4850 for $50 or buy a new 5800?

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Kuromizu

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A guy I know wants to sell me his 4850 512mb for $50 because he's ordered one of the new ATI cards.

I intended to go with a 5850 and my current specs (in signature) but this deal is kind of tempting. I mainly play TF2 and L4D. Sometimes I bust out an MMO (Aion, WoW, something like that) but not as often as the other two.

What do you think? Hold out for the 5850? or take the deal and run?
 
i'd say hold out for the 5850; so you dont have to worry about buying another card for a few years again.
 
What brand is the 4850? $50 is a pretty good deal. What resolution do you play at? I have the feeling that a 5850 would be overkill on the E6600, while the HD4850 would be a decent upgrade from your X1900. IMO I would stick with the 4850 if all you play is TF2 and L4D.
 
I'd take that deal honestly. If I could find one that cheap and had the money at the time I found it I would jump.
 
I doubt a 4850 would have any trouble playing all those games at any settings and resolutions you require. In any case, a $50 4850 is a pretty good deal; a darn sight better, I would have to say, than a 5850 for $300.
 
Mr. Pedantic said:
I doubt a 4850 would have any trouble playing all those games at any settings and resolutions you require. In any case, a $50 4850 is a pretty good deal; a darn sight better, I would have to say, than a 5850 for $300.
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Only if it has a warranty with it!
 
Score the HD4850 for $50, use it for the time being. It'll be much faster than your X1900XT and will hold you over until the 5850/5870s are cheaper. When you're finished with the 4850 you could probably sell it for around the same price, their value's probably going to hold up fairly well ..
 
AMD could have easily put the price on the 5800 series through the roof, but they didn't. That card could have easily gone over 450 dollars.
 
So, back to the topic. I do use a 24" monitor to play games. I can play TF2 at 1920x1200 with AA on, but L4D I currently have to turn down to medium/high settings at 1280x800 or 1440x900.
 
Kuromizu said:
So, back to the topic. I do use a 24" monitor to play games. I can play TF2 at 1920x1200 with AA on, but L4D I currently have to turn down to medium/high settings at 1280x800 or 1440x900.
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Then buy the 4850, only if you can transfer the warranty over to you. Otherwise, you could be out 50USd with nothing to show for it.
 
have your friend sell it to me please and you should upgrade to the 58**
 
The 5850 will probably be bottlenecked by your processor. The 4850 @ $50 sounds like a good deal. Get a 5850 after you've upgraded your cpu/motherboard to i5.
 
Only cause I have a 4850, and I play ALL those games that you mentioned, and it plays them like a hot knife through butter, I'd pick it up for $50 and pat yourself on the back for finding a good deal.

Put the money you would have spent on a Radeon 5000 towards a new quadcore or something.

Edit - Except Aion, I don't play that.
 
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4850 for $50 is a steal.
It would be a very good upgrade over a X1900XT, especially for the games you play it should be no problem at all.

I see very little point in spending $300 for a 5850.
 
If you can get a 4850 for that price you can't beat that for bang for the buck. Especially considering what you're upgrading from.
 
Definitely go for it. Even without a warranty, $50 is a pretty small price to pay for such a good card.
 
Well, what resolution are you using? If not too big, I would take the 4850. It's not like there's any big games coming out(lol).
 
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JaYp146 said:
Score the HD4850 for $50, use it for the time being. It'll be much faster than your X1900XT and will hold you over until the 5850/5870s are cheaper. When you're finished with the 4850 you could probably sell it for around the same price, their value's probably going to hold up fairly well ..
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This, right here. Great answer.
 
A 4850 for $50 is a steal, and a nice upgrade from your X1900. Put the $200+ you would have spent on a 5850 towards a new build.
 
4850 will run tf2 and l4d at that rez at max quality. might need to turn down FSAA tho
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Nah. Remember, the 4850 uses the same core as the 4870. As long as you don't run into memory limitations, it's still quite a little beast for the money. I run my games at 1920x1080 with 4/8x FSAA depending on the game, and everything runs fine. Fear 2, TF2, and L4D I play with 4x FSAA turned on. When playing WoW, I have it cranked to 8x FSAA. Runs everything like a dream.

Is it as fast as a 4870 or a GTX-275/285? Heck no. But hey, it's a lot cheaper.

