Read more.The Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB graphics card sacrifies a little high-end performance for a £100 reduction in the asking price of HD 5870. Worth it? We find out.
Read more.The Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB graphics card sacrifies a little high-end performance for a £100 reduction in the asking price of HD 5870. Worth it? We find out.
Thanks for the review - a small note is I'm beginning to find it hard to distinguish between the different shades of red on the graphs for the different cards, especially for the crossfire evaluation.
On to the card, and I thoroughly applaud the decision to make a smaller card! The 5870 wouldn't fit in my case! But I don't like the placement of the power connectors - just how different is the PCB of the 5850 from the 4890 I wonder...?
Tarinder (30-09-2009)
Agreed completely on the charts, i had to skip most of them to the bang4buck chart.
Wow (shadowsong): Arthran, Arthra, Arthrun, Amyle (I know, I'm inventive with names)
Nice review, it covered most of what I wanted to know, but I was wondering if Hexus could start providing a bit more information and a comparison on noise, some of us love a quiet system.
shadowmaster (30-09-2009)
Sorry n00b post delete please
Last edited by ABCx86; 30-09-2009 at 11:31 AM. Reason: thought I saw a typo in main article but I didn't
I like it, the 5870 was too expensive, too big etc... the power draw results, especially idle are one of the best things.
But at £200 it's still a little too pricey, IMHO new cards should make the previous generation poor value for money by offering more performance at a given price point (it reduces the impact of a new generation if it simply offers more performance for more money), but the Bang4Buck still shows more value to the GTX275 and 4890... I'd like to see the 5850 drop to £170-£180 for stock cards. I hope this will be the case in a few months, especially after the next NVidia launch.
It will be interesting to see how the 5850 copes with Crysis engine, especially if it can do significantly better than Nvidia's equivalently priced cards (which I hope it can).
Not sure what do now, I currently have a 4870 toxic, the 5870 is to expensive and the 5850 doesn't seem a big enough jump.
Will wait to see how the prices go, but the longer I leave it the less my current card is worth to sell.
This is true but I think its usually worth sacrificing a little value for higher performance if it means you'll get a bit more enjoyment and life out of the card. If you go for the best value card now you may waste money upgrading sooner than you'd intended to.
If you had a bell curve of cost against performance (ie bang for the buck) I would generally aim for just past the best-value peak.
Numbers look good, but does anyone know what these cards are like for folding? I just don't know if I could get one if it turns out to be as bad as the 48**-series... I do so like to fold...
"I want to be young and wild, then I want to be middle aged and rich, then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I'm deaf..."
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