Which ATi card should I get

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JayteeBates

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Green Teamer moving to the red side. Need some assistance choosing a card and a brand. XFX has the double warranty thing and that makes it easier to resell but I'm not 100% sold on them. Sapphire seems to have some newegg customer awards but I don't find anything significantly compelling about them either. Asus has apparently the best BIOS out there for tweaking and Gigabyte has always made some decent products. Powercolor and the other brands I am not really interested in looking at.

Aside from brand the first thing I need to decide is 5870 or 5850 - seems to me I have to go 5870 to surpass the GTX295 I am coming from. My criteria for this card is:

1) Run cooler than the GTX295 (I run 1920x1200)
2) Eye candy - I want as much as possible
3) Budget $500 or less
4) Noise - less is better but not a deal breaker
5) Not interested in overclocking it really - stock is fine

I'm thinking the biggest thing that differentiates the 5870's on newegg at the moment is the fan. Going by that this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150476 has a fan in the middle and has what looks to me to have a better outflow of air all around the card compared to the reference fan which this card has http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150443

I don't run my PC in a case anymore I use a highspeed pc techbench so I'm not as worried about exhausting heat to the outside of a case. What I am more interested in is noise level. My 295 is loud. One thing I am hoping for is that the ATi card just flat out runs cooler at 1920x1200 with eye candy turned on thus is quieter.
 
Nope not limited to the egg just been the easiest online retailer I have dealt with.
 
I would not buy Sapphire for the simple fact that they do not have a USA based support center. There's nothing more annoying then having a $400 dead video card and having a long wait plus paying high shipping costs to ship overseas for a replacement. I would stick too XFX, Asus, and Gigabyte.

The stock HD5870 fan is pretty quite. More so than the GTX295. Same goes for power usage.
 
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I would definately NOT go with visiontek if you are considering them. I recently had a card fail after a month, and after another month of futile emails and calls to visiontek, I managed to beg a return out of the retailer. Still no reply from visiontek, hope they enjoy eating the card when the retailer just returns it to them.

Stick with Xfx as others have said.
 
ClearM4 said:
I would not buy Sapphire for the simple fact that they do not have a USA based support center. There's nothing more annoying then having a $400 dead video card and having a long wait plus paying high shipping costs to ship overseas for a replacement. I would stick too XFX, Asus, and Gigabyte.
Click to expand...

You usually RMA through the retailer, which is significantly faster than RMAing to XFX HQ in CA.. unless you're near CA of course.
 
I bought a 5870 on launch in September after selling my GTX295, and I have absolutely no regrets. The 5850 will handle 1920x1200 well too, and you might even make up most of the performance delta as both the 5850 and 5870 overclock to almost the same levels, but then that might require more aggressive (and louder) cooling. I think the first XFX you linked to (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150476) is the way to go. Axial fans are quieter than radial/blower designs, and since your rig isn't even enclosed in a case, it's a no-brainer.
 
With that much of a budget maybe you should wait to see what Nvidia has to offer if you care.
 
Does XFX have a rep here on the [H] forums like BFG/EVGA? Jeff from BFG rocks and helped me out twice. If they made ATi based cards there wouldn't even be a question I would buy from one of them. Alas...
 
I think all these card manufacturers are hit or miss as far as support goes. Most of the time it is just random luck on who you get to talk to. Reminds me of how a lot of people say newegg has great customer service but when I called I got royally screwed over.
 
i had the 5870 and unless you can get a great deal on one, you will find the 5850 overclock very nice and the difference is not worth the price to me.

but still it's nice to have to top of line for those extra few mhz
 
Yeah in the end had to pull the trigger at CC on the 5870. Almost went for the XXX edition but I didn't want one that ran to hot. Heat is becoming a bigger factor in my purchases than it used to be. Thanks for the heads up.
 
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Well I am going from a GTX 295 which was SLI on a card and I wanted to get away from dual GPU's for heat/noise and potential performance issues with SLI/Crossfire. A single GPU with more performance than my 295 is enough for me.
 
Honestly there isn't really a massive difference between the different brands unless they have a model which strays from the reference design significantly, most do not.

The only difference I worry about now a days is price and bundle deals, Sapphire have come out on top for the UK stock for both 5xxx and 4xxx cards. I've used many different video cards brands over the years and they've all basically been the same.
 
I went XFX specifically for the xferable warranty that I can use as an enticement for resale here on the forums in 6 months to a year. I owned my GTX 295 for 1 year and 20 days lol.
 
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