Upgrade advice: HD7870Ghz, HD7850 or HD7970?

essenbe · 17 Jan 2013

Hope we helped, that's what we're here for.

MonkeyFunkR · 17 Jan 2013

Cheers. Glad I was reading the reviews on newegg. I didn't notice the 7850/70 requires PCI-E 3.0. @_@

Pretty sure my rig is only using 2.0... Can that be upgraded?

bobkn · 17 Jan 2013

MonkeyFunkR said:

Cheers. Glad I was reading the reviews on newegg. I didn't notice the 7850/70 requires PCI-E 3.0. @_@

Pretty sure my rig is only using 2.0... Can that be upgraded?

PCI-E 3 cards are backwards compatible with PCI-E 2.x. The performance difference is supposed to be negligible. Don't worry about it.

bobkn · 17 Jan 2013

essenbe said:

Their requirements are not clear to me. They recommend a 500W PSU for 1 card and 1 place says a 75W 6 pin connector is required for 1 card and later they say an 8 pin is required for a single card. I can only assume it requires both. Sapphire Vapor X 3GB.

I have a reference 7970. It requires one 6 pin plus one 8 pin.

MonkeyFunkR · 17 Jan 2013

bobkn said:

MonkeyFunkR said:

Cheers. Glad I was reading the reviews on newegg. I didn't notice the 7850/70 requires PCI-E 3.0. @_@

Pretty sure my rig is only using 2.0... Can that be upgraded?

PCI-E 3 cards are backwards compatible with PCI-E 2.x. The performance difference is supposed to be negligible. Don't worry about it.

Excellent! That's great news. I was googling and only found upgrade instructions.

Thank you.