I've decided to hold off on the CPU cooler roundup simply because it really wasn't all that exciting. I found that most of the coolers performed within a few hairs of each other, and the only big difference was the mounting technique and price. Needless to say, the Xigmatek Dark Knight will remain the standard heatsink on most of the Nordic systems until something better comes along. More interesting, however, has been my experience with the Radeon 5850, specifically Asus's EAH5850.

In all honesty, the last ATI card I owned was around the 9600 series I believe. I think it was an All-In-Wonder card, and it was definitely an AGP model. Since then, there have been more GPU refreshes than you can count on one hand and more driver updates than I'd like to even think about, so I decided to give ATI another shot.

Actually, I lied a bit back there. I have built a couple of machines on the Radeon IGP lately, specifically the 785 chipset, and I was pretty happy with them. If you have a Phenom II X2 555 chip, it's totally worth the poor south bridge performance for the chance to unlock a core or two with ACC. You will also get better overclocking with a 785 board than an 8200 or 8300, so the CPU speed might outweigh the hard drive and USB performance issues that are still there some 5 years after launch. The board I've been using is the Asus M4A785TD-V Evo, and it's highly recommended.

One of those builds was a light-gamer, and the other a sound machine, so the GPU performance wasn't really a big deal on either one, and I didn't test it much. All I worried about was whether Windows could display a desktop, and it did just fine. I didn't even really delve into the AVIVO display technology, although it's supposed to be pretty good too, simply because it wasn't needed. The GPU here needed to accelerate Aero and that's it.

The EAH5850 was picked to replace my very aged 8800GT card which was growing a bit long in the tooth. It wasn't really that slow, I could still play most games at 1920x1080 with very high settings, but AA and AF were technologies that were strictly off limits for this guy, HL2-based games aside. I was also really excited about having DirectX 11 ready to go when Alien versus Predator and LOTRO drop. And it was my birthday, and I wanted a new toy. ;)

I decided upon the ASUS EAH5850 because I really wanted something considerably faster than my 8800GT, which the 5770 wouldn't have been, and I wanted to push this sucker as hard as possible with voltage tweaks and the whole nine. As I read about the voltage tweaks available in software, I decided it would be worth the extra $20 to get a card that supported it out of the box, as I'm not really that good with pencil mods.

The EAH5850 showed up last week, and as I pulled it out, I was really impressed with the packaging. A black box with a gold ASUS logo greets you as you pull it from the typically gaudy retail packaging. Inside, there are two more boxes with gold logos and a well-protected card. This boxing job really screams class, once you get past the shell. The card itself is unremarkable, as are most reference cards, but there's nothing wrong with that. I just need it to perform.

And performance was never an issue. Without digging too much into things, I installed the latest 10.1 drivers and fired up LOTRO. I cranked everything up to the max in the menus, and my framerate sat at a lovely 60fps. I then launched the Divinity II demo, which is really hard on hardware, and was pleasantly surprised there too. The list went on, with Assassin's Creed, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age all performing excellently at maximum in-game settings and 1080p resolution. I said to myself, it's time to hurt this thing, and I pulled out the old faithful system killer, Crysis. I fired up the 64-bit, DX10 version, set everything to Very High, 1080p resolution, and ran the GPU benchmark. I was amazed to see framerates in the upper 30's for most of the test. Actual game play was vastly superior to my old card as well. Needless to say, this card handles just about everything you can throw at it from the in-game menus.

Once I started playing around with the clock speeds, in hopes of ever higher 3D Mark scores, things got weird, very fast. In NVIDIA world, things are really simple. You just install EVGA Precision and start playing with the clocks. Things were not so simple in ATI world. As soon as I opened MSI Afterburner, which is also based on Rivatuner, one of my displays started to flicker. I had no idea what was going on, but a few tricks and trips to the forums later, and I discovered this is a serious driver bug. And this is not the only one, ohh not by a long shot. I'm getting a bit ahead of myself with the flicker. There were plenty of issues before that.

I was really hoping to use the included Asus Smartdoctor software, since that's one of the reasons I bought this version of this card after all, but I couldn't make it work for the life of me. I kept getting a "card can't be found" error on start up. The damnedest thing is that I can't even uninstall the stupid thing now, whenever I launch the uninstaller, it just closes. Luckily, I found the service (yes it runs as a service) and set it to Disabled, so it's just in there not doing anything anymore. I turned to MSI Afterburner after that, which does work for the most part, but it did something odd also.

Ever since I started looking at the actual clocks on this card, they've read 850 MHz core and 1200 MHz memory. Those are not the clocks of a 5850, those are the 5870 clocks. Even my GPU-Z read out shows those as the default ones. Here's the GPU-Z screenshot, linked to the page for your convenience:

Pretty interesting, since it should read 725 MHz for the core and 1000 MHz for the memory, but I'll take the quick and dirty OC. So you see, I have no performance numbers for this card at "stock" clocks. I'm really not unhappy, considering the flickering issue, which I'll try to explain now.

ATI's drivers, which are brand new for a 4-month old card, incorrectly set the memory clock and volatge whenever the card is being overclocked. This goes for MSI Afterburner or Overdrive. It also drops the voltage of the GPU and the GPU clock, which is quite odd. These settings are too low for the card to operate properly, and thus the screen flicker issue arises. These clocks kick in during gaming too, which is really annoying, so I pretty much have to keep any overclocking out of the equation. Good thing my card is set to run at the wrong clocks out of the gate, huh?

I have made a few 3D Mark runs while overclocked, and this card is stable at 900 MHz core and 1300 MHz memory without any voltage tweaks, so once ATI fixes their drivers, I'll be able to squeeze another 15% or so out of it, which is noticeable. That's not the end of my troubles though.

I also have an issue with the card coming out of standby mode, which is probably the most annoying of all problems. I run two monitors, one 20" Viewsonic LCD and a 23" Acer LCD. Both are hooked up over DVI to the card on the regular DVI ports. I'm not using any HDMI or DP to DVI adapters or anything weird like that. When the machine puts the displays into standby mode only the Viewsonic turns off. The Acer stays on, displaying a black screen. Then, once you wake up the screens, the Acer shows the desktop while the Viewsonic does not turn back on, and Windows starts into a frenzy of unplugging and replugging the monitor in and out. It's totally unusable, obviously, and only a reboot will fix it. That means I'm back to power buttons until that gets fixed.

I did try to hook up my Acer over HDMI to fix the issue, but that was an adventure in itself. The card must have expected the LCD to be a special TV or something, because the picture it sent was simply trashed. Colors were totally wrong, the resolution wasn't displayed correctly, there were red lines, and green lines, and barely a recognizable desktop in there somewhere. I was able to use the second display to reset the resolution, which fixed it, but once it awoke from sleep, it was back to trashed. And the second screen was unplugging and replugging still. Boo.

So there you have it. The Radeon 5850, a very fast card, with tons of potential to be the next best thing, severely hampered by piss-poor driver support. Again. What do they say in this situation? "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." However, I am glad that I have had this experience so that I can shield my clients from it. If you're in the market for a gaming system, you're still best off waiting for the GTX 460, it's only a couple months away now.