Sadly, it does not properly render Jedi Knight II for me. :p I have to play that in software mode.
 
Go for the 4850 for $50...

You will be horribly CPU bottlenecked if you get a 5800 series card.

In WoW, the system in my sig is CPU limited in DAL.. and in a few places GPU limited.... but that is at 1680x1050 with 4xAA, edge detect, and all details all the way up except shadows which it two notches form the top...

And the 5800 series drivers (9.10 RC6) gives a very nice speed boost in DAL on the 4850.

In any case.. you will be CPU limited with the 4850 on your system. No need to get a 5800 series until you go i5 or i7.... or a massively overclocked C2Q
 
Definitely take the 4850. That's an amazing deal and will run everything you play maxed out.
 
cyclone3d said:
Go for the 4850 for $50...

You will be horribly CPU bottlenecked if you get a 5800 series card.

In WoW, the system in my sig is CPU limited in DAL.. and in a few places GPU limited.... but that is at 1680x1050 with 4xAA, edge detect, and all details all the way up except shadows which it two notches form the top...

And the 5800 series drivers (9.10 RC6) gives a very nice speed boost in DAL on the 4850.

In any case.. you will be CPU limited with the 4850 on your system. No need to get a 5800 series until you go i5 or i7.... or a massively overclocked C2Q
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Where are these claims coming from that a C2D @ 3.2+ghz will bottleneck a 4850?
I highly doubt that.
Hell I'd bet you won't be 'horriblly' bottlenecked even on a 5800.
 
$50 is certainly a great deal on the card, and depending on what games you play, it may be the better buy. I was running a 4850 for the last year or so on my 24" and the only games it really choked on at that resolution was Crysis and Stalker:CS. That said, the holiday season is right around the corner which means new game releases with more strenuous system requirements, so keep that in mind as well.
 
hmmm interesting, I have a 4850 and I can't seem to get TF2 working all max settings at 1920x1200, It laggs and stutters sooo much.
 
TechBoy said:
hmmm interesting, I have a 4850 and I can't seem to get TF2 working all max settings at 1920x1200, It laggs and stutters sooo much.
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That shouldnt be happening...I play tf2 at the same resolution with a 8800GTS 512 and its pretty smooth; not constant 60fps but smooth enough.
Do you have multi-core enabled in video options?
 
like everyone else said.. go with the 4850.. then when/if you decide to upgrade your system go with the 5850 when its well under 200 dollars.. there is absolutely no reason to go with the 5850 right now.. especially with those games.. and really.. you only lose 50 dollars out of your budget for the 5850 and the 4850 will easily hold you over for another year..

when the nvidia cards come out the 5850 will probably drop well under the 250 dollar mark.. so it will be win win for you either way..
 
4850 for $50 is too good to pass up. I think the 5850 will retail for about $250, do you really think that it's going to give you 5x the performance? I'm guesstimating it will only double the performance of the 4850 for the extra $200.
 
Who said anything about 5x the performance? I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that there is not a linear progression when it comes to price>performance.
 
ihira said:
Where are these claims coming from that a C2D @ 3.2+ghz will bottleneck a 4850?
I highly doubt that.
Hell I'd bet you won't be 'horriblly' bottlenecked even on a 5800.
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Hrmmm... well I have a C2Q and am CPU limited in some places in WoW.. Mainly in Dal.

It is due to the horrid threading in WoW. Having the affinity set to use all 4 cores in the config file and watching the GPU and CPU usage on a second screen that is being driven by my GTS250, I can watch as the GPU usage is only at about 40% in Dal and can see that the first CPU core is showing to run at about 80% and the other 3 cores running at about 10-35%. All this while only getting about 40fps while it is busy in Dal.

So yeah.. in Dal, it is CPU limited.

Poor threading = easily CPU limited.. and with a C2D only running at 3.2Ghz it will be more CPU limited than my setup.

Just did a bit of process affinity mask testing.... For some reason when WoW is set to use all 4 cores, it mainly uses 1 and just a small amount of the others.... but when set to use 3 cores (0,1,2), it spreads the load out a lot more evenly.

When set to use cores (1,2,3), it looks like it still uses all 4 cores while still putting most of the load on one of them.

Seems that it is incapable of not using core 0 even when set to not use it.

Can you say threading bug?
 
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