I am looking for a Linux distro that run on my setup with my Radeon 6850.

What I mean is when I install the official drivers I get a speed decrease in some distros and in others the OS is unstable. Currently I have gone back to Windows 7 as this seems to be stable and I dont have any issues with my card.

I hope there is a way to get linux on my PC and running perfectly.

Radeon is very Problematic. Every Kernel Upgrade will mess it up. I use Radeon and have mainly swtitched to CentOS as it works and functions great with it. But you wil need to add "el Repo" and install ATI Drivers. Ati Works great on Cent OS even though its an old kernel. Particularly the New ones cause more problems as each updates brakes the Graphics.

For newer hardware support, you MIGHT want to look into a rolling release style system such as ArchLinux, Gentoo, and such which are updated almost each day.

However, if your hardware is too new, you may want to wait at minimum 6 months before proper drivers for the kernel, X11, libdrm, and libmesa are created.

This is my system

ASUS P7P55-M Motherboard
Intel i5 650
Powercolor 6850HD 1Gb PCI-e
4GB 1033MHz DDR3 Ram
2 x 500Gb Sata2 Hard drives
Standard Sata2 DVD Writer

Your hardware should be supported even with some of the latest releases of more major distributions. The DRI and Mesa drivers added the 6x00 and 7x00 series Radeons a while back so they should be fully supported by the Gallium3D API.

If you want a stable system, check out Slackware. The next version 14.0 is due any time now and you're card will be supported through the "radeon" DRI and Mesa drivers. It actually is supported through the -Current tree if you are interested, and -Current is fairly safe and stable to use at times.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.. The open source 7x00 series drivers can't do much more than run glxgears.. The 6x00 open source drivers, I've found to be unstable, buggy, and very slow compared to Catalyst.

At least with my old Mobility x700, the open source drivers are around 80% as fast as the retired Catalyst drivers that AMD stopped making. Newer hardware is *MUCH* better off using Catalyst.. And even with Catalyst, you'll find the fglrx driver in Catalyst 12.6 will crash when put together with the newer versions of Xorg and the newer versions of the kernel.. So you need to use a slightly old Xorg or Catalyst 12.7 Beta.. Bleh. So complicated!

I agree Catalyst is the way to go. I am currently using Catalyst under Ubuntu and will add that it is working GREAT!

Except for full screen Flash but that is a Flash and 64bit problem as opposed to Graphics.

I have gone with Sabayon 9 KDE and i am glad i did. As for the 6850 they have the Catalyst already there to download and it worked like a charm. Windows 7 can now be dumped all my PC