Crossfire mate for 5870 Vapor-X or go team green

[FreeKnight]

Hi All,

I'm thinking of upgrading my GPU situation. Right now I'm running 1 Vapor-X 5870 and it's doing pretty well (though not quite the 'beast' it was in the day). I'm looking at mixing things up for two reasons;

1- A heavily texture and graphically modded skyrim (HD textures to the maximum, more as new mods come out).
2- I'm thinking of getting into folding. I work out of town 20 days at a time (back for a week each rotation), so the PC is usually just seeding torrents, so why not get into folding and make it do something useful those 3 weeks I'm away.

Now the options I can immediately think of are;

1) Get a second Vapor-X 5870 and crossfire it. Will cost around $200 bucks to get a used one and sepcs etc will match. I'm not sure how AMD's crossfire situation is now. I've heard a lot of mixed in the past about driver issues and so-so performance gains compared to SLI. Has Xfire gotten any better? How is the folding performance in this case?

2) Get a new Radeon card (preferably XFX) and Xfire, but then I'd like to find something with comparable clocks. In which case would a 6970 be the best bet? IIRC the crossfire clocks will only set to match whatever card is the weakest in the system, so going with anything better than a 6970 should be a waste, correct? Folding performance should be about the same as the first scenario. Cost would probably be around 300.

3) Sell the 5870 Vapor-X I have now (lets say I get ~175$ for it), and buy an EVGA GTX 570 or, more likely, a EVGA 580. Folding should be better than the AMD scenario (unless I'm misinformed...) and I should get a decent graphical bump from the sole 5870 (though probably not compared to the Xfire). I'll get PhysX as well, but that's not too big a deal for me. As long as the 5870 sells I'm looking around $325-400 this scenario.

4) Same as 3 but wait for the nvidia 6XX series. Has there been much murmuring about the expected release dates for these?

Looking forward to any insights or ideas anyone has on this. Since I'm rarely home it's not like I can't wait, but if I do sell the 5870 sooner is better than later.

Thanks

[zsamz_]

if you can get 175 for it sell it fast

you can buy one for 150$

personally i'd look for a cheap 5870

but then if u gonna fold .... go green

[FreeKnight]

Originally Posted by zsamz_

if you can get 175 for it sell it fast

you can buy one for 150$

personally i'd look for a cheap 5870

but then if u gonna fold .... go green

I've never seen a Vapor-X 5870 for that cheap. If you don't mind my asking, where? New ones are usually around 300 ish and even used the lowest I've seen is around 200 (ebay excluded, but even then).

[Dzzope]

My opinion, if it's not struggling bad then wait for the next batch.

Should see better performance than you'll get now and lose less in the long run too.