OldManLight

if it's not urgent, and if you're in the states, check big box retailers on 4th of july weekend or right after school starts back up in the fall. they'll be clearing house

I'd go with the GTX 770 for the power consumption reason alone plus nvidia driver support seems to be more solid than AMD. Currently I have 2 AMD 7770's crossfired and i'm able to run BF3 at max minus the MSAA at 1920x1080 and get 30 fps or better even when stuff gets crazy on 64 player servers. but, i'm only running these because it was what i was able to afford at the time i was looking to buy. if money were no object, i'd go Nvidia.

Been running AMD processors for a few years now. currently running a phenom II 965 quad core OC to 3.7 Ghz with 2 HD 7770's in crossfire mode. no problems with CPU at all. idles in the high 30's C and gets up to mid 50's C under load with a stock cooler. With the video, aside from a game specific crash due to the crossfire setup (witcher 2) and some hiccups getting the driver loaded right when i added the 2nd card, everything's been great.

Before that i had an athlon 2 x2 250 which also ran pretty solid.

Was wondering if my current PSU is enough amperage and wattage to support my current setup. Help?

I ask because when i check my power settings in my bios and the 12v rail appears to be consistently around 11.5. Didn't know if that was a telltale sign of that being overloaded or not.

Phenom II x4 965 black at 3.7GHZ stock cooler

12 GB DDR3

2 HD 7770's Crossfire

5 SATA Hard Drives,

HT Omega Claro 2 PCI Sound Card

4 case fans (1 of which is an LED)

they're sure to get that message.

i'd say $500 would be a fair expectation. Problem you're going to have is that anyone looking to buy a gaming pc either has the money to do it the easy way and buy new a prebuilt one or anyone looking to save some money is gonna be looking for a deal and won't be willing to go much higher than that price. I've never had good luck selling old PC gear because the market is always being flooded with newer better tech. A lot of times, i end up practically giving it away to friends who want to have their own pc to play games on.

i would say go with the nice new Haswell stuff for now making sure to buy a good motherboard and PSU. All other upgrades will be small potatoes for a few years after those. Also, if you have a Microcenter nearby, check them out for a GPU, the one near me always has deals on open box ones that are heavily tested before being resold at deep discounts. I just picked up a 2nd Radeon HD 7770 for $80 and i'm now running the 2 of them in crossfire mode.

Halo, made first person shooters more feasible on console controls (did not need a mouse and keyboard as was the FPS standard at that time.)

CoD4 took traditional online multiplayer and added a progression and unlock system to it (I.E. XP and levelling) Before this, there were few games in this genre who did this. It was also fast paced, highly accessible and a load of fun.

What a pain in the butt this was. finally got it working with current Catalyst 13.4 drivers,

just though i'd update the thread for continuity sake in case someone should have the same issue in the future. The critical step is making sure you got ALL the old drivers off your pc.

Procedure for installing a crossfire video card setup on windows 7 64 bit SP1

1. uninstall current video card driver software...reboot
2. run driver sweeper (found on guru3d.com), remove all video drivers found during analyze phase...power off (hint: a good way to tell that drivers still are present on your pc in some form is that when you get to your login screen/desktop, your pc will probably still be running your monitor's previous resolution. If you want to test to make sure you got them all, reboot and your screen should be displaying in 800x600 res)
3. with pc powered off and unplugged (for safety sake) install new video card, connect card to power supply, install crossfire bridge, reconnect power to pc
4. power up, log into windows, install drivers...reboot
5. login to windows, wait for windows hardware wizard to finish, what it's doing...at this point if your pc hasn't crashed, you're doing good...reboot once more.
6. login to windows, enjoy.

now running all my games at max settings AAx4 AFx16 and getting consistent +30-60fps out of all of them. no graphical artifacts or crashes as of yet (knock on wood.)