GAMING on a £0.25 Graphics Card!

it has genuinely been years since we managed to get a hold of a 25 P graphics card but today a good few years on we've only gone and done just [Music] that now this here was purchased from CX for 25p and is apparently going to be our new graphics card and no I couldn't quite believe it either as it's been a good few years since these things have been available and they just sharp randomly so you got to be paying attention but after going through and ordering the car I was amazed to see they actually dispatched it I was expecting them to think it was a mistake and cancel it but apparently they care so little they just shipped it and I mean it's also a card that to my knowledge doesn't exist as they never did a hd5850 with half a gig of memory but then again what exactly did they send us [Music] well this here appears to be a HD 5850 but whether or not it is actually this fabled 512 megabyte of vram version we'll have to find out as someone appears to have damaged the label on the back of the card which means some poor CX employee probably just made a mistake knew nothing about graphics cards and just listed it as he got told it was I could imagine the conversation probably went uh what card is this he was like uh I think it's a 5850 it's probably got half a gig vram it was like okay yeah I'm going to put that on the system now yeah we'll give you like 2p for it I'd have no idea how much they even offer for something like this or maybe they just found it at the back of the shop either way we got it for next to nothing but then again when something this strange happens you always have to find out if it actually works so what we're going to do here is we're going to take out this uh GTX GTX RTX graphics card which shouldn't be too difficult to do I want to say this is a 4060 something along those lines it's whatever it is it's from pallet the legendary makers of robot the robot and we'll put that to one side for now and then where I put it down I've put down the radian HD 58 something or other we have to find out exactly what it is because the label is peeled off on the back as i' probably already shown so if we get that put in here it needs two is it two eight pins two six pin connectors oh this is getting a bit camped for space right only need that six pin and then we want to do is move that away from the fans there and take out the phone I was using for lighting right that's all plugged in that should be working what I'll do we'll move the camera out we'll see if it turns on Okay so we've moved the the camera out a little bit what we're going to do next is uh turn this on and see if we get a display output I think the fans have come on if they have they're very quiet which is a nice change from last week's video on the 2900 XT where you could immediately tell that turn on we've got a post screen we've got Asus and that looks like we've got a working 25p graphics card so why don't we get this all turned on and find out what have they actually sent us and why do they say 5 12 megab because to my knowledge that car doesn't exist let's find out from the looks of things though this is a working radian HD 5850 and after booting the card into Windows it looks like there isn't even anything wrong with it in GPU Z it was recognized as having a full set of memory and as we were trying to look at things in a stark change of things from last week Windows 10 actually downloaded and installed working drivers a genuinely complete compl change of events from last week where it was hours of trying to get them to work this thing just booted up and decided yep going to have some drivers worked absolutely fine Through the Windows 10 ones and I just wanted to make sure nothing strange was going on and it wasn't going to crash out and the only Benchmark I had on hand was the original crisis GPU Benchmark Loop so I left it running for a while and to my surprise we saw one some blisteringly high frame rates because I had no clue what settings it was running at and two it didn't crash still we need to actually get some real drivers on here as the includ uded ones with Windows 10's downloader okay at best so I went straight to the AMD website and left those to download now while those are downloading really quick I am going to briefly cover what exactly is the radian 5850 released in 2009 this was one of the most formidable direct X11 cards around cut down from the most powerful single card on the market amd's HD 5870 and while performance suffered around 10 to 15% the price on these was slashed more than around 30% quickly dropping to 40% in the coming months you nearly had the highest end performance without any of the cost it knocked nvidia's gtx285 off into irrelevance while being faster and cheaper while also having full direct X11 support this card was seriously something to reckon with the only solution from the competition would have been to cut the price of the flagships which would have meant knocking down every other segment which didn't happen meaning that if you wanted a graphics card you wanted a HD 5850 reviewers praised it everywhere and even some of my mates ended up using a 5850 without having a