Hi everyone, I'm looking at buying a Radeon HD 5850 graphics card at Christmas. I have a choice between these two: The XFX Radeon HD 5850 XXX Edition which has a 755mhz core clock, and 4500mhz memory clock, and the XFX Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition, which has a 4000mhz memory clock, and 765mhz core clock. Otherwise these cards are identical (The Black Edition costs £8 more) So the question is, which is worth more, a 10mhz Core Clock increase of a 500mhz memory clock increase? I heard core clocks are more important, but surely this memory increase is huge in comparison. Thanks in advance, Casefan
The black edition has its memory clocked at 1.25ghz quad pumped to 4.5ghz just the same as the xxx version. I dont think 10mhz on the core is worth £8 as all other specs remain the same. The black editions are usually cherry picked however the xxx cards are too. But for a chip to maike a black edition over a xxx I would say it should overclock slightly better which makes the £8 more appealing. Scan as such have it listed wrong mate. Andy
I've never really overclocked a GPU before, would it really be worth it? Should I just go for the cheaper XXX then? Thanks for responses.
Overclocking (at it's most basic) is incredibly easy, just do it using ATi's OverDrive (built in to the driver). Yeah, the clocks won't get much higher (depending on the BIOS of the card), but you can easily make up the £8 worth of clock difference. However, as Andrew8200m has said, the higher clocked version (£8 more) is probably speed binned, so if you were to overclock properly, it should make it further. Hope that helps
The Black edition from what I've hear (think it was the latest hardware podcast) allows you to register your card with XFX to download a black editon owner only voltage utility like Asus' Voltage Tweak.
