Choosing the best HD6850

I would go with the HIS, because it has a higher clock on both core and vram, it doesn't seem as if it would be as noisy (looks as if it has a larger fan), would probably run cooler (heatsink on the HIS looks much better than the Sapphire), and I've personally heard bad things about sapphire.

You might as well spend just a bit more money and get this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
It's what I got an I love it. it takes any game i throw at it with highest possible graphics settings and AA.

Oh and my resolution is 4320 x 900 just to give you an idea ;]

For that price, I might as well get a 6870. I'll play on 1280x720 mostly, so the extra memory is pointless. Thanks for your answer, but that product is not what I want. Narrow your suggestions to a HD6850 priced at $150 or lower. Thank you.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

that one.

XFX 6870 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

free shipping, lifetime warrant, $160 after promo code, $130 after rebate

@lycros I'm sorry, but rebates don't matter to me because I don't live in the USA. That's a damn good offer though, thanks for the tip.

@esrever Do you mind telling me why is that a better choice?

@codyopj Sapphire isn't as reliable as HIS then. Thank you for the heads up. Anyone else who'd comment on this?

Once again, thank you all for answering.

+1 on this, my last graphics card was an Asus 6870 with the same cooling system and its exceptional. Keeps temps very cool and the deceleration of temps after running a game is very rapid.

I have just bought the Asus EAH 6850 and it's a great card. I'd like to say the drivers are good, except they're not.

I'm running mine on drivers from at least a year ago....not very impressive.

Drivers should never be used from the packaged CD it comes with. These are almost always guaranteed old a month after they come out because driver updates from AMD and Nvidia are relatively frequent.

Just go their respective websites and download the latest drivers and you are good to go (on any card)  

The only thing I could imagine being a problem is BIOS issues which may cause errors, but those are relatively rare and I wouldn't even worry about it.

its cheap and has a good cooler. Also asus makes nice stuff.

Would you say the ASUS is better than the HIS?

yes

Sapphire 6850 is doing a great job with my system. I'm playing most games on highest settings with middle to high AA. It stays cool (doesn't go over 80C in furmark) and I'm able to overclock it to great levels.

I don't know how the Sapphire staff but everyone has mixed reviews because of different circumstances relating to their issues involving RMA or anything else that would aggravate a person to begin with anyway. I suggest the Sapphire 6850 because I speak from personal experience that this is a great card. I've played on a GTX 470 and a 6970m etc etc. and this card is at least in range of all others for better or worse.

Interesting. The ONLY driver that works 100% for my card is the one that came in the box. It's 18 months out of date.

What should I do?....keep trying different packages from AMD until I get lucky?

The latest driver from Asus (direct) also works, except I get bad stuff on boot up.

Explain what happens if you try to use newer graphics drivers.

Is performance poor? Random Crashes?

Also are you sure you're inputting the right information to download the drivers? I know nvidia asks if your comp is either windows 32-bit or 64-bit, are you sure you are dling the right one?

Any info can help

Hey, thanks for reading....

the bundled drivers work good.
the newest driver package from Asus works OK in games, but on boot, it takes 20 seconds or so for the desktop icons to change from blank squares to "picture" icon.
with the 3 sets of CCC from AMD I've tried, the PC seems healthy enough but some games set the settings to "low", and some don't. Either way, as soon as the game loads (from the save file) the screen goes blank.
I've also had issues with flash player (youtube etc.) when clicking play or enlarging, the display crashes again.

I'm running the display with DVi cable, single monitor.
In the bios the video priority setting is [PEG/PCI] which I could set to [disable] or [PEG/IGR]

One thing that crossed my mind was a post on another forum saying that certain flash problems were sometimes linked to sound source.

I did notice I have 3 (yes, that three   ) sound sources. 1) ATi high def (presumably for the HDMi) 2) Motherboard sound HD and 3) My sound card.

It occurred to me to a) disable onboard sound in bios and b) unistall the ATi device (which I'm guessing lives on the GPU card).

I also have Asus bios update software, which I'm tempted to use, especially if I end up getting a new hard drive and starting all over again. The bios version is v. old and the newer versions are listed as "improving system stability"

Any thoughts gratefully received.

Thank you all for answering. At this moment, I think I'm gonna go Sapphire. If any other model drops price, I'll take. I've let enough price drops go already, it's time to make a move. Thanks to everyone once again, you've been really helpful.

davidjuk, I'm pretty sure you're OK with me derailing your threads by asking unrelated questions for my own purposes, so I'm gonna do it every chance I get (= See ya

Best answer selected by trubritarlol.

Sorry, it was me who took over your thread....

I think if I was buying again I'd NOT go with the Asus card again. I've had so many small problems with it.

The sapphire gets a good review (here, UK) and the last card I had from them (Radeon) gave 5+ years excellent service.

Another thing, most of the Asus bundled package seems a waste of time.

No prob, David. Your posts were informative at least, it's like you were spamming the thread. I could've gone for the XFX and the ASUS some days ago, for I've had problems with an XFX card before and I'd rather stay away from them. So I think Sapphire it is. Thank you for answering.