Smallish Upgrade from HD4850

[Mythbinder]

Hey guys

I'm looking to more less just jump to a DX11 card. Performance wise I'm still very comfortable with my HD4850. WoW is prolly the Heaviest game on my system right now sadly lol, But I am planning on picking up SC2 and probably Civ5 my wife is addicted to Civ.

Cap I can spend right now is bout $150ish less if I can get away with it and get same or better perf.

The GTX 550 and HD 6790 seem to be most common 2 at the $150 area. How do they compare against each other?

I see GTS 450/460's and HD (5/6)650 ans 70's around 100-120ish, but not sure how they measure performance wise against the hd 4850. Would these cards give equal or better performance to my card?

I'm not hard set on either MFG I've owned both at various times, Only card I was disappointed with was an old GF9600 I had once but I think it was just a bad unit from the start.

 

[happy medium]

Welcome to the forums.
Compared to your 4850............
A gts450 is a tad bit faster for about $80AR.
A 5770 can be had for about 100$ and is slightly faster then the gts450.
A gtx460 768mb is much faster then both, allmost 2x as fast as a 4850 for about 115$ AR.
After that theres the gtx460 1gb and 6850 for about 165$AR and is only about 8% faster then the gtx460 768mb.

The gtx550 and 6970 are overpriced.

We need you system specs and the resolution you will be playing at.

SC2 and CIV V seem to run better on nvidia cards.. The gtx460 768 seems to be your best choice for the price.

Nvidia cards seem to run Civ V better also.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...0%20xtreme

HD5850 Xtreme by Saphire. $140 bucks shipped no rebates, better than double your performance. Beats everything within its price point no problems. If you're gonna upgrade, do it once and do it right or why bother?

As Happy would say, it GTX 460 768mb's its competition.

 

[happy medium]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...0%20xtreme

HD5850 Xtreme by Saphire. $140 bucks shipped no rebates, better than double your performance. Beats everything within its price point no problems. If you're gonna upgrade, do it once and do it right or why bother?

As Happy would say, it GTX 460 768mb's its competition.

I would agree with the 5850, but in the 2 games the OP is planning on buying, the gtx460 768 is faster and cheaper. :thumbsup:

For WOW , even a 4850 is fast enough, thats a mute point.

 

[Mythbinder]

Currently Run
e8400 on an EP45-UD3p /4gb ram /Win7 64b
Monitor is an Acer x213h 21.5" @1920x1080
PSU is a SeaSonic OB-S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT - alil aging but its rocksolid
Wd 500gb HDD and a DVD Burner

 

[happy medium]

Currently Run
e8400 on an EP45-UD3p /4gb ram /Win7 64b
Monitor is an Acer x213h 21.5" @1920x1080
PSU is a SeaSonic OB-S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT - alil aging but its rocksolid
Wd 500gb HDD and a DVD Burner

Hmmm , Civ 5 and SC2 are heavily cpu dependent and love quad cores. Thats gonna be a problem. :'(

You have a great quad core motherboard, I would sell the e8400 and try to buy a used q9450/q9550 cpu. Its a drop in upgrade.It might cost you about 75$ out of pocket but its well worth it. :thumbsup:

Then I would grab a gtx460 768mb for about 120$ AR for CIV V and SC2.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Happy's right, if those two games are going to draw the lion's share of your gaming time, then Nvidia is the way to go. He also brings up a good point regarding your CPU. Its no slouch, but quad-core gaming has really started to hit its stride and you might not even be getting the full potential out of your existing card let alone a more powerful 460.

 

[Termie]

Guys, you're steering him in the wrong direction on cpus. SC2 is not quad-core optimized: http://techreport.com/articles.x/20486/4. A q9400 is barely faster than a g6950, which is equivalent to his cpu. Civ5 shows a bit more difference, but the older quad core architecture still gets blown away by a sandy bridge dual core: http://techreport.com/articles.x/20486/6. I think he should get a GTX460-768 now and wait until he has the money for a sandy bridge upgrade.

Edit: more evidence that SC2 is not quad-core optimized: http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page13.html. The q6600 is beaten badly by a Phenom dual-core. The only thing that matters in SC2 is clock speed, so overclocking his e8400 would make a much bigger difference than buying a q9450.

And more evidence on Civ5: http://www.techspot.com/review/320-civilization-v-performance/page12.html. Again, a Core 2 Quad is a bad investment at this point. It appears from this test that his stock e8400 could very well beat a stock q9450, extrapolating from the e8500/q6600 results.

 

[notty22]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=365434&csid=_22
Has that 5850 extreme and free Shogun 2, 150.00 If anyone is looking for a dx11 upgrade, thats a great price without having to deal with rebates.
I have no clue whether it o/c's at all, buyers will have to let us know.
Someone who has one should start a 5850 extreme thread, so owners can report experiences.

 

[Termie]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=365434&csid=_22
Has that 5850 extreme and free Shogun 2, 150.00 If anyone is looking for a dx11 upgrade, thats a great price without having to deal with rebates.
I have no clue whether it o/c's at all, buyers will have to let us know.
Someone who has one should start a 5850 extreme thread, so owners can report experiences.

There's a 5850 xtreme thread in the hot deals section. Consensus is that it overclocks to about 820-850 core and 1200 memory. That's pretty average for an hd5850, which is to say it's a nice overclock.

 

[Texashiker]

I posted a similar thread a few weeks ago - http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2155619

It came down to the 6850 or the 460. The 6850 won due to it having the new DisplayPort, while the 460 does not.

6850:
1 x HDMI
1 x DisplayPort
2 x DVI
Effective Memory Clock - 1000MHz (4.0Gbps)
Memory Interface - 256-bit

GTX 460:
1 x mini HDMI
2 x DVI
Effective Memory Clock - 3680MHz
Memory Interface - 192-bit


But I decided to keep my 4850 until prices drop a little bit more.

 

[betasub]

^ As both cards use DDR5, shouldn't you show their effective memory clock in the same terms? I.e. 4GHz vs 3.68GHz.

Edit: Memory bandwidth (effective clock x interface) is a better indicator, e.g. 128GB/s vs 88.32 GB/s.

 

[mosox]

http://dealnews.com/Sapphire-Radeon-HD-5850-1-GB-PCIe-Video-Card-for-125-free-shipping/453845.html