single problem whatsoever and in many ways this was the card that continued to save AMD but just how much power is an aradian HD 5850 now approaching in on 15 years old the HD 5850 doeses boast some really impressive specs to match up with the history that goes with it it wasn't the highest end card on sale at the time but still features a Cypress Pro GPU based on the terascale 2 architecture and was packed full of power, 1440 cores 72 tmus 32 rops combined with 1 GB of gddr5 memory despite what CX told as it was and operates with a rather respectable 256-bit memory bus still more than some RTX cards I will always be mentioning that it uses around 132 WS under Peak load when running intensive tasks and sells for25 p over on CX which is exceptionally cheap in terms of other marketplaces these things go for under you know £7 over on eBay no one is bidding on these so no matter where you're looking you can find these things for next to nothing right so in terms of overall condition I'm actually really impressed outside the scuffed sticker on the back which is clearly where the misnaming come from I don't even think they tested this thing this thing's been running really well I mean even though I've only tested it briefly with a crisis Benchmark it was running about 60° so I'm actually quite curious what the condition is uh underneath you know the Shroud so what we'll do we'll take off the cooler and we'll see does this thing even need new thermal paste cuz honestly I don't think it does let's have a little look if we go for a know somewhat large Philips screwdriver that looks about right right I think that's the same size one we used on the 2900 XT last week we can have a little look no need a smaller one than that and this is how so many of these get stripped people not using the right screwdriver right let's get this off now thankfully only four screws which makes our life 10 times easier than last week's one where we had about 13 or so two of which were stripped completely so we should just need to get these off and then I reckon we're all good I don't know if it's meant to have screws there no I don't think it is but it has got two holes there for screws which aren't there which is an interesting one so why don't we have a little look what's happening under here right turn that over take that off and it's perfect honestly that thermal past still looks absolutely fine and yeah someone really looked after this card before they traded it in I don't know if you can still see that thermal paste is is still slightly wet around the corners so this thing wasn't repasted that long ago it's got a bit of dust on it but a bit of dust on the you know memory is not going to hurt anything this is an absolute steel and a really nice cooler design so suppose from there we'd probably better carry on with the rest of the video overall then things are off to a brilliant start the drivers are downloaded successfully off the AMD website the card appears to be in brilliant condition and the only issue I've got so far is the final drivers do appear to be beta drivers which I think is version 16.4 which means we do get the still very fresh looking Crimson overlay as oppos the older Catalyst one and you know they did work straight out of the box I can't really argue I know they're beta drivers but even then there was no issues running it through the capture card and it was perfect with resolution changes and everything here was working so all there was really left to do was plug in the SSD full of games and get started with what really matters here the benchmarks starting us off with something very impressive we have black Mesa running here in 1080P with high settings and first off the game experienced no random crashes something that apparently this game exhibits more than I actually thought it was remarkably stable here though and more than that it looked and ran brilliantly returning 65 FPS on average this of course was Far higher During certain areas of the game where you're inside and could be in well excess of 100 FPS something I really didn't expect to see on a graphics card this cheap and from years before this game even came out even areas outside of combat worked fine you know those sort of larger open areas but you would sort of see closer to that 65 FPS average but still overall brilliant doesn't matter what you did in this game perfectly playable frame rate and great graphics [Music] BNG started off fairly solid with a lot of the simpler Maps the card managed the game in 720p with a combination of both medium and high settings we saw near enough 60 FPS in the most simple of maps and only a small amount less where the intensity increased a little bit like our usual driving something of a cliff Benchmark and it wasn't bad for a game that could be notoriously hard to run however there are certain areas of the game which leap in intensity reducing the game down to around 15 FP s if you wanted to keep the settings all the way whacked up if you did go through though and reduce them down to a mixture of low settings we did claw back a good chunk of the frame rate still lower than I'd like but definitely play you know these maps are