The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-06-09, 14:23:

Hoping wrote:

Did you try the game (Rage) before saying that it will look the same

Yeah, tried it. No significant problems or issues with RAM. AMD drivers had problems with RAGE, that's for sure.

So that was part of my problem I guess, I remember that the textures looked very bad.

That HD5850 looks great with that cooler, only needs a bit of cleaning.😉

If it were me, I'd either go big or go home, HD 5870, HD 6970, or GTX 480.

Between the GTX 460 and the HD 5770, I would go with the GTX 460 1GB because of the good tessellation implementation, PhysX and driver quality.

You could also dual-boot between Windows XP and Vista/7.

Not even GTX 480 for the ultimate electric heater experience?

I had a GTX 570 triple-slot Asus card for about 2 months. Ended up selling it to a dude so his 9 year old daughter could run some games on his older i5 Dell for $20 along with some free 2gb sticks of ddr3 1333. I really liked the 570, it had enough horsepower to crank out some serious frames and with the good Asus card it never got hot.

kitten.may.cry wrote:

Not even GTX 480 for the ultimate electric heater experience?

[Laughs in Radeon 5970]

You guys all had deeper pockets than I had - I upgraded from a 6800GS (my first ever PCIe video card) to an X1950 Pro in September of 2007, and I didn't upgrade again until I bought a GTS 250 in Jan. 2010.

Repo Man11 wrote:

You guys all had deeper pockets than I had - I upgraded from a 6800GS (my first ever PCIe video card) to an X1950 Pro in September of 2007, and I didn't upgrade again until I bought a GTS 250 in Jan. 2010.

8800GT wasn't that pricy in 2008.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-06-12, 16:19:

Repo Man11 wrote:

You guys all had deeper pockets than I had - I upgraded from a 6800GS (my first ever PCIe video card) to an X1950 Pro in September of 2007, and I didn't upgrade again until I bought a GTS 250 in Jan. 2010.

8800GT wasn't that pricy in 2008.

Yep, it had the best price/performance ratio at the time which took much of the value of nVidia's higher-end cards to the point that they had to build a G92 variant of the 8800GTS prior the release of GeForce 9 series.

I remember supply couldn't keep up with the demand and the GT was out of stock or well above MSRP in the early months after its release. Though it wasn't as bad as in recent years.

2008 was well beyond initial release.

I would consider also the GTX 460 plenty of speed for the time, far more common and not as high on power like the 480.
the 460 wasn't far from the 5850.

I've decided to buy the Radeon HD 5850 now, because it has around the same release date as the Core2Quad Q9505 AND also has a reasonable performance/consumption ration - at least siginficantly better than the Radeon HD 5870.
... and it comes with a Arctic custom cooler that matches the Arctic CPU cooler perfectly 😉

I have an HD 5870 vapor X and I quite like it, as for the performance/energy consumption ratio I think it is similar in all the 5000 series graphics cards, but as always the performance/price ratio has nothing to do with it, I was lucky with the price of the 5870, but today I also think the 5850 is a much better option, especially that cooler gives it great added value. And it looks great.

OK, I guess one can't always win ...
I received the HD 5850 yesterday, but unfortunately it is real trashy - some idiot glued the memory heat sinks with hot glue onto the board and the half came loose or got lost but the hot glue survived 🙁
I guess it will take some mayor restoration to get it in shape again. I'll try to put it in the freezer and hope that the hot glue will come off more easy when frozen.

In the meanwhile I've got an GTX 460 Hawk for little money that will serve in this retro rig 😉

Alcohol will dissolve hotglue pretty well, it should make the removal a lot easier.

Awww, I have a real soft spot for the HD 5850, as I owned one myself back in the day and was quite impressed with it.

I even found one and have put it into my XP retro rig, after redoing the thermal paste. It also taught me to be much more careful repasting GPUs ... as the Artic Silver 5 I was using can't just be splashed around like I used to do. And that you had to get the entire die on these chips as there is nothing to spread heat if you don't get thermal paste in the right place.s

Best on these exposed die chips to apply a thin film of paste (MX4 is better as it is electrically inactive) over the complete chip. Use a credit card or other small straight edge to spread a thin film over the entire die, perhaps half a mm.

I don't like the idea of putting the card in the freezer, why?, well, at very low temperatures the solder may degrade for various reasons and .... bye bye

Hoping wrote:

well, at very low temperature

Typical household freezers don't have such low temperatures.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-06-16, 15:12:

Hoping wrote:

well, at very low temperature

Typical household freezers don't have such low temperatures.

I'm not sure if -18 degrees centigrade is enough to properly damage the tin in the solders, nor if it's enough to shrink the materials enough for something to break when returned to room temperature.
It just reminds me of the bumpgate case but in reverse.
Anyway, thanks for the tip, I'll keep it in mind.