Much of this past week has been spent on newegg.com and tomshardware.com in search of a replacement for my now-ancient Radeon X1950XTX. In my price category of ~$100, I settled on the Radeon HD 5670 (Redwood). Being fortunate, I was able to purchase one last night for $101.change after tax in a local store.

The good news is that it will run WoW-Cataclysm on stock Ultra settings (I haven't even tried the DX11 beta features). The bad news is that it does so poorly. Performance is better on Good settings, but still not what I consider acceptable in open areas with terrain. I haven't tried StarCraft 2 yet, or Fallout 3... because let's face it, my primary game is WoW

The advice I am seeking is:

-I know it's obvious, but I haven't updated the drivers yet (by then, it was getting late last night and I didn't want to mess with it anymore). How much performance gain could I expect to see when I do so later today?

-Should I use the included software utility to overclock the card's processor and memory? If so, by how much? I am tempted to ramp it up as long as the temperature remains under control, but I don't have any experience overclocking anything even if it's as simple as moving a slidebar and don't want to damage it and be forced to buy a whole new card in a few months.

And if nothing else helps much,

-I am extremely reluctant to spend any more money, but should I just return the 5670 and pony up an extra $100 for a newer/better card that will actually last me a year and a half to two years? It seems wrong to me to buy a nominally-new card for $100 and not be able to play recent titles at better than medium settings.



EDIT:

Last night I updated the drivers from the AMD site (not ASUS, the card manufacturer) and the there was some improvement but I was still unhappy with the performance in WoW. I turned it on this morning, and all of a sudden everything worked great. Settings are on Ultra, with my only concession being to put shadows on the second lowest setting - even with DX11 enabled. SC2 runs everything maxed on Ultra, though the frame rate may be lower than some people prefer but bumping it down one level doesn't show much loss in quality while running a teensy bit more smoothly.