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I am looking forward to buy a new Ati Radeon 5870 but i have read it on many forums about flashing the bios on a 5850 with the 5870 bios. What does exactly this means. Is it like that both of these cards has the same hardware or it just allows different clocks. I am currently using windows xp 32 bit version.
I think the Ati Radeon 5870 would be giving you bit more frames per second then that of ati 56850. And there is also a difference between the prices of both of these cards. I guess you should go on buying the 5850 which is enough for having a great experience while playing crisis as it does not show any lagging while playing it.
Ati Radeon 5850 has only 1440 unified shaders and it has a stock 3dclocks of 850mhz core/1200mhz memory with the ati 5870 bios. And Ati Radeon 5870 has 1600 unified shaders.
It is about 10% more then that of 5850. So it is but obvious that you would be having 10 % difference in both of them performances.
I guess it would not be good to flash your bios to the card as it might happen that it bricks your card. Actually there are not much chances but still it might happen bricking the card. I think buying a 5850 is enough for running anything and everything.
I have flashed my video cards for about 100 times and it has also happened that my video card have got bricked once but it does not happens all the times. All you need to do is just reflash it from some other video source. I would like to give you some information about the 5870 as @OP, Ati Radeon 5870 BIOS only raises the core/mem speeds on the 5850.