11-Jan till 23-Feb? Damn! I would just pay retail and standard ups ground.
I wasn't in a hurry, one of my two 4850's was still functional, and really there isn't anything I couldn't already play in my pile of games. Still, another big pile of AA (and the supersampling option) made it very interesting for my older stuff.
So, gutted the Cat 9.6's I was using, shut the machine down, removed my loner 4850, put him in the box next to his dead brother, installed the new 5850 and loaded up the Cat 10.2's. No issues on boot, no issues on install, no issues turning up the ATI Overdrive sliders all the way to full tilt (775 / 1125), and no issues in any of the games I threw at it.
Oblivion with all of my texture replacement patches and tweaks at 8xSSAA, 16xAF is absolutely fantastic. Fallout, Stalker, and pretty much every other DX9 game that I own all worked the same. Obviously Crysis and Warhead needed to have it all turned down a bit, but both were still playable at native rez with all in-game DX10 menu settings maxed and at least 2xAA. I went in and continued massaging the CVARs for a bit more oomph, but I already love this card.
Before the movers face-planted my 2nd 4850 card, I took a decent series of benchmarks in various games with my Q9450 at 3.6Ghz and both the 4850's at 700/1050. At the first attempt with my 5850 at 775/1125, it generally outperforms my prior setup by about 30% in the lowest cases, and a few games (with the higher AA settings) it really trounces the 4850's by a wide margin -- 60% or more.
At least part of that is the 1Gb of framebuffer versus the prior 512mb; I know a few of the games ran into framebuffer issues with all the AA turned on. Still, for $250 that I paid, I feel that I got my money's worth.
Especially since most of the money came from the insurance company