exceptionally intensive we carried on for a good while and still returned a perfectly solid 34 FPS in the most intensive scenarios so overall depending what you're doing High settings or low settings still playable on a 25p graphics card not something I thought I'd be saying today [Music] City skylines here which as we know can be rather intensive for a city Builder especially the one that has roots in the unity engine still in the 900p resolution with higher settings we had absolutely no issues returning a very smooth 46 FPS average absolutely fine for a slow paced game where I'd rather watch my city grow with some decent level of details than have a blisteringly fast frame rate I know there's those of people out there that can't play this game at under 100 FPS but at that point you're watching a glorified traffic simulator at high frame rate I want to watch my cities grow you know say nice there there could of course be dips overall where the card you know didn't have optimizations for the game and the late game could prove a tad more intensive but that's due to our limited vram overall though it was never [Music] unplayable now this one did impress me a lot for a game that is notoriously awful to run even on the latest and greatest of PCS we have GTA 4 running here with high settings in full HD 1080p with no frame rate issues the game ran dead smooth to 55 FPS on average and I know that the game does perform better on all the cards but this was not something I was expecting here last week's 2900 XD needed a 30 FPS cap to be remotely playable but here on the 5850 perfect performance great visuals amazing frame times and an experience that modern cards can't match we were doing this for 25p and then modern cards out here that can't manage this game this is ridiculously [Music] impressive Counter Strike 2 was by no means unplayable but did feel oddly sluggish for a game returning a 76 FPS average everything just felt heavy you know just just like it's got a bit bit of weight to it and I'm chucking it around now I don't have a great deal of experience in this game you know older CSO played it tons but the responsiveness here just didn't feel feel as quick as when I've tested similar cards on csgo but it's 2024 and this is the current Benchmark it certainly wasn't a problem the game looked good with competitive settings however is notoriously a bit of a pain to Benchmark this game so I was relying on the built-in Benchmark from the workshop and a bit of casual gameplay so you know the frame rate could go up in competitive scenarios but only slightly overall not a bad experience and is perfectly playable on a 25p graphics card I think I'm just being a bit critical here because everything felt slow like I'm moving the mouse around and it feels like it's dragging a little bit but I don't know if that's a fault with the game or you know maybe we're just expecting too much from a 25p graphics card overall not bad the Elder Scrolls Skyrim is probably the perfect example of just how powerful this card was you know in the ear of the Xbox 360 being King well this thing knocks it off the top spot just a hat with Skyrim running here in full HD 1080p at a Flawless 60 FPS and this didn't change no matter what you were getting up to the card still had plenty in reserve which meant if you wanted to find some of those original Graphics mods which were targeting cards just like this you've got great performance here and you could likely see it look even better with some mods and just in case that wasn't impressive enough let's move things up a generation with Skyrim anniversary booted up with the exact same settings admittedly we only saw half the frame rate but still a perfectly acceptable 30 FPS in a game designed for a completely different set of consoles so in our budget context the latest version of Skyrim runs with high settings full HD and a perfectly smooth frame rate absolutely unbelievable last time we had a 25p graphics card on the channel we only have a managed Skyrim the original release in 480p so I have no words for how impressive this is GTA 5 ran perfectly fine with 108 p and higher settings there was still a little bit of the usual teror scale related hitching in places but very very minor and was heavily linked to GPU utilization up there in the top left overall though it looked absolutely fantastic with predominantly higher settings used in a nice full HD resolution and I wasn't expecting things to be this smooth in the slightest but there we have it GTA 5 actually running on a cheap graphics card but I know a lot of you want to know how the card fares in GTA Online and the answer is as always better than it did in single player once again The Game's net code only breaks over 16 players so provided you under that you will see perfectly fine performance after 16 players good luck even NASA would struggle but there we have it there was none of the teror scale related hitching at all and the game could certainly see 60 FPS when out of towns or cities and it didn't drop down too badly when streaming in tons of detail flying across the city either overall a great success for GTA there Banner Lord ran beautifully in 720p with