HD5850 owners, roll call!

[Imouto]

x3 money for x1.5 performance is a great deal.

 

[Maximilian]

One pic is worth a thousand words:

Hehe, makes me feel warm and fuzzy :awe:

 

[slayernine]

I had one it died, got a warranty replacement and it died too. My 5870 is still rocking it with out any issues though I did install an after market cooler to improve the cooling as I found the 5850's and 5870 all ran rather hot.

 

[Chiropteran]

I have 3 5850s, along with 5 of it's younger brother the HD 5830. All working hard mining bitcoins. Not using one in my main PC anymore though, upgraded that to a 6970.

 

[Termie]

When I bought BF3 and saw the projections for HD7000 back in October, I gave up and bought a second HD5850. All in I've paid $425 for my cards, have enjoyed good performance since I bought the first one in spring 2010, and now have 7950-beating performance. I absolutely made the right decision...I'm just sorry the 5850 was discontinued, because that means I can't recommend it to you all for Crossfire.

AMD's attempt to lift its stock prices on the backs of its enthusiast GPU users will backfire. It's just not a large enough market. AMD has been heavily promoted on this forum and others for its value, not for top-of-the-heap performance, because no one truly needs that. The 7950 is an even worse value than the 7970.

Here's another graph that tells a sordid tale:

Consider the following:
- HD3870: Nov. 2007, $220
- HD4870: June. 2008, $299 (7 months, 2.3x faster, 1.3x the price)
- HD5870: Sep. 2009, $380 (15 months, 1.8x faster, 1.3x the price)
- HD6970: Dec. 2010, $369 (15 months, 1.2x faster, 1x the price)
- HD7950/70: Jan. 2012, $450/550 (13 months, 1.2x faster/1.4x faster, 1.2x/1.5x the price)

Never before has AMD's performance increase trailed its price increase!

 

[KingFatty]

But, but, but, the AMD "overpriced" cards are flying off the shelves like hotcakes.

Are you suggesting AMD should be charitable and give away the cards at a lower price than people are willing to pay?

Even if AMD did underprice their cards below demand, don't you think the vendors like Newegg would happily step in and correct the error by pricing the cards at a reasonable level to meet the demand curve?

Why not "blame" Nvidia for refusing to "correct" the price of their 580 card, or refusing to release a competitor that outperforms AMD at a lower price?

 

[Termie]

But, but, but, the AMD "overpriced" cards are flying off the shelves like hotcakes.

Are you suggesting AMD should be charitable and give away the cards at a lower price than people are willing to pay?

Even if AMD did underprice their cards below demand, don't you think the vendors like Newegg would happily step in and correct the error by pricing the cards at a reasonable level to meet the demand curve?

Why not "blame" Nvidia for refusing to "correct" the price of their 580 card, or refusing to release a competitor that outperforms AMD at a lower price?

Flying off shelves? They've been easily available from multiple vendors from day one. I don't remember the last time it was so easy to buy a new card at release.

I'm confident that if they'd priced each of these cards $100 cheaper, their sales would have doubled.

 

[exar333]

5870 here; waiting for Kepler or price-reduced 7xxx series. In for 2 of either, depending on which is the best.

Been rocking the 58xx for a while now and love it.

 

[exar333]

Hell of a good card the 5850...it's worked reliably with no issues since purchase.
I'm looking forward to the HD7950 as a replacement,generally I skip a generation between cards(and CPUs).
I'd rate the HD5850 along side my old X1900XT as equal favorite AMD cards so far.

Agreed. My 5870, X800XT, and 9700Pro are my favorite AMD cards of all time.

 

[poohbear]

Well i kinda understand where you come from, but the 7970 looks so good that i decided to get it. My 5870 was the best for a while and it even kept up against newer cards such as GTX480/570, HD6970/6950.

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Tapatalk

why did u feel the need to upgrade? the 5870 is running fine for me. Seriously aside from the 1gb of ram (and even then its not a huge deal for me as i game @ 1920x 1080), this vid card can stay another year with me as there are no demanding games coming out in 2012 (all of the demanding ones came out last year and it handles them fine).

 

[beginner99]

Have a 5850 and no plans for upgrading because i have a 1680x1050 display and new cards are overpriced for that resolution.

 

[WMD]

Hehe, makes me feel warm and fuzzy :awe:

5850 vs 7950
2 years 4 months later
40nm > 28nm
ancient VLIW5 > GCN
256bit bus > 384 bit bus
Performance increase: 50%
Price increase: 73%

To be fair BF3 does make it look worse than usual because it does not involve extreme tessellation which the 7900 series are very good at. Titles like Batman AC should better justify the price.

 

[justin4pack]

5870 here; waiting for Kepler or price-reduced 7xxx series. In for 2 of either, depending on which is the best.

Been rocking the 58xx for a while now and love it.

Same here, was thinking on 7xxx series but this thing gives me no problems so i will probably wait for nvidia's next gen.

