So, Im trying to make my computer last through another year, and my two HD6960s have been letting me down with not playing Fallout 4 very well at all. It outright refused to do Crossfire on them as well which cuts down on the power considerably.
Then right after I got kicked by AMD saying they had dropped support for the VLIW arch cards of which mine were. So no updates were coming to improve crossfire support in FO4.
Then, last week, I came across a deal on craigslist. A guy had two HD7950s for $100 each. The ad was already a week and a half old, so I didn't think he would still have them. He had one left.
I thought about it for awhile. Looked at the specs. Finally decided I should look at it based on single-gpu vs single-gpu since thats effectively all I had and it looked a lot better. Plus its the GCN arch so it will still be receiving updates.
Decided to pull the trigger and met up with him to buy it.
Installed it and fired up Fallout and couldn't believe my eyes. Its incredible what a difference it made. Its at least double the frame rate with more eye candy turned on. Im so pleased.
Then while I was thinking about it, I pulled my Geforce GT520 out of mothball and installed it in the now open PCIe slot. Its running my second monitor to take that load off the 7950 while Im gaming. It doesn't cost anything for power usage because of a funky thing with the power saving where when you are running more than one monitor, it is unable to change the memory frequency of 1250MHz. So the lowest the 7950 can go is to drop the core clock to 500MHz.
With the GT520 taking my second screen, it is more than happy to drop all the way down to 300 core/150 memory. So, Thats pretty neat.
Also, you can only run one legacy device from the 7950. Legacy meaning anything NOT Displayport. So I couldnt string my 10Ft HDMI cable into the living room and play a game or watch a movie without disabling my DVI monitor. Now, all I have is one DP screen, so, thats no problem!
Then right after I got kicked by AMD saying they had dropped support for the VLIW arch cards of which mine were. So no updates were coming to improve crossfire support in FO4.
Then, last week, I came across a deal on craigslist. A guy had two HD7950s for $100 each. The ad was already a week and a half old, so I didn't think he would still have them. He had one left.
I thought about it for awhile. Looked at the specs. Finally decided I should look at it based on single-gpu vs single-gpu since thats effectively all I had and it looked a lot better. Plus its the GCN arch so it will still be receiving updates.
Decided to pull the trigger and met up with him to buy it.
Installed it and fired up Fallout and couldn't believe my eyes. Its incredible what a difference it made. Its at least double the frame rate with more eye candy turned on. Im so pleased.
Then while I was thinking about it, I pulled my Geforce GT520 out of mothball and installed it in the now open PCIe slot. Its running my second monitor to take that load off the 7950 while Im gaming. It doesn't cost anything for power usage because of a funky thing with the power saving where when you are running more than one monitor, it is unable to change the memory frequency of 1250MHz. So the lowest the 7950 can go is to drop the core clock to 500MHz.
With the GT520 taking my second screen, it is more than happy to drop all the way down to 300 core/150 memory. So, Thats pretty neat.
Also, you can only run one legacy device from the 7950. Legacy meaning anything NOT Displayport. So I couldnt string my 10Ft HDMI cable into the living room and play a game or watch a movie without disabling my DVI monitor. Now, all I have is one DP screen, so, thats no problem!
