D3LTA09

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guys stop being obtuse, the OP is obviously asking for thoughts on 5850s vs 5870s. For the most part a 5850 is a lower clocked 5870 with a few less stream processors on a smaller pcb. However the 5850 oc's something fierce so can reach 5870 clocks and the 5870s dont seem to have a huge head room to push much further, well in my experience anyway as I have seen lots of people pushing 1000mhz core clocks on 5850s and most tests I have seen 5870s arent going much further than 1000-1050ish.
As for which one performs better at the same clocks one would imagine the 5870 should have an advantage given the extra stream processors and slightly better cooling but its a debate I have seen on many forums with no real conclusion.

Bottom line 5850 is in a pretty sweet spot given price/performance and I would probably consider buying 2 5850s instead of 2 5870s if I could go back and choose what gpus to buy again.
 
Get a 5850 and save your $$.

1025/1250 (Dirt2 15min run)

Dirt2_1025_1250_143v.png


 

welshmousepk

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the 5850 is better value for sure, but the 5870 is certainly the better card.

if you have the extra cash (and its not better spent elsewhere) then the 5870 is an excellent choice. if not, the 5850 will serve you well.

or you can meet in the middle and grab a GTX470.
 

D3LTA09

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In the end better or not, what does annoy me is that my sapphire vapor-x 5870 effectively has about 100mhz give or take, less oc headroom than a 5850, how *** is that?
OvrClkr can get 1025 out of his 5850 with a voltage tweak but seeing as voltages are physically inaccessible on the vapor-x rev 2 max stable OC I can get is around 930mhz.
 
Both the 5850 and 5870's have about the same overclock limit so if you overclock both cards to the limit then there's very little difference, maybe 5% which comes from the extra stream processors.

Got my 5850 at 1000/1200 for 24/7 and 1080/1250 for benching
 
Great, but if the OP is like me, he probably want's his card to last more than a month. Besides, no matter how fast you clock it the 5850 has less texture units, less shader units and less memory bandwidth. Oh and it can be overclocked too.


Nothing is going to happen to the card as long as you dont have a scorching ambient temp. My 5850 can still do 1.3v and stay well below 80c @ load. After 1.26v 1050/1275 you see no gain whatsoever, on the contrary the card starts to lose FPS so there is no point in running the card at such a high voltage.The above temps were achieved @ 76F ambient, the card hit 62c after 15 minutes of gameplay.. I dont see a reason why the card would fail anytime soon..

The 5870 is a great card as long as you have the cash, if a more important upgrade is needed with those extra 100.00$ then it's a no brainer IMO. If not then the 5870 would be the clear choice.
 
Maybe that's possible with that Asus card which is clearly designed for that. I'm sure it costs more than a regular 5850.

My XFX runs 55c under load at 775/1125 on stock volts in a 80f room.

I hope it lasts you, time will tell. Newegg pulled the Asus cards for some reason, hope it wasn't failure rate.

Newegg has pulled all Asus 5850's even though ALL 4 models had/have a great track record.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=Asus+5850

Other sites still sell the reference version and the DirectCU as well, I have not seen 1 complaint or failure as of yet when it comes to the DirectCU so I doubt it has anything to do with faulty equipment but who knows maybe they just went EOL and started a newer version.

If you google Asus 5850 DirectCU you get around 14 different e-tailors that have it in stock, kinda odd that the Egg is missing out on this particular GPU.

 

wortwortwort

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I think the one of the only major performance gains from factory overclocking would be the Toxic 5970, but the cost isn't justifiable. They got something like a 20% performance increase on average, but that is not worth it. I'm going with a 5870 for my $1600 Canadian (Including OS and Monitor) i5 gaming build.
 

timaishu

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I noticed that as well. I think I may have literally bought the last DirectCU 5850 from newegg. Right after I place my order they became unavailable.

Weird. Hope Im not missing out on a newer better DirectCU card.
 

notty22

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They may have made a side deal with another distributor for pallets of cards, who knows. Its impossible and probably always going to be wrong trying to read reasons it to why this happened. On some models they have 'limit 99' and other times, they have a web listing for one open box model !
 
I see it this way, if you are inclined to overclock and your ambient temps are at a tolerable level then there is no reason to spend the extra 100.00$. Now, if you do not overclock and you prefer to not mess with any settings then the 5870 would be the obvious choice.