Sapphire 5850

[as905]

from own experience i would say you need a much better cpu if you like to play games on Pc,a quad core with minimum of 3.5ghz x 4 .

i used to have my Q6600 clocked @ 3.6ghz but since the OC wasn't stable i had to lower it down to 3.2ghz & because i did this i lost around 10fps on some cpu intensive games.

 

[Merlin5]

The next thing to do would be to see how far you can push the overclock.

May be overclock from 725MHz to 800MHz right off the bet and then run some benchmarks and games to see if the card can run stable with the overclock on stock voltage?

If you lucky, you shouldn't get any driver crash, artefacts or tearing...but if you do, you might need to back down on the core-clock a bit.

Well yea, I'd like to try to overclock it. I think I'll run some games and benchmarks at stock to begin with, just to see how it all goes and then give myself some stats to compare against. Will overclocking be ok on the stock GFX cooler? When I go to 800Mhz, do I need to adjust the memory clock too? And what about 'auto tune' does that do an auto overclock for me?

 

[Merlin5]

from own experience i would say you need a much better cpu if you like to play games on Pc,a quad core with minimum of 3.5ghz x 4 .

i used to have my Q6600 clocked @ 3.6ghz but since the OC wasn't stable i had to lower it down to 3.2ghz & because i did this i lost around 10fps on some cpu intensive games.

There's a vast difference between the cheapest 3.2Ghz quadcore and the 3.5Ghz in this Phenom list. I could afford the 840 @£77.99. Would that be a massive enough improvement over my dualcore, or is it really essential to get the 3.5Ghz 970 @£139.99?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=6&subid=1943

Now considering the Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition "125W Edition" 3.20GHz , and O/C to 3.5 or more.