Guys,
These are my current specs..

Phenom II 955BE
8 gig DDR 3
He 6950

I have a triple monitor setup that is struggling a little with rf2 and P Cars.

Would chucking a second 6950 or upgrading to an intel core i5 2500k improve my fps in both games the most? I appreciate both games are in alpha/beta status and both could do with significant optimisations, but in the mid to long term what's say you guys?

For the recordi also play a lot of bf3 and iRacing.

Cheers
Marcus.

IMHO easily the i5-2500k would make more of a difference than a second 6950, as most sims don't take advantage of crossfire or SLI, of the games you mention you play only BF3 takes advantage of crossfire, for the others it will be of no help and in some cases it can even hurt due to microstutter (I used to get that in iRacing with crossfire enabled).

The CPU upgrade would help everywhere, and with that particular CPU if you get a decent MB it also has huge overclock potential, if you choose to go that route.

Aye.. it is as i had feared.. time to break out the credit card i guess

I'm 95% sure that triple monitor setups in virtually all games tend to be GPU limited, not CPU limited. To find out for sure, you can run some benchmarks and overclock (or underclock if you are afraid to fry stuff) either the CPU or the GPU. Kludger has a good point regarding crossfire/sli, so if the games are indeed graphics limited, you might rather want to replace the card than add a second one.

Seeing as the PhenomII 955 is a 4 Core @ 3.2 GHz, i doubt that would be a Bottle neck for a Single GPU Configuration. 3 or 4 way crossfire/SLI maybe, but single/dual.. nope.

The 955 is a decent Gaming CPU, 4 Complete execution Cores, Higher IPC than my FX8120.

The problem your system has is Frame Buffer, and Raw GPU Horsepower.

A single 6950 should barely be able to run anything new w/ heavy shaders and physics in eyefinity.

the 6970 was the top of the line Single GPU for the 6000 Series and handily got stomped by the nvidia 580's 560ti's and 560 448 Core.

The 6950 is 128 Cores short of what the 6970 is, 1 or 2GB Frame Buffer depending on Model.

IMHO the entire 6900/6800 series were just minor tweaks of the 5800/5700 series.


I'd Say upgrade to a 79xx or 670/680. that way you increase your GPU power and Frame Buffer size.

Typo? According to most tests, 6970 was reasonably close to the 580 and significantly stronger than any 560. Also the higher the resolution, the better the 6970 looked and we are talking about a triple screen setup here.

linking one benchmark here, can link more if needed:

http://www.tomshardware.de/charts/2011-gaming-grafikkarten-charts/Gamer-Index,2673.html

For Eyefinity, two cards can help a lot -- almost doubled FPS in my games -- providing the game was not CPU limited. And, as kludger notes, in a few games Crossfire or SLI do not "run right".

Skyrim and the original IL-2, for example, are CPU limited. The Eyefinity FPS was virtually the same with and without CrossFire in my tests -- but fast enough in both cases using a Phenom II OC (easy to OC). Still, much more good than harm in my case.

FWIW, now I run HD7970 OC as a single card that runs Eyefinity fine so far (basically equal to 2x HD5870) -- worked with OC Phenom II and now works with OC Bulldozer (Bulldozer is no real game improvement over Phenom II -- basically equal performance).

Anyhow, might be worth it to verify if the game is CPU limited and verify by reading someone's test data that the Intel CPU actually makes a visible difference (usually with a "faster CPU" the effect is far too small to actually "see" with your eyes). Cost effectiveness might dictate an all new CPU (rarely) or all new GPU or a second HD6950.

Just more opinion

Hmm.. food for thought.. I get plenty fine FPS on high settings on BF3.. around 55-65 dependant on map and player number.

However pcars and rfactor are both mid teens to 30 on middling settings. It is especially bad sitting on the grid (as expected) but does improve after the race starts.. however neither are as good as iRacing as it gives me minimum 60's and usually higher.. apart from Spa.. Spa is not nice to my rig..

I had read that on another forum that the CPYU i run currently should be fine.. I do run it OC'd from 3.2 to 3.6gig. Whilst i understand the fact that many games, rfactor and pcars included do not currently play nice with crossfire, my understanding was that part of the dev process of both of them is that they would be putting some effort into getting that resolved.. hence my thoughts on a second 6950.

As an aside, my 6950 is a MSI twin frozr and i have unlocked the extra shaders allowing it to run with 6970 shaders and not 6950 shaders.

Two HD6970 should beat my HD7970 OC (in most Eyefinity cases and the many cases that CrossFire works). Two HD6950 may also beat it. But, HD7970 is fast enough for me, in my games.

FWIW, CrossFire (and SLI) usually run at nearly twice the FPS of the slowest card. One can mix an HD6970 and HD6950 -- it will run like 2x HD6950. Parenthetically, I tried it with an HD5830 and HD5870 over a year ago -- ran like 2x HD5830 (which I also tried). So, something to consider if you go the HD69xx route.

I did not know this... thats pretty interesting. I don't think it will make a good deal of difference to me, howver it is something to bare in mind.