollar while the price tag shows the same numbers, the british pound being right now totaly unafordable for importing.

If you guys know a vendor that will ship me a 5850 or 5870 card from the US, do tell, it would mean like a 1000 currency units of savings for me ( which is about how much a Wii costs right now).

yana you can try Ebay, there are a few sellers there which ship overseas. My girlfriend likes to buy clothes off Ebay and we're not American citizens.

yana, amazon UK is selling HD 5850 for £194 with free shipping, that comes up to about $300

link

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapphire-HD5850-GDDR5-Graphics-Card/dp/B0036QFVSG/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1267002798&sr=1-4

210.00 GBP

=

957.872 PLN

I included shipping of 16 pounds.