GPU upgrade, worth it?

[Trotter]

One question, as I've never upgraded a card before, I've always just upgraded my entire rig at once, will I need to uninstall my old drivers before installing the 6890? I just recently d/led the newest drivers for my card, but I'm sure they aren't the same. Or can I just unplug this card, pop in the new one, and will it automatically delete the old drivers and install the newest ones/drivers provided on cd?

Download the latest drivers from AMD. Uninstall your old drivers. Reboot. Install the new drivers.

Were you able to successfully unlock the fourth core on that X3?

 

[Thresh25]

I never tried it, I remember when I bought it I read a little about it but I can't remember why I didn't try. Is it overly complicated or risky?... It might be something I need to try now that I'm unable to max some the games out that I play.

 

[Trotter]

No, it is easy to do. My wife's Biostar board and it was an option in the BIOS. She is running an Athlon II X3 that unlocked.

 

[Thresh25]

I actually just did it lol... Seems to be stable so far.. In CPU-Z I noticed my dram frequency is 400mhz.. aka 800mhz but it should be at 1066... How do I get my RAM to run at full speed?

 

[Trotter]

Congrats on the unlock. Try running it through some Prime95 to check the stability... just to make sure.

You will have to set the RAM speed in the BIOS as well.

 

[KJamesJR]

Generally I would uninstall the old drivers.

 

[Thresh25]

I played BF3 for like 3 hours and it was stable, it increased my FPS alone w/o the new card by like 10-15, I was really shocked and so happy lol... it's almost like I just got a new processor. I do have a couple of questions though..
1st) Core temp shows "0?" as my cpu temp, is there another program I can use to make sure I'm not burning up my cpu?
2nd) Does unlocking this core heat my cpu up at all?
3rd) I have my cpu overclocked 400mhz to 3.2ghz, is my 4th core automatically running at this speed as well?

Thanks!

Edit: And a last question! I went on to amd's site to get the newest drivers, but it appears my new card and my old card actually use the exact same drivers? Is this correct? I didn't uninstall any drivers just plugged it in booted it up and everything seems to be running fine. I went to d/l the new drivers, but when I went to save it to the desktop it asked me if I wanted to replace the old file (which was still left up from when I recently d/led the new drivers for my old 4850).

 

[Trotter]

1) not sure... sort of brain dead right now.

2) A little as it is an additional core, but not enough to worry about at all.

3) Yes. All the cores will run at the same speed.

I would still reinstall to make sure Windows is set up properly with the new card.