medium settings this was the preset the game defaed to originally but we did have to drop the resolution down to something a tad more manageable still smaller battles in a lot of the early to mid game you could see FPS in well excess of 50 to 60 however in our big Benchmark battle the game did average closer to 30 FPS a lot of the time it was in the higher 30s and was still a very playable experience and a blind sight better than the console version of this game which suffer with being far more sluggish with worse frame drops worse graphics and overall just feel like there's this weird level of input latency that wasn't even present here when we were only seeing high 30s in terms of FPS so overall b a lord ran [Music] brilliantly unfortunately probably our most disappointing result of the night was Fallout 4 a game that I still find runs particularly awfully but one that people are desperate to play after the release of the show still with medium settings and a 900p resolution the game was quite playable and didn't actually look too bad when you were out in the wastelands but those larger builtup areas well I just think they didn't look great and they didn't run particularly well either they were not unplayable by any means but after how well everything else did on the card it was a tad disappointing and the frame drops could be rather bad The Sun Also looked really off I don't know if it's the god Rays just not liking the card and honestly I would have been better off turning them off because they look just really pixelated and nasty more of distraction than a graphical option so not ideal but still an experience you can work [Music] around but finally can it run crisis well of course with 900p and high settings across the board the game ran beautifully we saw an impressive 72 FPS during our usual Benchmark and it's just amazing to see this card running this game that well we rarely ever see new cards well I say new cards when we test something new it's probably very low ends that's probably why but still we don't often see cards run the game this well yet alone when they cost us just 25p this may actually be the best deal the channel has seen for a while and goes to show that 25p graphics cards you know a lot has changed in not a great deal of time because we could hardly run this before and now we're seeing it in like this it's amazing [Music] so yeah every Benchmark we threw at the card seemed to work and there were some notable areas where the card struggled but the vram wasn't too much of an issue I know there'll be plenty of people saying 1 gab of vram that's not enough well you know when your card only has this much power it's all it needs to actually shine through and show off that this is not only a good value card but AMD got things right here and compared to last 25p GPU we had which was an Nvidia unit I want to say it was an 8600 GT we are seeing double the frame rates higher resolution and you know higher settings it's it's amazing everything is better here and as it stands at the moment everything was very smooth on the card there were no crashes but really what I wanted to see was can we push things even further with a little bit of an overclock and maybe some custom drivers just to see how much more can we get out of a 25p card first things first we did want to see just how much we could overclock the card our unit wasn't amazing but we did still manage to see some fairly decent performance overall which of course I have recorded entirely for you right so you join me here with the radian HD 5850 in the PC I've got the unigene valley Benchmark running here and the idea is we're going to see how much more performance we can get out of this so what I'm going to start by doing is is uh have we got power limit controls at all in here I'm just having a little look through and see what options we've got uh not many actually um do we have any more an MSI After Burner let me see where is After Burner I have to open it via this shortcut uh do we have power limit controls not from the looks of things um have we got any other options in here unlock voltage control maybe uh let's see see if that works we'll see if it works uh extend official overclocking limits let's have a little go applying those and uh we'll restart the PC and reconvene in a second see if there's any way we can get this thing overclocking right so you join us back here on the uh Windows desktop and we're going to go straight back into not launching teams because apparently Windows 10 makes everything start still not as bad as Windows 11 we're going to launch up unigene again keep that running over in the corner and we are going to relaunch MSI After Burner and see if it's going to give us any more shortcuts I don't think it will but uh you never know let's try and get all of that visible on screen lovely and uh what do we have here do we have any additional options no unfortunately not well it's not too bad I mean I wasn't really planning on using MSI After Burner in the first place uh it did make Windows start with sort of a a pinkish screen uh but that's not the end of the world what we'll do is we'll just use the radian global settings and see if