Bitcoin Forum

Im actually just mining with and 6850 Cyclone at 231 Mhash with the core clock at 925, running stable at 63°

I was planning on getting a 5850 to put in the same PC with a VGA dummy to mine, but I was wondering if it would be better for me to just buy another 6850. What do you recommend?

a 5850 will get you about a 50% higher Mhash/sec rate - and should probably cost a touch less new, too (depending on the vagaries of brand availabilities and rebates).

seems pretty clear-cut.

Ok, thanks for the reply  :)

Any recommendations on a cheap mobo to run 2 or more 5850?
Also, how much of a power supply do you think it will take to run two of those together? just speculating tough, not planning on doing that yet hehe

msi makes pretty good motherboards for mining.  a lot of people here use them.  i have a couple of their 870A-G54's, in two dual-PCIe miners.  they make motherboards with more slots than that.

just a personal preference here - if you're going to use AMD GPUs, you oughtta use AMD processors and chipsets.  works for me.

for your PSU, add 125% of your GPU running at 99% (in watts), to triple the wattage your CPU consumes.  hard drives are negligible.  fans are a bit - don't forget to add them in.  if your miner is dedicated it shouldn't even have things like speakers or CD/DVD drives.

so a 6850 (~150W) plus a 5850 (~180W) plus 25% = ~410.  plus a 45W Sempron single-core X3 = 135W.  plus 3W for an SSD and 25W for fans gives a grand total of about 575W.

a 650W PSU should do nicely.

if you game at all or anything, just get a 6850... mining in crossfire is simple, easy and less complicated, with the added benefit of great gaming etc

oh yeah... gaming.  that's true.

if you only plan on mining you can use the PCI-Ex1 slot and an extender with the back cut off.
chances are you already have a PCI-Ex1 slot. but it's useless for gaming

Don't forget to unlock your shaders!

only in the 6950 :) dont make him kill his card!

the 5850 shaders are laser cut. There is no way to unlock them without fixing the silicon ...

Oops, I misread it and thought it was 6950.

I would flash it to 6870 and then buy another 6870 and crossfire ftw. They scale so much better in xfire performance in comparison to 5xxx series it's no brainer. You need to get another 6870 maybe two.

how many people are going to suggest him to kill his card? I wonder if they do it by ignorance and stupidity or on purpose just to fuck others up

Ok so Im getting an 5850 Xtreme in like 10 days. I will plug it in the same pc where the 6850 cyclone is. Im gonna put it with a dummy plug and put them to mine at the same time, and when I want to play i just turn off the 6850 and use it to play =D

Do you think its worth it in this time right now? Im getting it anyway now, but just wanted to know what do you think

Thanks for all replies hehe, im not killing my card :P at least not soon

I would have gotten the 6850, at least if mining doesn't turn out to be that good, you get a good GPU setup.

but atm, yes it seems OK

5850 is a much better miner than a 6850. Since this is a mining forum, I think you did well.

just because he is in a mining forum doesn't mean he only mines.... he also cares about resale value and gaming and usefulness in case mining is not an option anymore... which makes the 6850 is a very worthy opponent.

Hell, at this point I would even consider selling the 6850 to get another 5850 if I were you.

Well, you assume he does. He never said anything of the sort. In fact he already mentioned his plans for gaming and it didn't involve the new card at all.

Besides, it's not like 5850s can't game or sell for peanuts used.

they game less well and dont sell very well, and at lower prices.

but now that he is getting a 5850, might as well sell his 6850 for a 5850.... perhaps even a straight up trade 6850 <--> 5850

I've seen benchmarks that say they are very close. So close you won't notice a difference while gaming.

I've also seen completed ebay auctions with used 5850s selling for more than you could recently pay for a new xtreme at newegg, so resale seems fine to me.

prices in ebay can be veryy high, doesnt mean they sell at that price. I mean to compare them crossfire wise, the 6850 scales much better

Meaning they sold.

well than there are some damn stupid people in the world

I've just made the dummy plug, the resistors are 68 ohms, but I noticed that the wires are thinner than the pictures I saw of other dummys. Is this ok? The blue thing is also much smaller than the ones i saw around on some forums
I also been told than I NEED to put some thermal insulation (aislante termico) in thw wires cause if they touch themselves I can kill my card. Has anyone done this already?

Here some pics of the dummy i made:
https://i.imgur.com/KMYkF.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/D79Zz.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/YOt0e.jpg