XFX 6850 Black Edition or XFX 5850 Black Edition..

[vallonen]

Hi,

I can't seem to make up my mind which card to go for and purchase has to be made today. In the process of building a new system for my better half, a Christmas present to her.
...
Both cards are priced the same, spank new, and sold by the same retailer.


Your thoughts would be appreciated, thank you guys and have a nice Christmas!

 

[sirmonkey1985]

5850 is faster so if they are the same price i'd definitely go with that card over the 6850.

 

[bastage]

Equal price I would take the 6850 since although yes it is a little slower.. Its also smaller, runs cooler & uses less power.. I wouldn't pay more then about 10 bucks extra for those advantages, but to me thats enough to justify the small hit in performance.

 

[XacTactX]

A stock 6850 is only 6% slower than a stock 5850. The 6850 BE uses less power, overclocks just as well as the 5850 and predictably hits 900+ core with memory rated for 1250MHz, and has HDMI 1.4a. If she ever decides to double up, the 6850 scales much better than the 5850.

If she doesn't ever plan on OCing, then the 6850 has better stock clocks (850 vs 775, 10%) than the 5850 (765 vs 725, 5%). The memory is only 100MHz less, 4.4GHz on the 6850 vs. 4.5 on the 5850.

The deciding factor for me is the cooling on each card. The 5850 BE uses the reference cooling design. Check out the 6850's cooling solution here. Vapor chamber cooling on an 80mm fan. Then look at the cooling results here. It is the coolest running card in the review, and its fan is described as markedly better than reference.

I would choose the 6850 over the 5850, by far.

 

[vallonen]

I ended up with a 6850 but not the Black Edition, I went with a Sapphire Toxic instead.

I hope she will be happy with it, heck, the colour of the PCB even matches that of her motherboard.



Thank you for your input guys.

 

[[H]jimmy]

Good choice! Much better tesselation, much better Crossfire scaling, and very good overclockability!