As the title says its about a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 Extreme 1024MB GDDR5 been looking for one since I saw it in CPC, but never found one even looked on the day I got my subscribers ed of it this mouth at pixmania.co.uk who state that they no longer sell it . Anyway my question is I've since found one at oc.co.uk for £135 roughly £20 more the advertised in CPC which is fine but is it worth that much when you can get a 6850 for around the same price? As I side question and you can call me a n00b or whatever for it, but is it a case of more processing cores the better?? The 5850 comes with 1400 whereas the 6850 only has 960?
Generally speaking yes, within the same series of cards more stream processors (APUs) = better, but it's not everything since core clock, memory capacity, clock and bus speed still all matter. The 6850 doesn't directly compare to the 5850, which is still faster. The main improvement with the 6000 series is power efficiency/heat and better tesselation. So if your main concern is performance and your budget is set I'd still recommend the 5850 over a 6850.
The gpu is more modern than the 5850 in the 6850 but can't you buy a 6870 for £130 and that is better than a 5850
I'd go for the 5850 Extreme or cough up the extra and get a 6870. The 6850 is not really worth it (in this instance). The 6000 series does have fewer cores than the 5000 series, but they are more efficient, so it levels out.
Depends on your definition of "better", technically a 5850 on average still beats even the 6870 by a few frames so again it comes down to raw framerate vs higher efficiency & tesselation...
+1 on the suggestion to get a 6870 - £135 from overclock.co.uk The newer tech would be a better use of the same money than getting the 5850.
The price difference between a HD6870 and a GTX 560Ti isn't that great. However just nab the HD5850, older it may be, but it serves it's purpose well.
I'd say buy one 5850 now and crossfire later. The card is going to get dirt cheap (all the bitcoin miners will dump them when the currency collapses). But thats IMHO, it could take some time for all that to happen.
If you were going to go crossfire, get the HD6xxx instead. They happen to scale much better. Single card however, go the HD5850 for the price, it's brilliant. If you can afford it, just get a GTX560 Ti and don't worry about it for a while.