we can you know eek out a little bit more performance out of this thing so if we start with the GPU clocks see if we can push 800 MHz no are we up to 800 we are up to 800 MZ on the GPU core and uh slightly more frames there can we try 850 we are now running 850 MHz 99% utilization and it hasn't immediately crashed can we go for 900 I mean if we could push a gahz that' be uh very impressive 900 and still no issues here this is getting very impressive let's see if we can do 1,000 no that's our limit there 1,000 is not going to be happening that's going to crash out and uh then we'll restart and find somewhere between 900 and 1,000 that seems to be sort of overclocking level I mean how's the card doing for temperatures absolutely fine this thing has just not got warm once uh can we close this down please there we go um and let us go back to say 900 which we knew was stable uh we're feeling optimistic we'll do 925 relaunch that drag it back into the corner and then we shall see are we getting any immediate crashing we're not getting any artifacting which is nice oh he says don't click on it it has broken it so yeah 925 still too high right what if we try and do just oh 900 quickly before that launches speed overclocking apply that don't crash please okay 900 900 on course seems to be our limit how far can we go on memory we up to 1,00 how's 1100 looking 1100 is stable can we do 1150 1150 also stable this is overclocking really well this is a nice change from the 2900 last week right 1,200 can we push 13 I'm feeling that's a bit optimistic oh nope 13 not happy let's drop back we might be a bit late dropping back 1285 still unstable 1250 perhaps 1250 1250 is stable that's a pretty good overclock going on right there and given that we can't seem to change many of the other settings we're doing all right it's it's not getting hot either this graphics card not getting hot at all so what we'll do is we will rerun some synthetic benchmarks and then uh some games and we'll see what kind of performance we get out of that um this is brilliant because uh I could hardly hear myself over the graphics card last week when I was trying to do a live segment and suddenly you can hear everything I'm trying to say while we're overclocking this is a really really good car this might be possibly the best bargain we've ever had on the channel however when we turn to custom drivers we didn't have a good time now I was expecting big things here because you know last time I tested these was with the later AMD 7000 series of cards and one of the main things I wanted to test was Counter Strike 2 and given how well I'd seen them perform previously you know I was expecting big things but we quickly ran into issues where games that would have received the most Improvement would simply crash due to a conflict with the anti-che so a bit of a shame there unfortunately counter- strike 2 has a form of anti-che that does not like modded drivers so that was one I was really hoping we'd get a bit of a better experience in yet uh it just crashes down to a small window and there's not much we can really do about it so I'm going to end task there cuz it is majorly slowing down the system but what we will do is we will try GTA 5 next to get an idea of with an overclock and uh you know some modded drivers do does it improve performance a little bit so we'll let that load up and we'll find out very quickly um does this fix our performance Wes not that they were too bad in the first BL all of that was right so what we're going to do here is we're going to see if the modded drivers and an overclock fixes performance we did try and test Counter Strike too but unfortunately with modded drivers the anti-che won't let you launch it Counter Strike go used to be fine with things like that modded drivers never ran into problems there but uh unfortunately uh looks like cs2s cracked down on those types of things but we're running the nemz uh drivers here and we're running the same overclock we were before so what we're going to do now is let the game load up and crash I'm assuming we might have to dial our overclock back there a little bit which is weird because it was stable through the benchmarks uh we'll knock 100 MHz off the memory speed cuz that's looking awful lot like memory corruption and uh we'll go from there honestly the performance we had was pretty decent oh have we completely locked up oh yeah we've uh we've crashed right we'll restart the PC there's a restart button somewhere there we are and uh we'll uh turn down some of those clocks and then uh we'll jump right back into things right so um the Nez drivers here don't appear to be all too stable uh given that I don't think it was the overclock that was causing the crashing I think it might be the drivers uh which is odd usually I have such great experiences with these drivers but it could just be that terascale and these modded drivers it is very system dependent you know I've had issues before where you know sometimes the drivers work sometimes the modded ones don't so uh we'll dial it back to the drivers we were using and then we'll test some games with just the standard overclock and we'll see if that improves