Best bang for the buck card considering OC power?

[maniac5999]

Crap. less than 36 hours after giving in and ordering the HIS 7850, the DC2 gets reactivated and is back in stock at the 'egg. Sigh. I think that that cooler is worth $40 and not dealing with the pain of a MIR.

 

[Don Karnage]

Crap. less than 36 hours after giving in and ordering the HIS 7850, the DC2 gets reactivated and is back in stock at the 'egg. Sigh. I think that that cooler is worth $40 and not dealing with the pain of a MIR.

You ordered a HIS?

 

[blastingcap]

So you want exact decimals next time? I'd call +/- 5% and doing maths percentage on top of ones head on the fly pretty damn good enough. Maybe your standards are just a bit higher, whatever.

Let's settle on amazing performance @ $250 and <150w as the best bang for buck and move on.

ps. It's 45.348%, 860 -> 1,250 or 1,250/860.

You didn't clearly define what "no sweat" and "nearly 50%" meant. So drop the attitude. Given that overvolting with a well-cooled design at high fan speeds is apparently "no sweat" to you, I can only imagine what more-than-no-sweat means to you.

Why don't you go read this thread if you think I am hating on the 7850? http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2242521 I strongly defended the 7850 in that thread for the record. I just don't think you need to over-hype what is already massive oc headroom.

 

[maniac5999]

You ordered a HIS?

Yeah, it looks like all the 2nd tier vendors are using essentially the same cooler, Diamond, powercolor, HIS. Obviously it's not the best, but $30-$40 is a decent bit of coin on a $250 card. I figure that if I'm conservative with my OC (probably limiting myself to 1050-1150 without any overvolting) the cooler should be good enough.

I only found one review for the HIS card, but it seems relatively positive. http://blog.testfreaks.com/review/review-of-his-radeon-hd-7850-2gb-pcie-video-card/ they hit 1.1ghz w/o voltage adjustment, and a 72* max temp, and remarked that the card seemed quite quiet at those temps. At $220 (after MIR) it's 15% cheaper than the DC2, and I figure at most I'm giving up 18% performance (1.1 ghz instead of 1.3) so yeah, it sounds reasonable. I'm also probably going to be CPU limited in most games, so squeezing every last bit of OC isn't a high priority for me, but there's too big a gap between the 7850 and the 7770. I didn't want to pick up a 40nm card because I only have a Corsair VX450, and in NYC I pay about $0.22/kwh

 

[aaksheytalwar]

You could go reference plus arctic