I'm stuck, what card do i buy? £200-300

[AMG]

Some of what you posted does not make sense, but to answer your question I would still go with a GTX470 atm as it does overclock quite well.

if you overclock a HD5850 to the same speeds as the HD5870, the HD5850 will hold its own and very well against it, however in some situation it may be 10% slower than a HD5870 some people have tried.

the GTX470 does overclock well, but not as well as the HD5850 thats the point, okay fair enough it has less cores which does make a difference compared with its bigger brother, but for £200 thats just uncanny. It will be interesting to see a bechi with a GTX470 overclocked to its max and a HD5870 I got a feeling the HD5870 still maybe faster.

for the moment as you can tell I ve got two older gen Radeons which I am not upgrading, as I see little point in it.

Personally I m waiting for the smallier fermis to pop out and play unless they take up too much power, I only want it for linux

 

[James1954]

ifr you're considering getting a new psu, maybe X2 5830s in crossfire? they scale very well

 

[AMG]

yeah but they are close to HD5850 in price if I remember ?

 

[James1954]

£157 if you look hard for the xfx AVP edition

 

[ebilcake]

if you overclock a HD5850 to the same speeds as the HD5870, the HD5850 will hold its own and very well against it, however in some situation it may be 10% slower than a HD5870 some people have tried.

the GTX470 does overclock well, but not as well as the HD5850 thats the point, okay fair enough it has less cores which does make a difference compared with its bigger brother, but for £200 thats just uncanny. It will be interesting to see a bechi with a GTX470 overclocked to its max and a HD5870 I got a feeling the HD5870 still maybe faster.

for the moment as you can tell I ve got two older gen Radeons which I am not upgrading, as I see little point in it.

Personally I m waiting for the smallier fermis to pop out and play unless they take up too much power, I only want it for linux

Yeah I understand all this, still the part I highlighted doesn't make sense.

I would say the GTX470 would probably come out ahead, they seem to scale better and from the guru3d results it's almost on par with the GTX480 when overclocked, however you would probably need to run both at silly fanspeeds to maintain these speeds so it doesnt really matter.

 

[Ollie83]

They're a good card, I wouldn't hesitate popping one into a customers pc, if you plan on over clocking tho I'd definatly recommend an Asus or similar that has voltage control.

+1 a 5850 from asus is the way to go

 

[AMG]

Yeah I understand all this, still the part I highlighted doesn't make sense.

I can't be bothered to say anymore we differ in options.

needless to say a HD5850 at 1Ghz on the core see who wins

 

[Shagger]

Get a 5850. And overclock your Q6600 if you haven't already done so.

Nonsense, at 1920x1200+ resolutions, a single GPU isn't enough to make CPU matter. As long as you have a Core2Quad or higher (which he has), you'll see next to no performance gains all the way up to i7.