Cheapest opengl 4 card

[anything I don't mind]

I am looking for a new card but I want to get opengl 4 card and was disappointed that the new passive SAPPHIRE ULTIMATE HD 7750 is opengl 3.2. Is there realy that much difference with the opengl versions?

I am looking for a card better than my old hd 3850. It is an old card but they tend to make a lot of low spec cards these days.

My 3850 spec:

Video Adapter ATI Radeon HD 3850
BIOS Date 12/14/07 03:32
Transistors 666 million
Process Technology 55 nm
Die Size 192 mm2
Bus Type PCI Express 2.0 x16 @ x16
Memory Size 512 MB
GPU Clock 716 MHz (original: 720 MHz)
RAMDAC Clock 400 MHz
Pixel Pipelines 16
TMU Per Pipeline 1
Unified Shaders 320 (v4.1)
DirectX Hardware Support DirectX v10.1
Pixel Fillrate 11456 MPixel/s

Memory Bus Properties
Bus Type GDDR3
Bus Width 256-bit
Real Clock 900 MHz (DDR) (original: 900 MHz)
Effective Clock 1800 MHz
Bandwidth 56.3 GB/s


I know the card is 4 or 5 years old now but the spec of the new cards don't seem that much better. I was hoping to not spend more than £100. Am i being unrealistic ?

edit: i just saw on the website http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/?cid=1&gid=3&sgid=1159&lid=1&pid=1471&leg=0 that it has opengl 4.2 so maybe ocuk spec are just incorrect. hmm

 

[synixx]

Oh believe me the 3850 has been surpassed by a wide margin. If you are looking at the unified shader count, that changed after the 5xxx series to a more efficient design which required less shaders so you can't really compare them with shader count (for instance 6850 has 960 shaders which is almost equal to the 5850 at 1440 shaders). And again, the 5850 has 4x the shader count of the 3850 and that is an old card.

Anyway, if there are still any cheap 6850's about there were a great buy at under £100 about a month ago.

EDIT: If you were to stretch your budget a bit, the 7850's have recently received a price drop to ~£150 and they overclock like monsters.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I was not aware that the shader count changed as you explained.

 

[Orcvader]

Doesn't the 7750 support Open GL 4.2? http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7750/Pages/radeon-7750.aspx#2

Can you stretch a bit more for this 460, that supports Open GL 4.3? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-171-EA&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1830

Why do you need the Open GL 4+ requirement?