helping picking a new card

E

Eyke

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Jan 12, 2005
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help pick a new video card
with my video card giving up on me i was looking for some advice on what i should look toward getting in hopefully a 200-275 budget

500watt antec power supply
ASUS P5Q Pro LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1000
intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz

i was considering the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130370

but id like some input first

edit: by the way its for gaming, any game really from fps to wow :p
 
GTX 260 (216) or HD 4870 1 GB. Can't go wrong with either and your choice depends on the games you play most (if they are friendlier toward one or the other) and whether you like ATI or Nvidia more.

The GTX 260 (192) is a good buy.
 
Good card although is it that 192 core or 216 core GTX260? Tbh it doesn't really matter as both cards offer pretty much the same gameplay experience.

I should be receiving my eVGA GTX 260 216 Superclocked tomorrow after my XFX GTX260 died. There is a rumour going around that XFX are going to defect to ATI so I would avoid them and their poor quality assurance over the more established evga or BFG

Evga do have excellent service and the step up program is another plus. Although I am aware that BFG do trade up in the US as well. Either way you aren't going to go wrong with a GTX 260 from Evga or BFG. :D

However I am not totally versed in that since I live in the UK!

I say go for it but of course the choice is up to you... :)
 
Btw are you partial to Nvidia or ATI as you haven't considered the 4870 1gb?

Just wondering...

Personally I only go for Nvidia due to drivers, CUDA, PhysX, game dev support etc...

but the 4870 1gb in fairness is a good card too...

However if you are a solid Nvidia man then go for the 260 as you will not regret it :)
 
ive always had an Nvidia so its easy for me to just go that way

its not that im an nvidia man i just want the better card that wont die on me or have something dumb happen like driver problems

ive never had a problem with one of my nvidia cards till now which makes me a sad panda feels like the ram on it died or leaked or something it was a Evga 7800gtx

other than preference is there anything else i should consider between the 2 cards?

thanks a bunch for the input by the way, i dont like shelling out money without being sure :p
 
Eyke said:
ive always had an Nvidia so its easy for me to just go that way

its not that im an nvidia man i just want the better card that wont die on me or have something dumb happen like driver problems

ive never had a problem with one of my nvidia cards till now which makes me a sad panda feels like the ram on it died or leaked or something it was a Evga 7800gtx

other than preference is there anything else i should consider between the 2 cards?

thanks a bunch for the input by the way, i dont like shelling out money without being sure :p
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what resolution are you going to run at? I built a similar system to yours a few weeks ago and have been running the standard gtx260. I was surprised how easily it handled games at 1920x1200. I can play Warhead in DX9 on a mix of Enthusiast and Gamer settings very smoothly. Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 run just fine at maximum settings and even with a little AA. Clear Sky is sluggish on max settings but that game feels awful even with higher framerates.
 
Eyke said:
i plan on playing in 1400x900
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well a GTX260 would be overkill for almost any game at that res. still if you can get a really good deal on the GTX260 192sp you should get it. if not then just get a 4850. honestly I would go buy a bigger monitor. you can get a good 22inch for 160-180 bucks.
 
Just got that card a few weeks ago. It plays Crysis at 1680x1050 no AA all settings on "high" very nicely. And it doesn't spool up the dustbuster too high, either. At 1440x900, 2XAA and everything on high, I kept getting pauses. Overall framerate was ok, but the pauses were really distracting. System in sig below.

The only issue is if your monitor only has an HDMI port for its digital interface, nVidia drivers suck and will force you into HDTV colordepth (http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032937672&postcount=20 and http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032937672&postcount=21) and you have to either hack the EDID in your registry or you go analog connection. I went analog, and it looks great - I just hate the fact that nVidia doesn't provide an override in their drivers for the HDMI interface.

BB
 
BB Gun said:
Just got that card a few weeks ago. It plays Crysis at 1680x1050 no AA all settings on "high" very nicely. And it doesn't spool up the dustbuster too high, either. At 1440x900, 2XAA and everything on high, I kept getting pauses. Overall framerate was ok, but the pauses were really distracting. System in sig below.

