6850 or 6870 and which brand?

[lorewap3]

Short backstory, I bought a Gigabyte 6850 and although the hackintosh worked OOB with this card, my Windows partition gave me more BSOD than I ever though possible. Yes, I'm pretty positive it was the card as the cause of the BSOD was always atimag.sys . The computer also rebooted 3-4 times after it passed the BIOS splash screen when I'd power it on.

So, getting tired of it not working in Windows, the OS I would expect to have no problems under, I decided to return it as defective. Don't get me wrong, it gave me plenty of kernel panics in OS X too, just not nearly as frequently. What it would do instead is just poweroff or reboot spontaneously. It 'may' not be the graphics card, but I've run memtests on the RAM and that's not the problem (and it's the same ram I've used for over a year with another graphics card that gave me 0 problems. So the blame goes to the graphics card.

So, sorry for the rant, but the root of my question is this.

I have to go with 6850, I don't have the time to hack DSDT or Kexts and force other graphics cards to work in OS X. My question is, which brand would you suggest I buy for the 6850? I'm kinda burnt on Gigabyte, and am leaning toward MSI (since I have a MSI 6950 that works flawlessly) but I'm open to any and all suggestions.


My other main question is whether it matters if I get the 6850 or 6870. I have the dough to get the 6870, so if it's the exact same drivers that power both in OS X I might as well use the 6870. But before I try that on faith I'd like to hear from you experts.

So
1) What brand 6850/6870 are your favorites, and
2) Should I get a 6850 or 6870. Keep in mind that if it's a complicated process to OC the 6850 to 6870 I'd rather just pay the extra ~$20 and get the 6870.

Oh...and this is for a triple monitor setup. One problem I had with my previous 6850 (the Gigabyte) was upon boot of OS X the monitor plugged into the DP port was always garbled and required an unplug, plug back in to get it to work right. Also my wallpapers never stuck and usually went back to the defaults upon every reboot. Yes, I'm using active adapters, etc. Just please keep that in mind.

This is the card I'm returning:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125353&Tpk=gigabyte%206850

One more question...is 650W enough to power all of this?

I primarily want this machine to have OS X and Windows for Development. I'm not concerned with gaming as much I just want to be able to write Windows/Mac/iPhone/Android/Web Apps on a stable system. Probably should have gone with a $3 grand Xeon setup but don't really have the money for that.



Thanks for your input!
Will

Comp Specs:
650W PCU
GA-H67MA-UD2H-B3 Motherboard
16g RAM (3 G-skill 1 kingston)
3 Hard Drives (1 500gb for Windows and 2 1TB for Mac (clones))
1 SATA DVD-R
1 USB Bluetooth Dongle
Radeon 6950 (using while I return 6850)

 

[lorewap3]

One thing I've heard about XFX is that you get a lifetime warranty, and most come with a rebate. However, if you use the rebate, you lose the Barcode on the box, essentially voiding the lifetime warranty. Sounds pretty scammy to me, so I doubt I'm going with them. But if you've heard differently I'd love to hear your experiences.

 

[cliffg]

I am using a Powercolor 6870 and it "just worked" in SL and Lion.
I believe people are having success with the XFX card in either the 1G or 2G memory varieties. There have been multiple postings on these cards. Although I believe the 2G version took a few steps to get to work.