Upgrade from a Radeon HD 5970???

This might seem like a ridiculous question, but I have a burning desire to upgrade my video card from a 5970. Crossfire or SLI do not appear to be options for me due to the lack of power cables (I might be able to rework some things and squeeze out the power needed).

I am considering switching to a single GPU card - the 580 GTX (3GB) version. With the idea that I might be able to pull that into an SLI down the road, which I think would outperform the 6990 or 590.

The reason I'm considering this is because my current card will not overclock and I think it's performing at a much lower rate than what should be expected. My benchmarks on Vantage are way below where they should be.

I do play games, but I probably use the GPU most as an accelerator for Photoshop, as I do some very graphic intensive work with Photoshop and Flash.

I would appreciate any feedback you might have. Thanks in advance. FYI - whichever GPU I go with, it must be able to power 2 30" monitors.

What are your Vantage scores that you're concerned with? CPU is factored into Vantage scoring, so your older Q9650 will be highly outpaced by the Core i series (1156, 1366, and 1155).

Edit: Evidently your sig changed while I was responding. If you indeed have a 2600K at 4.4, then you will need to post your scores to evaluate. BTW Z78 isn't released yet

I updated my signature to reflect the new system I just built. I have a 2600k Sandy Bridge CPU now and plenty of memory (16GB @ 2133). My Vantage scores are about 30% off of what the published benchmarks are....

Can you post them so I can see them? What are you comparing to in order to determine that you are 30% low?

I would think that a 5970 should still beat a 580 gtx.. just get a larger PSU and find another 5970

GPU Score of 29781, when I just reran it... that's up a bit from the last time (15,000+). I was basing my comparison on a chart that I found online. One of the boards... maybe this one?? I saved an image and I'll upload that in a minute. Thanks for your help.

Are you overclocking the card at all?

I assume the HD5970 is stock? You can get some increase in performance by grabbing MSI Afterburner and overclocking it. You can also raise the voltage if you need for stability. I went to 1.162V and can run it at 950MHz core (from 725MHz stock) which increases my FPS.

The GTX580 will be a step down in terms of gaming performance on average I believe, but it benefits from CUDA in that it will be quicker in Photoshop when GPU acceleration is available.

Here's a link to one of Badbonji's Vantage runs Link. Look at the screenshot and see where your systems differ.

I'll try increasing the voltage to your recommendation, Badbonji. Nzaneb, I tried overclocking it in small increments and the card says it "passed", but my screens start to flicker at the slightest overclock... this is why I think I have a bad card or something.

Sounds like you're overclocking in the CCC, try using one of the aftermarket OC tools (like Afterburner as suggested). You can fire up Furmark then and check for artifacts.