Buying a HD 7850.

[hyperstalker]

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: tonight ro tomorrow
BUDGET RANGE: 200-275$ including rebates

USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: gaming, WoW, GW2, Arma2, Just Cause 2, Borderlands, Dues Ex, Ect. i know some of these arent graphic demanding but with a beter card i can better games.

CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: None new build, OCZ 600W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply

OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS:Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor , ASRock Z75 Pro3 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard

PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Partpicker.com http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/video-card/#c=81&r=2048

PARTS PREFERENCES: HD 7850

OVERCLOCKING: most likely unless its not necessary

MONITOR RESOLUTION:1920x1080

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: i want one that has a good warrenty and cooling most of the cards i read about had problems with cooling or fan problems. also the MSI at Compusa is on backorder. im mainly looking at which company to go for.

 

[danawesome89]

I have a Sapphire 7850 (mine happens to be the OC edition). It has really good cooling with two nice big fans on it. The non-OC version also has the same fans.
I always buy Sapphire when I get an AMD card, and I have never been disappointed.

It is also one of the only versions of the card that only needs one 6pin power connector rather than two.

 

[sarinaide]

It can for the most part run and match a HD 6970, if you consider the price point difference and that it is the lower end Pitcairn Pro mainstream card vs a high end Cayman XT, you start to see just how strong the little card is;

Pros:

70+ FPS solid in major gaming titles at 19x12 resolutions.
130w max operating load, runs of 1x6pin, making it a light power consumer.
Overclocking, factory set this card runs at a modest and uninteresting 860mhz, it can be bumped up to 1250mhz like a sunday jog, the oc headroom on all GCN chips is insane, running it at over a ghz gives you more gaming performance than the GTX 570 so this card can hang tough for such a low profile.

Cons:

The HD 7870GE is $20 more for a lot more performance so it is now badly priced, If AMD drop it down to $200 this card will be a must for any mainstream user buying on budget but it is being limited by its pricing.

To get the true gaming experience you need the overclock, at stock it sits around a HD 6950 performance, it was rather held back by AMD's liberal clocks on the vanilla GCN cards, with Ghz editions being released and rumour of a 7850GE we may get to see this card well and truely dominate the mainstream segmant particularly with the 660ti looking to cost around $300-350.

 

[JJ1217]

I was surprised such a little card (Sapphire HD 7850 Oced edition) could blast through most games at ultra at 40+ fps. (I get 40-60 on BF3, 40 on Crysis, and 45 on Crysis 2)

 

[sarinaide]

with some tweaking of unnecessary settings you can get it flat around 60FPS, overclock it a bit and you get 70-80FPS on BF3 no problems.

 

[odiervr]

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Above chart shows some benchmarks and cost data.

Quick look at newegg: (prices post rebate)
-$210 for an XFX 7850
-$255 for a Diamond (brand ??) 7870
-$280 for a Gigabyte or XFX 7870

If you give yourself week or two and do some serious shopping (amazon, newegg,pricewatch, microcenter ...) you should be able to get a good 7870 for $260 - 270 ... time is money.

Good Luck

 

[sarinaide]

Hey guys so I was reading this thread and I just actually exchanged my HD 7770 for the 7850. It put my graphics performance at 7.9 rating and increased my fps by almost 100 in WoW and SSF4AE(I know not a lot of graphics requirements) but I am thinking of getting BF3 and I was wondering how exactly would I overclock it for better perfomance? or would it even be worth over clocking? I noticed my temps for the GPU are 37C when im not playing games and 50C when I am. Not sure if this would help with your reply but htought ill post it up there.

Depending on the brand it comes with overclocking software unique to the brand or you can download any of ASUS, MSI, Sapphires respective overclocking tools and use that to overclock the card, alternatively you can use AMD overdrive to overclock either CPU or GPU.

You should look at OCNet and other sites for numbers that other people got using the same card under conventional cooling, that way you can have a benchmark to work off when adjusting core and Vram speeds. Don't aim for to much, aim for the better result and as stable as possible.

 

[sarinaide]

It won't make that much difference, the bandwidth of PCI-Exp 2.1 is not fully saturated to concern about that. Just download MSI Afterburner accept the terms and conditions for overclocking and you can overclock your card. It is ultimately the same GCN Pitcairn pro chip, the only thing that changes is the cooler.

 

[sarinaide]

You can hit a high overclock around 1150mhz/4800 VRAM on 1.175v or a more liberal 1ghz over clock on about 1.075v, the 3dmark 11 scores will be roughly 6200-6700 which is up on the 5400 base score.

 

[hyperstalker]

Best answer selected by hyperstalker.