performance somewhat there because this card is not liking these drivers um usually it should be fine you know I've done a complete ddu and uninstalled The Originals uh I've gone through and just in standed the stand you know standard modded driver package uh it should all work fine but uh we're just getting sort of this uh this mess happening here now where uh we're not even running an overclock but it's not even loading the settings menu so uh oh or is it we have a little opaque blur going on yeah what we'll do is we'll go back to the standard drivers and we will test them from there so unfortunately modded drivers uh not a great deal of success here on this card um could be down to a lot of things but it could just be a case of sometimes they can be 50/50 and in this instance modded drivers are not going to be the solution right so we're now running with our overclock in place and things are notably smoother he says as there is a small spike in the frame rate but we're now seeing much closer to a solid 60fps in GTA 5 with the same settings and this is from going into MSI After Burner extending the overclock limits and then going back into the AMD drivers to actually you know increase the clocks on core and memory and we're still not seeing full utilization when driving around in single player which is an issue inherent Terror scale cards from something I've noticed and something that online seems to resolve but we are still seeing a slightly smoother experience overall now overclocking is not going to save everything here as we can see the memory up in the top is spiking very close to the vram limit uh which could be one of the reasons that are memory you know is limiting the full utilization of the card here but generally the game is running smoother it feels smoother to play overall um there's still small hitches here and there but ultimately it does look really nice with the high settings enabled and we are still seeing anywhere between 40 to 60 FPS the main times we're dipping down to 40 is that utilization though I mean you can watch the numbers in the top left hand side and as you can see it's just so sporadic I mean as you see 92% utilization here well over 60 FPS yet when a lot is about to be going on we will drop down further than that I mean now we're hitting 70 FPS it's the utilization of the card here that struggles and overclocking does help because it means that even at lower utilizations the card does have a bit more performance to it so with terascale you know overclocking isn't going to help you all the time but in those situations where you know the card isn't receiving proper utilization it does certainly help bring up that deficit and as I'm noticing now now the memory usage has gone down our utilization is back up to 100% so I am going to say there is definitely something funky going on with the vram here given that you know this doesn't tend to happen on equivalent Nvidia cards I'm not too sure why uh could just be another funky terascale thing but ultimately this is still a pretty good experience I'd be inclined to say it's entirely down to the vram but the thing is when we go online we see perfect utilization more of the time whereas here it it just doesn't happen so overall it does make game smoother with the overclock but it's not exactly going to save everything uh but you will see still see a smoother experience it's just a shame we couldn't pair this with some modded drivers and see if they helped out even more and uh it's it's just crashed so also don't overclock it too much um because apparently we might have pushed it a little bit too far I did try putting it up 50 MHz more on the memory uh so yeah we'll stick the old limit before but still overall a good experience so there we have it a 25p graphics card the concept that actually started this channel now brought back to life and things have come a long way they were by no means perfect especially when we started pushing things a little bit too far but when you were spending so little can you really complain that you can't push things further for such a little price the car turned up in amazing condition worked beautifully didn't get hot at all was dead silent while running and despite my absolute detest for the terror scale series of drivers these final beta ones do work surprisingly well yes they were abandoned on a beta driver and the Nvidia fery Series has aged better but at least these ones install fine and for the most part they do the job so I can't complain too much especially when this is the price we're paying hope you all enjoyed the video and just seeing how much 25p actually gets you now so go out grab one of these cards they are brilliant value and thank you very much for watching good night

Channel: Budget-Builds Official

Views: 29,766

Keywords: AMD, Graphics Card, CHeap graphics card, Value Graphics card, under 100, under 50, GTA 5, GTA Online, Benchmark, Test, Low Price, Budget, GPU, HD 5850, Gaming, Showcase, Budget Builds Official, Modded Drivers, Overclock, Performance, Under 10, 25p Graphics Card, Radeon, Nvidia

Id: 4MAAS45tf2E

Length: 33min 13sec (1993 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2024