looking at the prices on newegg, they price difference of the 4870 and 4850 are huge. the 4870 is like 320USD and the 4850 is around 170USD. i was planning on getting the 4870, but seeing the price difference, i was wondering if there is a big difference in power? is it worth it to spend the extra $150 for that much more power?
The HD4870 is faster, but not as much faster as the extra price indicates. You'll typically get 30-50% more performance with a 4870, but clearly it's 90% more expensive. Your call really. Personally, I would stick with the 4850 unless you run a very large screen resolution.
thanks, i guess ill get the 4850 unless the 4870 price drops lower. i have another questions though, not reguarding GPU's. its about HDD. i know the more RPM, the faster the rotations on the moving parts of the disk spins, but what does that help? like if i have 10,000 rpm compared to 7,200 rpm, what does it really speed up? does it speed up the boot time when i turn my pc on?? what does it help go faster? because the price between those are always very big and i was thinking maybe i will get a 72gb 10,000rpm for my master and a 720gb 7,200rpm for everything else.
Other than the new velociraptor, the data transfer rates of the 10k drives are similar to modern 7200 drives (typically 80-85 for the former, 75 for the latter), but it's their response time (4ms vs 8ms) that's the big gain - that doesn't help much for bulk transfers - installing games, copying big files etc, but it does help with loading the OS, and loading games split into numerous files. Due to the limited size and size/cost ratio, 10k drives are rarely used for games now, but the Velociraptor adds a new dimension to speed and capacity, at 300GB and over 100MB/s for data transfer - plus it's not that much more than the older, far less reliable, more noisy and hot running 150GB drives.
