5830: worth it?

With the prices of them dropping to below $200 after MIR they have become a viable purchase. The additional power over HD5770 is going to help with DX11 features.

well its a good upgrade over the 3870 and for $200 the price is better then at launch. It still runs hot, needs as much power as the 5850, does not OC well, and is about to get competition from the Nvidia GTX 460 this month. An OC 5770 can still give a stock 5830 a run for its money.

What games do you currently play and look forward to play?

Frankly I would not make any decision until the GTX 460 launches and then see how the marketplace shapes up.

*its also a damn long card. 2" longer then the 5850.

Well, currently the only games I cannot play comfortably (60FPS+ and with settings that don't reduce the quality too much) are crysis and cryostasis. I can play BFBC2 at 720p and have to lower prototype to the same.

I'm going to see if I can hold out until the 5870 comes down to $200. I mostly just play COD4 at lan get-togethers anyway. Gotta keep always above 60FPS so I end up lowering some settings and definitely taking AA off but it works well.

I am considering upgrading to Zambezi next year and selling my old system, minus the graphics card and disk drives. I'll probably be able to get a second 3870 by that time for cheap or free for crossfire.

the 5830 will give you a noticeable increase, but you won't be able to play crysis on very high with a good 60+ fps on 1980x1080 though, but bfbc2 and prototype will run very well, but if you find any gtx 460 in your price range id recommend you to get that instead since its a little bit better than the 5830 and especially in dx11 games that uses tesselation, also cryostatis uses physx which ati doesn't have, nvidia does however, so id recommend a gtx 460 if you find one in your price range. otherwise a 5830 will do you good.

lol. Did I not make it clear in my last post that I had decided not to purchase a new video card anytime soon?

Yeah. This is the reason I am thinking about crossfire. I got my current card for $40 from a friend. My other friend got the other one and is considering upgrading. So I'll either get that one for a very low price or for free. I figure, combined with the cost of a crossfire board over a single board (if Zambezi supports AM3 I found a nice mATX board with 8x crossfire for $130 by MSI), it would be worth it. 4850 performance in crossfire-friendly situations  

I see that you like my self have thought ahead so I would go for it. They are good enough for older games and reduced in newer but they are good for the money. By the way mine is the viper edition.

Not really. You were kind of all over the place, lol.
When they are giving away video cards, make sure you post where. I want to get one.  

Woot! Got a used Sapphire 4850 for $20. It runs much cooler and fairly quiet after I altered the fan curve and overwrote the card's bios.

Best answer selected by Enzo Matrix.