3850's a better option when......

Hi guys, I've been lurking in the forums for quite a while
and decided to register and begin my post about my planned
video card purchase.

Basically, I prefer to play my games on 1024x768 resolution (My
monitor is still a 17 inch CRT monitor and thus best resolution
is 1024x768?) because I do not see any visual improvement beyond
that. No AA but 30 to 60FPS constant if possible. Detail levels
from medium to highest are acceptable for me.

The most recent games I have bought are Oblivion and Bioshock, and
currently I'm not planning to buy any games more recent than those
two as my buying tendencies is to wait till their price goes lower
than half than when newly released.

Current my system consists of :

MSI K9VGM-V Motherboard
Athlon64 X2 5600 OCed to 3010Mhz (215x14)
Palit GeForce 7600GS 256MB gDDR3
2056MB DDR2-667 RAM

In this rig, I think currently the bottleneck is found in the
video card and because of it I'm planning to buy a Radeon
3850. So in my current playing preferences, would it be
better to buy a 3850 rather than a 3870 because I actually
prefer to play on 1024x768 performance wise?

The 3850 is fine - if need be, you can OC it a little.

No one's selling that item anywhere here.

While the GeForce 8800GT 512MB are selling for $280 here the cheapest. Insane I know, perhaps it's the demand or something.


The Radeon 3870 costs about $200 while the Radeon 3850 costs about $155. At that price it's nearly the same price as the GeForce 8600GTS. So the choice is very obvious for me.

If you're cool with 1024x768 then the HD3850 is the card for you. The 256MB 8800GT sucks

Any suggestions on a place that is dropping its price on 3850's? Newegg has been pretty steady the past few weeks.

Thanks,

Newegg has just dropped some prices on the 3870s and 3850s already. Lots of instant rebates and free shipping deals.