Someone talk me into ordering a second 5850. Having a hard time justifying the purchase but I think it's time, and I can afford it... Just talk me into/out of it. I can't make this decision on my own! lol

You'll regret it

Why though? They scale really well (from 1.5-2.0). Remember my golden rule of 50%? Sure my board will only do 8x/8x but everywhere I read there's only 1-2 fps difference if any at all. I won't be bottlenecking my cpu either. So why would I regret it?

God damnit Dr B u got me all second guessing myself!

Either way I got about $350 to drop on an upgrade I just don't know what yet.

New case and cooling solution with no performance boost?

An SSD so the one time a week I reboot my PC it loads Win7 faster? With no big performance boost in games?

A second 5850 with about 75% performance increase in games? Even though I need to buy a new PSU with it?

I just can't decide but if I don't decide soon I may not get anything lol

well phonix an ssd is not just for boot times dude. Remember what you see on your screen is your hard drive.

anything you do with the gui ( windows ): install, uninstall, load msn, a game the internet a pr0n site read/write times play heavy. You would see an insane performance increase depending on the ssd you buy. ( I want one soon myself dude ). Steve-o's read write times are so fast that his pc can see into the future. lol

Unless you are playing a game that needs much more than a still sweet 5850 can put out, sure, move into two or drop more money on a faster card.

You can certainly "MAX" the two sliders for gpu and memory in CCC, set the fan speed manually to a mere 35% and you are good. It will play anything.

I would however like to see the performance difference running two lol

Go ssd you won't regret it

Well that's just it. I've never cared about application/game load times. I really don't. 1 sec or 10 sec it really dont matter to me. And as far as a 2nd 5850 goes I think I've ruled that out, since I only play Cod4 and Black Ops and you actually get less fps with black ops on crossfire.

God damnit money burning a hole!

do a 128G corsair ssd.

spend it on your fellow man (or "monkey") instead

but no, if there's nothing you need or want then just save it or invest it in some kind of growth fund or something.

Crossfire is still far from perfect and can be downright annoying at times. Drivers can be flat out broken for months on end, some games really don't like CF I'm talking start a game and your looking at the BIOS screen kind of not liking. So you constantly disabling and re-enabling it all the time, trying to remember which games work and which ones don't. Don't get me started on multiple displays with it...

I ran two 3870's for awhile then two 4870's for about a yr before getting a 5850.

no issues with crossfire breaking whatsoever. It ran great. I just had to get the previous ( very manual ) motherboard set correctly.

The games I played worked fine, no blue screens just awesome gameplay.

;oad and boot times arent the only thing an ssd affect...general overall performance is main thing, i will def not buy another os hdd that isnt an ssd, i am planning on getting a second one when prices drop ever so more for games. you def wont be dissapointed

Wait, what's this thread about again?

Phonix has money to burn

May 2008, CF'd 3870's, corrupt textures in CoD4, UT3 and Bioshock. 8.1 drivers worked, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 did not. I picked up a new motherboard thinking that was my problem and it wasn't. They finally fixed it in 8.6 or 8.7

Fall 2009, CF'd 4770's. Could not enable CF and have 2 monitors function under Vista. If I enabled CF, it disabled one monitor. If I re-enabled the monitor, it disabled CF. The feature functioned correctly under XP.