Hey guys, my dad told me the other day that somone at his works was selling an 'almost new' Radeon 5850 for £150. Great I thought, too good to turn down even with a lack of warranty!
Dad brought it home yesterday and it's an 'engineering sample' dated 09/04/09 (so presumably 4th Sept 09 in Uk speak). I'm not sure what to do with it- as the manufacturing date is so close to the actual release date I'm inclined to think that it can't be that different from the actual release version.
It looks exactly the same as a normal 5850, except it has a weird little connector on the back of pcb which I can't see on any photos of the production version. The Bios is 012.011.000.000.000000, which seems to be a slightly lower number to other branded models I have seen on the internet. It seems to be running okay, and it spends most of its time idling a low temp and low fan speed (25%). GPUz says its clocked at 725/1000 with 1440 shaders which seems about right (Everest thinks it has 1520 for some reason). I've played a few games and they seemed to run okay- Empire TW sort of froze (although I could still move the camera) at one point a short time after putting the textures up to ultra- but I'm not sure if that's not just the game being buggy as usual.
Anyway, the point of this long warbling post is what would you do with it? Keep it or try to get your money back?
Dad brought it home yesterday and it's an 'engineering sample' dated 09/04/09 (so presumably 4th Sept 09 in Uk speak). I'm not sure what to do with it- as the manufacturing date is so close to the actual release date I'm inclined to think that it can't be that different from the actual release version.
It looks exactly the same as a normal 5850, except it has a weird little connector on the back of pcb which I can't see on any photos of the production version. The Bios is 012.011.000.000.000000, which seems to be a slightly lower number to other branded models I have seen on the internet. It seems to be running okay, and it spends most of its time idling a low temp and low fan speed (25%). GPUz says its clocked at 725/1000 with 1440 shaders which seems about right (Everest thinks it has 1520 for some reason). I've played a few games and they seemed to run okay- Empire TW sort of froze (although I could still move the camera) at one point a short time after putting the textures up to ultra- but I'm not sure if that's not just the game being buggy as usual.
Anyway, the point of this long warbling post is what would you do with it? Keep it or try to get your money back?