Worth getting a 5850 for Eyefinity?

T

Tudz

Supreme [H]ardness
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G'day all,

Wondering how people are going using a 5850 for Eyefinity? Is the performance reasonable? I'd want to be able to play modern games at medium to high levels.

My current PC is a 965P-DS3 mobo, E6600 at stock speed, 4gb of 667MHz ram and a 512mb 4870. Do you think a 5850 + a couple new monitors would be a worthwhile upgrade?
 
a full system upgrade would be more worth wild right now and then waiting til the end of this month or march when the fermi's are released to grab a 5870 and triple displays.. that system would bottleneck the snot out of the 5850..
 
I figured if I were running Eyefinity my system wouldn't bottleneck a 5850 too badly as running 3x monitors at a decent res would be abusing the graphics card more than anything else. Is that wrong thinking?

I know going from my PC to my mate's which has an E8400 and decent DDR3 ram isn't a massive step up in gaming.
 
The higher resolution would shift the bottleneck to the card.
With more people getting a Eyefinity setup, I'm sure people with similar systems to your current one would have a better take on the worth of the upgrade.

What size monitors are you considering?
 
24" as I've already got a single 24". As I watch TV and movies on my PC, it'd be nice to keep the 1920x1080 resolution. For a while I was considering some smaller 1600x900 monitors, but it'd cost me the same as the 24"-ers in the end.
 
Good choice. That card can always be carried over with the monitors to a newer system later.
Once people wake up from SuperBowl hangovers... :D you might get some feedback from people who've made the same upgrade.
 
If you're aiming for 3x1920x1080 thats 6.2 Million pixels total, a 5850 is a decent card but it can't push that many pixels in most new games and maintain a good frame rate, you'll have to drop the settings a fair bit to maintain performance.

People with 3x24" setups need to consider that if they want to run at native resolution and max settings in most modern games they're probably going to need a crossfire setup, a 5970 is ideal since it's cheaper than 5870 Crossfire and will overclock to 5870 speeds easily.

Otherwise you'll find yourself skimping on a lot of settings to maintain frame rate, and thats with current games, future games are bound to be even more harsh. Hell I have a 5970 and already I'm finding BFBC2 in 2560x1600 unplayable with max settings and some AA, so down to 1920x1200 I go.
 
BC2
1920x1080 all low 100fps and up to 130fps
eyefinity 5760x1080 50fps all low settings

5850 900/1000 and a 4ghz i7.
 
Flopper said:
BC2
1920x1080 all low 100fps and up to 130fps
eyefinity 5760x1080 50fps all low settings

5850 900/1000 and a 4ghz i7.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info :)

What about other games? Have you tested anything else? BC2 seems like a bad benchmark at this stage as it gives seems to give somewhat erratic performance across systems.
 
just play Bf2 and Bc2 atm.
tried it with dragon age worked well.
Bf2 dosnt work with eyefinity atm properly.

I dont like the gameplay in BC2 tho, to much consol.
 
Ah ok, thanks, anyone else gaming with a 5850 on eyefinity to say how its going?

I kinda want similar performance to what my 4870 is getting with a single display, except with 3 monitors. Would that be reasonable on a 5850 or should I just give up?
 
Im waiting on my dp>vga adapter to get here, hopefully thursday. I recently went from a GTX 260 to a 5850 to a 5850 crossfire to a 5870 to a 5870+5850 to a 5850 crossfire and ended on a 5870, everything else just went back to the stores. The 5850's crossfire were fps beats but microstutter sucked, i ended up keeping the 70 just for that extra 15% for eyefinity. If you shop around you can find it for 360$.
 
I'm in Australia, the cheapest 5850s are $370AUD that I've found, and 5870s were $535AUD (assuming they are still in stock).
 
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