GTX570 vs 5850
 

A friend of mine has a 5850 in a C2D rig of his. He wants to upgrade his video card so that he can play most games on High - max resolutions. I have a spare Galaxy GTX570 that I could sell him. I paid $155 for it used a month ago.

If I sell him this card 1) is it a good deal for him, and 2) will it be a big enough upgrade over the 5850 to justify the expense?

Seeing as a 5850 is more around the GTX460/470 performance area I would have to say yes, a GTX570 would be a lot faster.

Hopefully his CPU will be up for the challenge.

I would agree that it will be an upgrade for him. Much better min frames I would guess. It would help though in answering your question if you would tell us if he is overclocking his CPU and the res he games at.

Would you be selling the card at the $155 you paid?

According to this:

AnandTech - Bench - GPU12

there are definitely some decent gains. That said there is a pretty good increase in power conspumtion (around 100w more according to anandtech)to go to the 570 and he may very well be hitting cpu bottlenecks, vice gpu.

cmon HWC review! Personally I would read this review and compare the min frames between the 570 and 5850. http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...review-10.html

No, he's not overclocking, he'll be playing at 1080P framerates, and yes, I'll sell it for the $155 I bought it for a month ago (I'm losing money on the shipping, but I got a month of folding out of the card, so it's all good).

If your friend can, he should OC his C2D IMHO.

No he won't notice a difference with a C2D.

You say that bc you think his C2D will hold him back??? First it makes a difference if he is running an e6300 or a an e8400. Secondly I see the C2D hurting the max frames but the 570 should really help the min frames IMHO.

(FWIW I am still running an e8400 and a GTX 460 oc'd to 900mhz in one of my rigs. I also have a q6600 pair'd with a GTX570 in another)

I went from an i7 to a C2Q with a 560ti, and now almost every game is unplayable even at lower settings (BF3, ARMA2, just about anything that isn't GPU dependent.) So he won't see much if any of an upgrade.