The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Thing is though, all I have at present is benchmarks to go on - I haven't spoken to anyone who owns the card. The 4850s will be worth buying but only if they're absent from all the technical problems the 3800 series suffered, and there's plenty of them.

 

ebuyer cacneled my order for security checks. then after it was sorted they told me re-order, only to find its now £5 higher and out of stock, so I think i can wait till the HIS ICEQ versions are out, and if i have enough ill get the 4870

 

That sounds like a good old fashioned case of 'we didn't have any in the first place' to me. Wouldn't be the first time from ebuyer.

 

oh well. i think ill stick with scan or OcUK for the HIS ICEQ Version, who ever stocks first.

 

When they show up, you let me know, I'm buying one! lol
Having heard the ICEQ version of my housemate's X1900XT-X when it was still air cooled, I'm more than happy to settle for that sort of noise level to get HD4850 grade performance.

What I might do is get an HD4850 initially, and then some time down the line (probably considerable) try crossfiring it with a 4870. My only current concern is the ridiculous idle power consumption - I sincerely hope that's fixed some time soon.

 

they said 8.7 will improve that. but no worries, if rivatuner gets support for the 4 series, then you can downclock the idle / 2d clocks.

and HIS anncounced the ICEQ versions for mid july, but they are not sure if they should stick with the ICEQ3 OR switch to a newer one.

 

Given the power consumption of the X1900XT-X and the temperatures the ICEQ3 achieved, it would certainly be plenty sufficient for an HD4850. Not sure about the HD4870, but it still shouldn't be too much of a problem.

 

I heard that actually worked excellently with the 3870 and the 3850. Benchmarks put it close to 2 3870s. Try it and let me know when you do. It should be interesting

I'm still going with the Sapphire 4870. I have owned 3 cards made by Sapphire, and the stock cooling has always been adequate. Noise levels aren't a big issue for me, so as long as it doesn't run like the dust buster on my old X850XT, I'm a happy camper.

I only really want to make the upgrade for Crysis. If you've ever spent some time with the very high settings(dx9 or dx10), you'll know why It really does look good enough to justify the purchase, IMO.

 

lol While we are talking about graphics, me and some friends were playing the ORIGINAL halo today. I swear it looked better when it first came out.

I don't think the 4870 is worth getting For a 100 dollars more all you are getting is a card that's overclocked a bit more. Seriously we could probably overclock it to those speeds, especially when the GDDR5 4850 is out.

 

Are the 4870 and 4850 on the same chip and PCB??? I honestly doubt overclocking is going to close up that performance gap.

The 4870 is ahead by miles in some cases. In Crysis it manages a 42FPS average in 1920 x 1200 with all high settings.

I'm looking at running Dx9 very high in 1650 x 1080. I'm expecting about 40 FPS, which is the same speed my 8800GTS runs it in tweaked high settings.

 

As far as I know the only difference right NOW is clock speed and GDDR5. The GDDR5 version of the 4850 IS SUPPOSED to come out. Lets see whats happens when it does.

 

I'm waiting for a price drop before I make my move. $200 is not worth it for me to upgrade to the 4850, and $300 is a bit much for me to pay right now. I might have to save my money and see what happens to prices. I could buy one now, but I really don't want to just yet. I'm not done enjoying my 8800GTS

 

Yeah the 8800GTS is an EXCELLENT card, and is more than enough for more people. Sometimes, all this upgrading seems pointless to me, but it's so damn fun lol.

 

I upgrade to play the newest games available. My 8800GTX was sweet, but in retrospect, I would have done better to get a 640MB GTS. I paid full price at the time. $550 is a lot of money for one card :/

I sold my 8800GTX to pay bills and was blessed with a GTS 320MB from Grandpa for my birthday. That was also a great card, pulling high frames in all my games. But it was woefully inadequate for my 1920 x 1200 monitor. Anything over 1650 x 1080 would hammer it badly. Not to mention I had to go very easy on eye candy settings.

The 8800GTS 512MB seems to handle high res about as well as my 8800GTX. My only complaint is crappy performance with Quake 3 engine games. Call of Duty 1 sometimes drops into the low 20s with lots of action on the screen. Other times I get over 500 FPS. I've been told it's a driver issue. That seems to be the norm with most Q3 engine games. Wolfenstein has graphical anomalies, MOH:AA refuses to run, and Call of Duty has performance issues. Go figure that the roots of modern FPS games are becoming unsupported

 

IICR the circuitry is also different around the VRMs.

 

Sapphire have always served me well, I've had a 9200-256AGP, X800Pro-AGP, X1600Pro-slim and X1900XT from them, all with good success. Their HD3870 however, is laughable, by the far the worst cooler I have ever seen on a graphics card, and I've seen some pretty bad coolers in my time.
I sincerely hope their 4800 series is better.

Abuzar: You will never overclock a 4850 to be a 4870 - there's a good 30% performance gap between them. It's not like the gens of old, where they just up the clock speeds a few mhz, the 4870 is a big design change, hence the steep price tag.
Estuansis: 320MB hurts for nvidia cards. When a Geforce runs out of memory, it's game over, the frame rates drop off a cliff. Due to the way ATI cards are designed, they can run well beyond the amount of memory they have and the frame rate is affected, but not nearly as much - consequently they're good cards to run with very high resolutions - and given the grunt of the 4800 series, they should be very remarkable.

 

I've noticed that as well. Sometimes my 8800GTS 320MB would be getting lower FPS than my X1800XT when I was using AA/AF at high resolution. Lower the AA a bit or drop the res, performance skyrockets. So not a big issue in general, but a major annoyance at 1920 x 1200.

I don't remember where exactly, but I read an article that says G80 and G92 had problems with memory management at high res. They would start choking far before the Radeons did. They seem to have addressed this issue with the G94. The 9600GT can sometimes outperform the 8800GT in eye candy mode and seems to handle high res a bit more gracefully.

Something to consider for cheap performance: 9600GTs scale really well in SLI.

I do not fault nVidia for their problems. The GeForce 8 series is still awesome and has had a nice, long run as top dog.

 

Hmm perhaps it is. Seems strange that it was fixed for the 9600GT and not the 9800GTX. We'd have no real way of knowing if it's been fixed for the GTX200 series because they have so much memory anyway, except for perhaps Crysis at 2560x1600 with AA.

Oh yes, and you know what I was saying about ATI's frame rates still being affected by the lack of memory? I'm not so sure...


The 1GB version of the 3870 is also slightly higher clocked...

 

I suppose you would need an extreme case to show a difference. Sadly, the Radeon HD3870 seems to be too slow to handle Ep2 at those settings anyway.

I hope the trend continues on the 4870 as that would be very beneficial in eye candy mode. I think that is why 512MB seems to be enough to match even the 800+MB of the GTX280.

Just for future reference. I don't quite get what the GTX280 is. Nvidia have released their GeForce 9 series already. What makes the GTX280/260 so much faster(aside from clocks)? This was something I never even heard of until I looked at HD4870 reviews. Google doesn't turn up much on it.

 

You'd think so, based on those results wouldn't you? Yet I tried it and it ran fine - noticeably not fluid in some areas, but certainly playable.