 

[gorb]

I still have a 5850. The only game I play is cs 1.6 (obviously the 5850 is huge overkill for that) so I'm not worried

 

[Stingercjc]

I've got two 5850's in CF right now both overclocked to 850 core. Runs most everything I throw at it without problems. The one exception is Skyrim. It runs fine but the microstutter is awful, especially in outdoor areas.

I've got around 250 in Amazon gift cards (X-mas and some DVDs I traded in that were collecting dust) and the 79XX series looks interesting, but the price is too high. So it's a waiting game for now.

Once I do upgrade, one of the 5850's is going in my HTPC so I can play games on my 100" projection screen. The other will be sold on Ebay.

 

[dakU7]

Flying off shelves? They've been easily available from multiple vendors from day one. I don't remember the last time it was so easy to buy a new card at release.

I'm confident that if they'd priced each of these cards $100 cheaper, their sales would have doubled.

Lies. It was virtually impossible to buy a 7970 for the first days.
Heck, I added 300 Sapphire 7970 cards to my cart on launch day from Newegg just to see what's the stock like. 2 hours later, I could only add about 20.

 

[Termie]

Lies. It was virtually impossible to buy a 7970 for the first days.
Heck, I added 300 Sapphire 7970 cards to my cart on launch day from Newegg just to see what's the stock like. 2 hours later, I could only add about 20.

20 available on launch day sounds available to me. And that's not a very scientific method anyway.

Fact is, anyone who wanted a 7970 on launch day bought one. I haven't heard a single person on this forum say they couldn't get a card. Previously released cards went out of stock for weeks at a time.

End of story. And by the way, this is a thread for 5850 owners. Do you have something to add on topic?

 

[KingFatty]

20 available on launch day sounds available to me. And that's not a very scientific method anyway.

Fact is, anyone who wanted a 7970 on launch day bought one. I haven't heard a single person on this forum say they couldn't get a card. Previously released cards went out of stock for weeks at a time.

End of story. And by the way, this is a thread for 5850 owners. Do you have something to add on topic?

I currently have a 5850, but I'm wondering if anyone knows the thickness of the thermal tape used over the VRM modules - I can buy thicknesses in 0.5mm, 1.0mm, and 1.5mm.

As an aside, I think historically the 58XX series cards were released at a certain price, and the supply/demand became mismatched to where prices actually *rose* after a little while. I'm not certain, but I believe that indicates that AMD lost money on the 58XX by underpricing it and the vendors stepped in and raised prices to compensate. I wonder if the same is true for the 7970, apparently it sold out and I'm wondering if the pricing of the 7950 will further drive buyers to the 7970? But to maximize profit, I think the price should be as high as possible so long as people are buying. That price will remain high when people are buying, especially if there is no competition so there is nothing else for buyers except the one product.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

5870 here that I just got in Dec. Once properly set up has been a good card that I expect to use for a couple years.

 

[Brunnis]

5870 here. I've had it since within a few weeks of the launch back in 2009. So approximately 2 years and 4 months and I'm currently playing Skyrim at 1920x1200, 4xAA, 8xAF, Ultra + tweaks for siginficantly better draw distance. And it runs at 40-60 FPS. To be honest, I don't think I've ever gotten this much value out of my hardware. On the other hand, it's quite clear that the evolution of graphics has slowed down very significantly. One could blame the consoles, but judging by the rather modest increase in performance between the HD 58XX launch and the HD 79XX launch (averaging around 70%), I'd say that we can blame the semiconductor industry as well.

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

/raises hand

No plans to upgrade (unless nV has something interesting available down the line).

 

[NIGELG]

The thread title is ''HD 5850 owners.roll call!''.All other owners including 5870 owners GTFO.

 

[Maximilian]

Hehe I welcome our 5870 and 5830 brethren :awe:

 

[AznAnarchy99]

5870 that I bought when it came out for about $400 still going strong. Nothing has put it to a crawl at all. At first I thought BF3 did, but it was actually my RAM/HDD bottlenecking it. Upgraded that and I run on Ultra beautifully. Im also only on 1900x1200..

I cant see anything in the near future that would even ask me to upgrade it. WoW graphics arent getting better, SWTOR runs fine, etc etc. I almost feel like finding a used 5870 and xfiring it.

 

[poohbear]

5870 here. I've had it since within a few weeks of the launch back in 2009. So approximately 2 years and 4 months and I'm currently playing Skyrim at 1920x1200, 4xAA, 8xAF, Ultra + tweaks for siginficantly better draw distance. And it runs at 40-60 FPS. To be honest, I don't think I've ever gotten this much value out of my hardware. On the other hand, it's quite clear that the evolution of graphics has slowed down very significantly. One could blame the consoles, but judging by the rather modest increase in performance between the HD 58XX launch and the HD 79XX launch (averaging around 70%), I'd say that we can blame the semiconductor industry as well.

yea i honestly think the 5870 has become the best bang for buck card ever! i dont plan on upgarding until the fall, so from Oct 2009 to Oct 2012, that's 3 years on one card!!!! In fact, nothing coming out in 2012 is even gonna challenge it. I'm really thinking of just holding on to it till 2013, cause it plays everything beautifully.