My EAH5850 opinion.

[thedoc46]

Recently upgraded from a 4850 to a Vapor-X 5770 and I was WOW !!! Everything was so much smoother and little niggles I had with the 4850 were washed away.. The min frame rates made everything act smoother.. So impressed was I, i wanted to continue the trend.. So i was either going to grab another 5770 for x-fire or just go with a 5850..

Anyway i went with the 5850, which i rec'd yesterday.. and upon installing this beast of a card, i had my first issue.. It was too long. At least to fit my 2nd HD in the bay.. Why cos the power sockets were also at the end, adding an extra cm or two.. A better design would be to have the pci inputs at the side ! But small problem, I just had to move a HD out of it's intended bay and fix it elsewhere in my Antec P182 case...

Next problem.. Performance... Any small and slight niggles i had on my 5770 that I was expecting the 5850 to iron out.. DIDN'T... Nope, I guess just about every game i play the 5770 plays it to the max anyway, so why bother with this leccy consuming, heat producing 5850 anyways ? Also fan noise, my vapor-x, with it's better design and cooling, made much less noise.

I guess i'm someone who can not stand any tearing and do not care too much for max fps, providing i can run vsync on and everything stays at 60fps.. Which is what it was doing on my 5770.. So extra horse power thats never going to get used.. At least for now. It it can run a game at 90fps instead of 70 fps, so what.. I'm only going to ever have it running at 60fps anyway with vsync always on.

Lastly, Asus's site for drivers is painful. The card ran fine in Windows 7, but on my other bootable Win XP partition, it did not.. It was blocking up, so i decided that maybe i needed the Asus drivers instead of the cats 10.2.. At download speeds of 5k a sec, that was enough for me to box this thing up, cancel my ebay listing of my 5770 and return the 5850 for a full refund..

 

[thedoc46]

*You should have checked the length before buying so cannot blame the card for that.
*Which games and which resolution do you use? Playing Chess at 1024x768 will not show any difference between a 5770 & 5850, wheras playing Crysis at 1920x1080 with 4xAA will make a huge difference.
*Always go direct to ATI or NVidia sites for the lastest drivers. All "partner" websites are rubbish.
*You should not be surprised that a Vapor-X 5770 (designed for very low noise) creates less noise than a reference 5850. That seems pretty obvious to me.
*If the 5770 provides a constant 60fps with vsync enabled (and that is all you want) why did you upgrade?
*Perhaps the graphics card is not your limiting factor - what cpu are you using?

edit: The monitor and CPU within your sig should allow significant performance increases to be seen when using a 5850. I cannot imagine the 5770 would run many modern games at 60fps at 1920x1080 with AA. The 5850 shuld be much more capable.

Cases don't get much bigger than my P182
I upgraded cos i thought i would see a performance increase, when i really didn't. The latest 'ATI' drivers were not working on my XP install but working fine on my Win7 64-bit, so i know the card is fine.. Hence my re-direction to the manufactuter driver site..

I play mainly the COD series.. All of which ran silky smooth before hand.. Also Need 4 Speed, which runs silky 90% of the time, and that 10% slight hiccup is still present with the 5850. Farcry2 which is probably the most demanding of my games seemed to look the same when i was expecting a huge increase. Overall jsut not that impressed.

If i could advise myself from 3 weeks ago, i'd say just get a 5770 and be happy.