I was going to include the Sapphire 5850/5830 Extreme in my post regarding fluctuating pricing influencing results (post #2). The problem being that the SKU's are out of stock at Newegg and some other big etailers. Being a model designed to clear excess inventory makes its sustained availability a little questionable.

Yeah they appear to be on their way out fast, get'em whilst you can kids. These are the ones I was referring to, $154 with rebate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=hd 5850&x=0&y=0

"Run roughshod" huh? Me likely when you use dat ol' fash-und kinda power speak.....:rolleyes:.....It be time to break out the Village People's greatest hits......

HD 6790 better than the GTX 460 768MB this joke

OHHH, son of a seacook! why must you make sport of me dagnabit!

I guess a fair question here, is why wasn't the GTX-460 1GB included, as it seems these fall into the price range, if only from time to time by virtue of promotions

Nice review, however I want to point out that it is unlikely that a person which is buying such a card will go for a core i7 and more than this that it will overclock it to 3.7.

This should have been tested with a mid-range processor. Maybe a core i3, core i5 entry (not overclocked), athlon II X4, Phenom II X4.

At the end of the day this is what people buying this kind of cards have in their systems, and maybe due to the processor they will not see any difference between a GTS450 and a GTX460, so what's the point to pay more.

George

I am afraid he is right though, budget cards means budget CPUs as well and if the results mean all cards perform the same, buy the cheaper! The round-up is interesting but not representative of actual performance in the reader's target rig.

Any performance change will only occur in games which have some sort of dependency on CPU, otherwise I think it is not that big of an issue.

Why no mentioning of Nvidia's CUDA? It should effect some peoples choice greatly. (In my case I need it for digital film editing.)

http://www.nvidia.com/object/what_is_cuda_new.html

I am not a gamer but I like fast graphics if it will help with my browsing or opening huge graphics files like PDF , etc. . I keep noticing that PDF files do not scroll smoothly in most cases meaning the pages kiind of goof around as you scroll down or up in halting styles or manners like that.. what do you recommned the minimum standards for discrete graphics for guys like me.. Remy, I am not a gamer. I also hear about how some graphic cards acutally help cpu with some of the tasks.. What are they? What about AMD Fusion?? I suspect that Intel's Sandybridges is actually a mush up of the old integrated graphics once found on the Intel mobos which controls over half of the mobo market, anyway.. nothing so grand about Sandybridge as if Sandybridge include the level of discrete graphics cards which it is not by a long shot, right? Is AMD Fusion going to blow SAndybridges in this context that is if users want powerful discrete level graphics to go along with CPU which Sandybridge do not .

Well one card IS missing here

HD5850!

Seling in germany for about 120$ TROUNCES everything on offer here.
In crossfire quicker than a GTX580 by some games!

What drivers did you use for Sandy Bridge? And which CPU as well as Memory

Interesting to read but sadly of little value as the bit width and DDR level is unspecified.