Cant effing decide!

2wiced

2[H]4U
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Feb 14, 2005
Messages
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So the 4870 is coming out, and i have seen some reviews.... in your opinion does it perform better than the 4850 enough to justify the 300 dollar price tag?

i sorta think yes, but also think the 4850 is impressive.

what are your thoughts?
 
from a price to performance point of view, no it does not.......but it is pretty close

from a what is the best card for $300, it wins hands down
 
both are very good performers for the price.
Depends how much you want to spend on a video card I guess.
 
I'm stuck in the same boat as well...
I may pony up for the 4870 simply because of the dual-slot cooler. Saves some cash on aftermarket cooling, I guess. Hopefully some nice rebates will bring the 4870's price down at least $20 to seal the deal for me...
 
Just get the damn card. It will last you longer probably anyway. Just think how high you can overclock this. The 3870 went well over 850 with just the GDDR4, the GDDR5 probably will go way over that is my bet.
 
Seems like the 4870 performs about 20% better at my gaming resolution (1680x1050), which in my opinion isn't worth the 50% price increase.

I'd like to see how a 4850 with a nice OC performs, separate the GPU from the memory.

It seems like if the retail price of the 4870 goes over $300 that 4850 CF might be a better buy.
 
4850 and 4870 have just about the same price/performance... Honestly, either one would be good, it just depends on how much you want to spend.
 
wonderful.... still stuck...

i think ill pony up the cash for the 4870.... god i hope there are some instock on newegg, im stayin up past midnight to check...

woot dedication.... feelin hella nerdy now
 
they used to say it will be out and in full quantity but as soon as they found out where nvidias offerings perform.... i think they decided to say that its gonna be in limited quality, this way many of us will buy it for higher prices? or atleast something like that, i dunno just joking.
 
It will probably end up like the 8800gt when it was released... MSRP of $199, selling for $1,234,234,345,345 + shipping and handling.

Great deal my ass.
 
yea... but i think that pic of it being at 309.99 was at what the cards will be bought at. The only thing that it could be, that NewEgg just put that picture of the 4870 out as an order... just to see how many will order in that time frame. This way they know the demand and can comapre it to their supply, then figure out price!
 
yea... but i think that pic of it being at 309.99 was at what the cards will be bought at. The only thing that it could be, that NewEgg just put that picture of the 4870 out as an order... just to see how many will order in that time frame. This way they know the demand and can comapre it to their supply, then figure out price!
NewEgg are not that "sophisticated". :)
Besides, the rumored GDDR5 shortages have failed to materialize.
 
I'm going to roll with the HD4850s in crossfire. I got two 4850s for the price of one 4870 and the benchmarks clearly show that if you have an X38/X48 board, you just got the best bang per dollar available.
 
I'm waiting to see either a price drop (or coupon deal) for the 4870 or some better stock cooling on the 4850. I'm expecting to see Nvidia drop prices on GTX 260 when both cards are widely available, and I hope that will set off a downward spiral in prices.
 
unfortunately doing crossfire would require me to purchase a x38/x48 motherboard or atleast a p45 with 2 pcie 8x slots. This would be too costly as the upgrade would ride close to 500-600 bucks :(. I have just put in an order with bestbuy for the 4870.

i figured going crossfire would be nice but i have no will to spend so much money.
 
I have an ASUS HD4850. Could I crossfire it with say a Visiontek? What would be the drawbacks if any?
 
I have an ASUS HD4850. Could I crossfire it with say a Visiontek? What would be the drawbacks if any?
Yes you can and there shouldn't be any draw backs considering both have the same heatsink and can be clocked at the same rate. Use ATI drivers only.
 
Well I can tell you what I do. Years ago I used to always buy what was always one generation behind, it kept things cheap. Or so I thought. What I found is that because I was always one generations behind or buying the cheaper version of a card instead of the high end version, I was having to upgrade more often, and most of the time it was because I ran into problems running a game that I wanted to play, so I ended up having to upgrade not at a time of my choosing, which is the absolute worst situation.

So what I do now, it doesn't matter what manufacturer, once every 2 generations I buy the best card I can, and plan on it lasting until 2 new generations of cards come out. So for instance this last time I bought a top of the line 8800, it has lasted me until the G200's and the 4870's came out. Now I will wait for the price to drop, and at the time of my choosing, upgrade to the newest.

The way I look at it, is at least for a while I get to run the top of the line, and enjoy it. Where before, I was always fighting trying to get a gimped card to run a game I wanted. No more headache.
 
See i sold my 9800GTX to a friend, he killed it so im in the process of RMAing now, anyways back to the point.... I sold it to him for 200 and a cpu to an other friend for 50 bucks last week (got lucky, cuz i didnt know it would drop in price). He is happy to have the card. So i had decided to just put up the extra 50 bucks and buy the 4870.

it will overclock better haha
 
See i sold my 9800GTX to a friend, he killed it so im in the process of RMAing now, anyways back to the point.... I sold it to him for 200 and a cpu to an other friend for 50 bucks last week (got lucky, cuz i didnt know it would drop in price). He is happy to have the card. So i had decided to just put up the extra 50 bucks and buy the 4870.

it will overclock better haha

The 4870 also perfroms massively better than the 9800gtx, it is almost on par with the gtx 280.
 
4850 is not a big enough increase over my 800GT so went with 4870 regardless of cost per performance ratio. 4870 uses GDDR5 instead of GDRR3 which I expect costs quite a bit more than GDRR3 and has much better bandwidth than GDDR3.
 
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