Just refurbished a HD 5850 1Gb I got on eBay for under £20. Whacked it in to see how it performed in some newer titles..
For a 2009 gpu I could still hit 60fps in BF1 on the low preset with a few settings upped to medium. Even full medium it was Comfy at about 45fps.. It freaked out at high though completely failing to display.
Really surprised as the G3258 was severely bottlenecking the R9280x... But with the i5 and a cheap gpu I can actually play everything I want at 60fps after some settings fiddling.
Lesson learned about the benefits of quad cores I think!
Also.. Refurbished the gpu by dis-assembling, cleaning, degunking and changed the TIM. The card now runs about 5°c cooler (it was disgusting) but also netted me an extra 300 points on 3d mark and extra 2-3% increase in FPS on every game I've tried it on.
This was done by running 3 built in benchmarks prior to the refurbishment and then the same bench after..
Any ideas why this would increase performance?