The only issue is if your monitor only has an HDMI port for its digital interface, nVidia drivers suck and will force you into HDTV colordepth (http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032937672&postcount=20 and http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032937672&postcount=21) and you have to either hack the EDID in your registry or you go analog connection. I went analog, and it looks great - I just hate the fact that nVidia doesn't provide an override in their drivers for the HDMI interface.

BB
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if you are running that E4500 at stock then I find hard to believe you would get any more performance out of lowering your res. thats a pretty slow cpu at stock speeds especially when paired with a GTX260.
 
BB Gun said:
*shrug* I only report what I see. Believe it. Or not.

BB
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well you didnt list any framerates, and to be honest I was just making a generalized comment about that cpu. I also didnt know if you were overclocking your cpu or not either. you would pick up a lot more performance if you did.
 
With that resolution you could just get the GTX 260/4870 1GB and run every game completely maxed out or close to it. That's what I would do :)
 
alg7_munif said:
$230 for a 1GB HD4870 with an aftermarket cooler is a bad deal? Please tell me where I can get a GTX 260 for near $130? ;)
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it doesnt have free shipping so that would make it $240 after rebate .I payed $165 for my gtx260 so thats $75 cheaper which is why I said almost $100 cheaper. also there were even better deals on the gtx260 then I got. ;)
 
cannondale06 said:
it doesnt have free shipping so that would make it $240 after rebate .I payed $165 for my gtx260 so thats $85 cheaper which is why I said almost $100 cheaper. also there were even better deals on the gtx260 then I got. ;)
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Learn to count first. Even after shipping: $240-$165=$75. That is 25% less than $100.

1GB HD4870 competes against the GTX260 core 216, GTX 260 Core 192 is slower.
 
At a low resolution like 1400x900, just get a 4850. Anything more is really a waste. (Save your money to eventually upgrade your monitor)
 
I know that nVidia is much better, much much better, I mean no problem at all, especially with dual cards. Not a single issue. :p It just works!!!

Meh, I can spend the whole day searching for problems on ATI cards as well. There is no solid evidence that shows a company has more problems than the other except for mobile GPUs problem.

Btw to the OP, you can't be wrong if you go with any of the cards. I just want you to know about the deals on ATI cards as well since people have posted the deals on nVidia cards.
 
alg7_munif said:
I know that nVidia is much better, no problem at all, I mean much much better, especially with dual cards. Not a single issue. :p It just works!!!

Meh, I can spend the whole day searching for problems on ATI cards as well. There is no solid evidence that shows a company has more problems than the other except for mobile GPUs problem.
Click to expand...

I'm getting sick of seeing those links. Most of them are due to overclocking, insufficient power supplies or multi gpu solutions, none of which are germane to the OP's situation.

From what I've read, the nvidia cards edge out ATi's most of the time. There are of course exceptions and it depends which particular cards you're looking at. the 4870 X2 will walk all over the GTX 280 in some games, others it's the reverse but they are for the most part close.

With the 4870 1GB vs. GTX 260, the 260 wins most of the time, but it doesn't matter because both are perfectly playable.
 
Here's your proof as written by Derek Wilson of Anandtech @ http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3463&p=6


AMD Driver Caveats and Major Open Issues

The issues with AMD's driver and hotfix for Far Cry 2 have been fairly public. The 8.10 driver didn't really deliver on some performance points while the first hotfix had some rendering issues. The next couple hotfixes fixed some things and broke others, and we still don't have a driver from AMD that gives us the results we want. The 8.11 driver only incorporates the final hotfix changes, but we will have to wait until a newer hotfix is released or 8.12 for any hope of a better experience on Far Cry 2 with most AMD hardware.

While people have been talking about the issues, we've spent quite a bit of time looking at this problem (and the AMD driver issues are one of the major reasons this article is as delayed as it is). And we'll lead off with the bottom line: the Radeon HD 4870 1GB is the only AMD card not in some way afflicted, and it also happens to be the card we would recommend for the best single GPU experience on Far Cry 2 at any setting except 2560x1600 with 4xAA. But that is not an excuse for the kind of horrific experience we've had with every single other AMD solution when playing this game.

