Orphaned Radeon HD 6850... building new main system, Crossfire or new card?

Faust · Post by **Faust** » Sat May 18, 2013 10:30 pm

'Sup, gents?

Long story short, migrated most of my retire-ing hardware from my main box to the HTPC. The Radeon 6850 was too long for the HTPC enclosure so it's orphaned.

In the current scheme of things, would I be better off (in building my new "main" system) just gifting the 6850 to someone (~$150 for a dupe) or just buying a new VGA device?

Feeling nostalgic game-wise

Sad cat diary because... well, because I only assume some folks here have owned cats

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Mon May 20, 2013 6:26 am

Depends on what you plan to do. I have a 6770 and I still use it for my main gaming rig. I'm lucky that mine OCs very well. If you're looking to game at high resolutions(1920x1220 or above) then you may want to look into a newer card, and if you don't really game, then I'd say keep it.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Mon May 20, 2013 6:38 am

What games you looking at playing where it wouldn't be enough?

Caught your Steam message over the weekend....my gaming rig had been down since last Sept. Just rebuilt it with Win8 over the weekend...had to deal with getting my Steam account going again, Arma 2, and DayZ. Getting into DayZ and War Thunder. A buddy has a pretty customized DayZ server going, zombiebattalion.net
Anyways....tried sending a message back but was wrestling with Steam stuff and getting frustrated...will be on later this week.

Faust · Post by **Faust** » Mon May 20, 2013 10:34 am

Heya, guys.

As far as particular games, I really can't say or at least I don't have any in particular picked out. I have held off on say, Skyrim and Crysis due to me not being able to run them at as high a resolution as I'd like, but with say, Borderlands 2 I don't have a problem. It's really the system around the card that's the bottleneck and not the card itself. Play resolutions won't be greater than ~1920x1080 (haven't picked ouit a new monitor yet), so it sounds like I'll just run the single 6850 and see how it rolls

Thank you for the input, fellas.

And, 'Cat... yeah I saw you bounce in on Saturday. Was off doing a run through of an older RPG but saw they released Dragon's Lair on Steam. Back in the day (when was that... '81 when that came out?) those were the best graphics coupled with the absolute worst game play in gaming history. I wasn't too keen on it personally as it was a major quarter-hog. But it sure was a blast of nostalgia to see it this out now. When I get this system built and plunked into a proper battle station I'll get some good FPS games going.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Mon May 20, 2013 12:23 pm

Yeah I do recall DL at the arcade when it came out....the graphics made you pause and look. however....as you state...gameplay was "blah". Kinda like back in the 70's when you went to Disney World and was all excited to ride those powered race cars on the track...only to find out they were on rails and you were VERY limited to steering. Couldn't do much but sit and and wait for the ride to finish.

I run just a midrange Sapphire 6700 series myself...forget which specific one. Older Intel C2D CPU, 8 gigs rammage, pair of 76 gig Raptor HDDs. Old slow rig by most gaming standards...but it does fine for me.