After a good year of dealing with current and competitive hardware and hanging out in the overclocker community, my current focus is on older graphics cards of the Radeon HD series for DirectX 11 applications. For this, I always give myself a budget of up to about 20 Euros, look what I can get used on the net for it and try to set new records with old graphics cards – which is of course a bit presumptuous. Well, at least that’s the claim and usually something quite nice can be elicited from the cards after all.
Since retro “10 years ago” articles appear here from time to time, this one should fit into the series. I would like to show in more detail how such old cards can be overhauled with simple means and how you can get more performance out of them – most of the time! And it might be worth taking a look in your own basement, especially because of the current street prices of current graphics cards – if current cards are available at all. I’ll now take a closer look at two used cards for this article, a reference ATI Radeon HD 5850 and a PowerColor HD 6950.
Since most of you probably don’t remember at all or only partially what these cards were about back then and what technical specifications they had, I have a GPU-Z screen shot for you as a refresher. Let’s start with the older of the old cards (that is, the even older one) in the form of the AMD Radeon HD5850:
Cypress was followed by Cayman in the next generation – that was the name of the chips at the time. By the way, both had the memory size of 1 GB in common, which already seems extremely poor today. The GPU clock rates were also still below 1 GHz and the breakthrough through this sound barrier only came later with AMD’s GHz edition of another card from the HD7000 series
So far, so good. So that’s where they are. And now? As they are, you can’t use them yet, nor should you. Hardened thermal paste, junk and bad pads need to be replaced or removed first. And it is exactly this journey that I cannot and will not spare you.
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