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4890x2 or 5850?

If you are buying from scratch buy the 5850. It offers great performance and an easy upgrade path in the future.

If you already own a 4890, buy another because they are dirt cheap at the moment.
 
rolypolyman said:
Agree, the CF5770 comfortably beats the 4870 X2 2GB in all but one of the games in this review which I would think puts them at or near 4890 X2.:)
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But not better, which was the point I was trying to make. As far as I know, ati have done nothing to improve crossfire performance with this generation, hence given that a single 4890 is either equal to or better than a single 5770, the same should apply when both cards are compared in crossfire. Also if drivers have improved performance for crossfire 5770, there's no reason why performance isn't being improved for crossfire 4890.

I think the reason people get excited about 5770 crossfire performance is because the performance of a single 5770 is fairly poor. I'm guessing that having two of the cards in crossfire alleviates the memory bandwidth deficiency that the cards have compared to the 4870/4890, since each card is rendering only half the frames in a crossfire setup.
 
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'the performance of a single 5770 is fairly poor'

As against a card twice the price do you mean ie 5850. Or against a card 3 times the price ie 5870 or against 260GTX, old tech and still more expensive. For around £110 I think anyone buying a 5770 should be very pleased with the performance. And as for two in crossfire, well beats 5850 and gets up to 5870 performance. Apparantly the 10.3 drivers are giving 5*** cards a huge boost in Dirt2, particularly in crossfire, so looking good for me.:D

See this thread.
 
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rolypolyman said:
'the performance of a single 5770 is fairly poor'

As against a card twice the price do you mean ie 5850. Or against a card 3 times the price ie 5870 or against 260GTX, old tech and still more expensive. For around £110 I think anyone buying a 5770 should be very pleased with the performance. And as for two in crossfire, well beats 5850 and gets up to 5870 performance. Apparantly the 10.3 drivers are giving 5*** cards a huge boost in Dirt2, particularly in crossfire, so looking good for me.:D

See this thread.
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I was talking mainly about performance, but I agree it seems to be priced right, though I'd still take a 4890 any day.

Also Dirt2 performance sucked to begin with as I honestly don't see anything majorly different with the graphics in comparision to GRID, which runs loads better.

Personally I'd like to see ATI fix their texture filtering issues (see here), fix DX10 AA performance and lighting glitches in Resident Evil 5 and try to improve performance for Bad Company 2 when it's released.
 
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wow, im glad that's cleared up - rofl, thanks for all your replies, I can see it's a bit of a '6 of 1 and half a dozen of the other' situation. I'll just have to weigh up all the pro's and cons mentioned here and hope I decide correctly.
 
wardogz said:
wow, im glad that's cleared up - rofl, thanks for all your replies, I can see it's a bit of a '6 of 1 and half a dozen of the other' situation. I'll just have to weigh up all the pro's and cons mentioned here and hope I decide correctly.
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There's no real wrong choice :) (except maybe the 5830 at it's current price lol)
 
5870:
1027 / 1286 @ 1.27v

5850:
1001 / 1232 @ 1.226v

On average 0.05V further to get 26mhz more..... It's certainly easier to get the 5850 to 1ghz levels and they perform very similarly when clocked the same.
 
Meaker said:
5870:
1027 / 1286 @ 1.27v

5850:
1001 / 1232 @ 1.226v

On average 0.05V further to get 26mhz more..... It's certainly easier to get the 5850 to 1ghz levels and they perform very similarly when clocked the same.
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You're looking at the average volts needed across all overclocks...

The 5850 is a great card....but it's in no way, absolutley in no way a better performer than the 5870. Money aside, if you're prepared to push the 5850 and 5870 to the same extreme levels the 5870 will come out on top.

This is taken from XS:

Just for reference a 5850 needs clocks of 940/1200 to beat a default 5870 in every aspect
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http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?p=4259395

The chart I linked to earlier also shows the 5870 is clockable further than the 5850.


Fledge said:
Am I reading here that the 5850 is much better value than the 5870?
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Yes, much much much better value :)
 
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