gc86

So i'm leaning towards the single 5850 and getting another one later.. or selling it later and getting a 5970 or whatever the next gen card is. Anyways, either way it will be $250 bucks and the 4870s are the ASUS model with the aftermarket cooler (better than oem) so i'm pretty sure I can get a decent OC out of them. I'm sure they will outperform the 5850 by a small margin depending on how high of an OC I can achieve on that card. Thoughts?

d3v0

save your money and buy a 5870 when:

a) prices come down
b) decent DX11 games actually start to come out

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gc86

err.. ignore the GTX285 in my sig, i'm currently on a backup 8800GT. I sold the GTX285 while it was still worth something in preparation for the next gen cards

camoo

5850 is the better choice cause it has the obvious: about the same power consumption as the 4870 and DX11. But also if you get the 5850 now you can OC it to be better than any 4870 CF combo and you can CF it later. And it is also quite a bit cheaper than a 5870 yet is quite close in tests.

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Zonda

There is little gap between 5850 OC (850 or higher) and 5870 or 4870X2. You can also consider two 5770 in CF, they provide you even better performance than 4870 CF and support DX11.

Tommie

The power consumption, heat and noise from crossfired 4870 would be bad. I also think the performance is not gonna be impressive compared to the 285 you had. I would get 5850 (Crossfired), if I were you. I think in general the wisest thing is to go for the most powerful bang for buck single GPU. That would be the 4870 and the 260 for last generation. For this generation it is the 5850.

CL3P20

I agree with the above...of course, there are always price drops which make older hardware muchmuch cheaper that its newer counterparts...

I would much rather have 2x 4890's vs. 1x 5850 ...no Q.

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gc86

So I picked up the 5850 earlier today. Going to play around with this for a while until I see some benchmarks from ATi's next offering which will determine whether or not I go 5850 CF.