Question regarding my Radeon HD 5850

Hardware Hub GPU
1

Hey guys,

I've been using my 5850 for just over three years now, and I'm just wondering how much longer my graphics card will last. 6 more months? one more year? I don't know about that.

I've been taking good care of the card. It's a reference-design 5850 by MSI, and the way I've been taking care of it is by blowing the dust out every 3 months, and doing a total cleaning (reseating etc) every 6 months.

I mined BTC with it for a few months in 2011 (when BTC was still $15-$17 before dropping further), and I don't know how much that will affect the lifespan of the card. I set the card's fanspeed to 50% and it kept the card around 80-85C most of the time.

The games I've been playing most of the time included World of Tanks, War Thunder, and Command & Conquer Renegade (including its various LINK:standalone mods). I run all these games on high/max, unless I feel like playing them in eyefinity mode, in which I have to lower the settings.

I'd like to upgrade, but I'm still happy with this card and I intend to use it until it mostly goes kaput or cannot handle whatever newer games that come out (that interests me) decently.

2

It´ll break when it breaks, other then that it seems like the games you like dont need much horsepower anway. You might run into problems with AAA titles in the future with only 1 gb vram, especially in portrait mode, some even now. Just get something new if you want to play something too demanding for your 5850 with the settings you want. the 9000 series are just around the corner and the maxwell gpus are announced for Q1 2014.

If you want to upgrade now you can buy a 7950 for cheap, sell your 5850 for 60-70 dollars, sell the gold reward games and end up paying 100$ for a  new gpu with 2 gb more vram and 60-70% better performance

3

yes, i own a EAH5850 DirectCU TOP/2DIS/1GD5 and feel the same way... either buy a really cheap 7970 or wait for the next line of AMD GPU or go NVIDIA if you have the cash and really want those 4 or 5 extra FPS in games.

-- also, the temperature on your 5850 is kind of high... mine goes to 60 degree Celsius.