Thinking of buying a 5850; How widespread are GSOD issues?

How widespread are the GSOD issues? A lot of stuff I'm reading is from ~2 months ago, have things improved drastically since then? I'm on Windows XP 32bit right now, but this seems to be occurring across a wide range of OSes, so I'm not sure it matters.

I'm not a fanboy of either NVIDIA or ATI, but I have no problem holding out for NVIDIA's next release if ATI can't get their stuff together, even though I want a new card now.

Have GSODs been reduced substantially since release?


Current system:
Corei7 920 on P6T Deluxe
3GB RAM
8800GT (she's finally dyin' on me, will be dearly missed)

Unfortunately, I have not heard any statistics. All I can say for sure is that I bought a 5850 in January and it has not had a single random GSOD (and it has been OC'ed to 775/1125 recently). I have heard that recent drivers have helped some who had issues, while others still have problems. If you get a card that GSODs now (with the latest drivers) I would say to RMA it as defective.

Also, be sure to have the latest MB BIOS.

none for me either I've got mine a 950/1200 : )

Yes, we know your lovely folder MM

But still it is hard to get a feel on how many of these cards had the issue, or more importantly how many after the 10.2 drivers.

its pretty hard to know if your going to have problems with a card or not.... you could google "problems with ATi 5xxx series cards" for as long as you like and then buy one and not have any problems....
Most new cards on the market have problems.....just the way it is

I expect alot of those problems in your list are human error....seems to be quite common when it comes to PC problems in general.

you can bet that Fermi or any other GPU in the future will have problems

Ok MM, I'm not going to argue with you, at the end of the day your an nVidia fanboy. Nothing I can say will change your mind.... Seems strange that someone with a biased opinion is a moderator advising other people.

Yeah I'm so scared, think I'll go hide in a corner

I'm not denying that theres some truth to what your saying, But I'm also right in saying that new cards generally have faults and there is a degree of human error in some cases.

Why can't you just admit that ATi is actually doing well for once. I haven't seen a moderator as biased as you in this forum

Yep MM, I'm not saying 3 out of 4 means anything either. All I'm saying is that I have no real numbers (nor does anyone except maybe ATI/AMD) so the question is hard to answer. All we know for sure is that they are not all defective, nor are they all working properly.

As I'm not using a GTX285 I couldn't give a rats ass about the performance differences, if anything this is showing your fanboyism more as you can't handle the fact that not everyone is fawning over these cards and blowing smoke up AMD/ATi's asses.

I actually put this thread here because I was looking for statistics (even rough ones)- like the RMA rate of the cards, for example. People generally come to tech support forums and talk about damaged/malfunctioning hardware, so it makes for a poor cross-section of consumers to evaluate.

Right now the only data I have telling me these cards are reliable is from newegg. Most of the 5xxx series cards have generally good, 75%+ 5-egg ratings, but forum activity speaks differently. This complicates my decision to purchase.