The stuttering issue people have pointed out with AMD hardware is not an issue with the 1GB part in our experience. The rest of the line up suffers greatly from random hitches that aren't so much stuttering in our tests as they are temporary slow downs. We were also unable to test CrossFire, as CrossFire only works with 4xAA enabled. Even then CrossFire performance is erratic and stutters more than single card solutions (except for with the 4870 X2 or two 1GB 4870 cards that is). We aren't quite sure what the CrossFire issue is, but it seems clear that there is some graphics memory issue somewhere, and not only because of the huge discrepancy between the performance of the 4870 512MB part an the 1GB part.

In our tests, we initially wanted to take the 3 run average for each test. This was not something we could do with AMD hardware as even our benchmark sessions were marred with ridiculous stuttering and slow downs. We would have performance range from 25 to 55 frames per second on any given test. Rather than take the average, we decided to take the highest performance run for NVIDIA and AMD. It is worth noting that most of the performance results for NVIDIA were within less than a frame per second difference, so average versus max performance run isn't that different.

This does mean that our tests paint AMD hardware in a better light than the actual experience will be, at this point in time, with every card except the 4870 1GB. The average FPS data was just not usable as our line graphs looked more like sine waves than anything logical; nothing made any sense at all. Our choice to publish this article now is based on the fact that we absolutely expect AMD to fix their performance issues in Far Cry 2 as soon as possible. Far Cry 2 is a major title and AMD is a major GPU maker: there is simply no excuse for this sort of problem.

So the trade off for going forward with best-case scenario numbers is this page explaining the problems and a plea to AMD to change their approach to driver development for the good of the consumer.

Maintaining a monthly driver release schedule is detrimental to AMD's ability to release quality drivers. This is not the first or only issue we've seen that could have been solved (or at least noticed) by expanded testing that isn't possible with such tight release deadlines. Yes, consistent and frequent driver releases to improve compatibility and performance are a necessity, but doing anything to excess is a very bad idea. Moderation is key and AMD severely needs a better balance here.

We've been mentioning this as an issue in passing when it pops up and causes us problems, but this is starting to get ridiculous. It is one thing when previous fixes are broken or when older games fall off the grid and are neglected. But when a major title like Far Cry 2 is released to incredibly poor driver support, it is time to wake up and realize that something is wrong. This is not the first time we've seen issues with a newly released game, but the problems we've had with AMD drivers and Far Cry 2 are some of the worst we've ever experienced.

And this time it isn't just us. This isn't prerelease hardware or a beta software package. This isn't a quick fix "oops I forgot something" kind of bug. Though we tend to see problems a lot more frequently than end users, we do see a lot more issues with AMD drivers than NVIDIA. Even though not all those issues are things that we need to bother end users with, the probability of hitting a bug that will affect end users is much higher when you've got a higher number of bugs to worry about in general.

Now don't get me wrong, AMD drivers are still much better than they were before Catalyst. Back during the transition to Vista, ATI drivers were hands and feet above NVIDIA drivers for a long time (and they didn't hang XP out to dry either). AMD has maintained a unified driver model where NVIDIA had to break up their driver for different hardware generations for a while.

And now it is time for AMD to learn from their mistakes and change over to a more manageable and sensible driver release policy. Double the time between driver releases, do much much more testing across hardware platforms and games, and maybe even regularly release partly QA'd beta drivers in between WHQL drivers if there's something that needs a quick fix.
 
why do fanbois ALWAYS have to thread crap? I guess they came from the third grade.

bottom line, both cards (GTX260 and the 4870) have issues. and no Nvidia drivers are not more stable. sorry. both red and green release driver that improve performance. Green did theirs (and brook a few things doing it) ATI just released their. The same back and forth that everyone gets excited about. and you will always have people claiming POS drivers for one side or another. these are probably the people that should be ignored.

Both right now are really good values at the prices listed above due to close competition. as for what card is faster they tend to trade blows. Right now I would pick one based on if you can crossfire or sli in the future. if neither apply, pick the one with the best package and be done with it. really, a 4870 1gb or an old GTX260 (the new ones are not actually any better, go read the H reviews on some of the newer games.) for225 and under (I think the GTX260 has been seen for under 200) make this a choice that you really can't get wrong.
 
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