Radeon HD 5850 black edition vs HD 6870

[atomic7431]

How you going about overclocking it mate? - I've never OC'd graphics cards but with BF3 think I might have to lol.

Presume your using afterburner? Last time I gave it a brief try I couldn't up the clocks at all

yep msi afterburner ive altered the voltage to 1200 and now got a stable core clock of 1017mhz and a mem core of 1200mhz and getting 5074 in 3d mark 2011 http://3dmark.com/3dm11/2420112

 

[muppet]

Sweet score mate there's life in these old cards yet lol

 

[Helios1234]

The two perform about the same except that the 5850 has much more room for overclocking.

 

[dave_beast]

The two perform about the same except that the 5850 has much more room for overclocking.

But uses much moar power

 

[gurusan]

Not much.

 

[muppet]

i think we all agree 5850 to 6870 is pretty poinless

 

[Helios1234]

But uses much moar power

The HD5850 is hardly power hungry though. I'd rather have more performance .

 

[liamcrane]

How much wattage does a 5850 actually use tho at stock? and how much more would it use say if it was overclocked from the stock 725mhz to 900mhz? i saw the 7 series look to be using around 250w at stock

 

[mayebaza]

For the Guys who have the 5850s cross fired on AMD, IMO, do not upgrade your cards, but rather change your board and chip to an Intel 2500K and see what these babies can really do!

This is my 3D Mark11 score on my AMD 955 @ 3.9Ghz

This is my 3D Mark11 score on my Intel 2500K @ 4.8Ghz

Now, I not looking to upgrade until the new PCIex cards have proved themselves worthy.
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AsRock Z68 Ex4 G3, [email protected] , G. Skill RipsawsX 8GB,
5850 1GB(CFX), CM90 II Advanced, Crucial M4 256GB, 4 HDDs,
NH-D14, XFX 850W BE, Xonar Essence STX, BlackGold HD DVB.

 

[nitram100]

3D Mark doesn't really represent in game fps though. My bro has the same card as me but an i5 2500k, his frames on BF3 are only slightly higher.

 

[Marine-RX179]

3D Mark doesn't really represent in game fps though. My bro has the same card as me but an i5 2500k, his frames on BF3 are only slightly higher.

But the biggest problem is with crossfire setting up, whenever people play games that use less than 4 cores, overclocked Core2Quad or Phenom II X4 will bottleneck the graphic cards to hell and back, whereas an 2-3 cores on overclocked 2500K would be significantly faster than 2-3 cores on the Core2Quad or Phenom II X4, thus greatly reduce the bottleneck and improve scaling hugely.

The number of games that actually uses 4 cores or more like BFBC2/BF3 probably account for less than 5-10% of the games out there.

 

[almighty151986]

Clock-for-clock the 5850 is the much faster card so don't get a 6870..

 

[BigAndy87]

tessellation the 6870 will be abit better at but sidegrade coming from a 5850.

 

[ooEy]

If your motherboard supports crossfire (and your PSU is up to the job) get another 5850 and enjoy near 580/7970 performance at 1080/1200.

 

[Oma-Lan-DP]

Have just installed a second 5850 in crossfire.

My friend has the same setup but has a single 6970.

Here's the Unigine Benchmark's to compare, shows that 2x5850's are better than even a 6970.

A single 5850

Crossfire 5850

A single 6970

 

[J.D]

Have just installed a second 5850 in crossfire.

My friend has the same setup but has a single 6970.

Here's the Unigine Benchmark's to compare, shows that 2x5850's are better than even a 6970.

Why on earth would you and your friend use a benchmark program to see what's the better card?. Just either a) measure performance over several game titles or b) use something like this http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/303?vs=292 or multiple review sites. I'm not saying it's wrong to use Heaven, just not to rely only on that. You and your friend do not play Heaven .

Your cards are faster but...... not by much and then you have Crossfire to deal with, driver problems with some titles and also the lack of support for new titles (for a few weeks). I'd say it evens it out but as only a reader of other people's Crossfire/SLI woes, I've only got their experience to base this on so I'm out of my league. I'll grab my coat .