Replacement card on a mid budget.

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CombatLibrarian

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So, my current card, an 8800 gt, is giving up the ghost, and I need a replacement very soon on a budget of $150 with a little (not much) wiggle room, not counting shipping.

Mostly I play WoW, so I need something that can stand up to longer play sessions. Something with a custom cooler usually seems to be the best approach on these. Trying to find something dependable, and cool, with enough power to run raids without choking and not die on me after 1 year. I've been looking so far at some of the 9800 gt/gtx models, and some 4850's on the ati side. Anyone have a particular manufacturer/model they can recommend?
 
I'm sort of glancing between the xfx 4850 and the HIS 4870. The HIS is a step up in specs, but I'm not really familiar with HIS's track record.
 
CombatLibrarian said:
I'm sort of glancing between the xfx 4850 and the HIS 4870. The HIS is a step up in specs, but I'm not really familiar with HIS's track record.
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If you're worried, then consider the Powercolor card I linked to. It's only $5 more, which you should be able to manage.
 
I didn't realize the price on those 4870 512MB's....

I'd go with the Powercolor 4870 512MB.
 
I've found the card elsewhere for a similar price, but in searching I came across a large number of people complaining of harsh crashing issues with the 4870 cards. I'm trying to find out if this is a drivers issue that has since been resolved, but it dead-ends so far, most seem to be from late last year.
 
I just got a HIS 4870 and I can vouch for its quality. Great card so far and very well built. Feels way more solid than my old 8800gts in terms of quality and is a nice upgrade in terms of performance.
 
And on TigerDirect, the price jumps by $30 literally between page and checkout. Stock based, instantly updated pricing ftl.
 
I ended up sucking it up and getting the HIS...which is just as well I've been finding no end of people with problems/complaints about the sapphire 4870 cards. I've also had a personal bad history with sapphire, I had two of their ati cards in the past (a x850xt and an x1950xt, respectively), both died about a year and a half in, in catastrophic "omg teh graphics is asplode" fashions.
 
Just in case anyone else should stumble across this post. Since I stated in my initial post that I wanted this card primarily to play World of Warcraft on.

If you are a World of Warcraft player, do not under any circumstances purchase a 4800 series ATI card. I'm not going to bother to c&p links here, just google "world of warcraft 4870 performance" and you'll get all of the info you can stomach and then some. Bottom line, the ATI 4800 series of cards is absolute crap for World of Warcraft. Performance is actually -worse- than my 8800gt was when it was still functional. Even in standard outdoor zones it's a stutter fest with fps taking a nosedive if I so much as turn suddenly or look at a large body of water...this was not the case with my 8800 gt. Changing settings, reinstalling wow, double-checking and reinstalling drivers all has done nothing. I have tried every single fix there is, and the sad bottom line is, for whatever reason, this card is piss poor for the money for world of warcraft, has been since the line came out, and there is apparently no hope in sight. Other than what I'm about to do, which is exchange the card for an nvidia 9800 and hopefully never speak of this again.
 
CombatLibrarian said:
Just in case anyone else should stumble across this post. Since I stated in my initial post that I wanted this card primarily to play World of Warcraft on.

If you are a World of Warcraft player, do not under any circumstances purchase a 4800 series ATI card. I'm not going to bother to c&p links here, just google "world of warcraft 4870 performance" and you'll get all of the info you can stomach and then some. Bottom line, the ATI 4800 series of cards is absolute crap for World of Warcraft. Performance is actually -worse- than my 8800gt was when it was still functional. Even in standard outdoor zones it's a stutter fest with fps taking a nosedive if I so much as turn suddenly or look at a large body of water...this was not the case with my 8800 gt. Changing settings, reinstalling wow, double-checking and reinstalling drivers all has done nothing. I have tried every single fix there is, and the sad bottom line is, for whatever reason, this card is piss poor for the money for world of warcraft, has been since the line came out, and there is apparently no hope in sight. Other than what I'm about to do, which is exchange the card for an nvidia 9800 and hopefully never speak of this again.
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You can literally google ANY card from Nvidia or ATI and find the same thing. :rolleyes:
I play wow and just upgrade from an 8800gts 320mb to a 4870 and I saw a night and day difference. My frames went up more than 20 on average and that is WITH turning up settings from what they were at on my 8800gts.
 
It's completely worth getting the 4870 or the gtx260 216 for the price that they are at right now.
 
lloose said:
You can literally google ANY card from Nvidia or ATI and find the same thing. :rolleyes:
I play wow and just upgrade from an 8800gts 320mb to a 4870 and I saw a night and day difference. My frames went up more than 20 on average and that is WITH turning up settings from what they were at on my 8800gts.
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An 8800 GTS 320 isn't an Alpha Dog 8800 GT. The HIS he got may have just been a crap card compared to what you got. It can happen. I agree though, you can visit the WoW tech support forum on any given day and find loads of threads about either GPU family. When I first got my 8800 GTX (when the Burning Crusade first came out). It would lock up intermittently if any sort of AA was used and took Blizzard and Nvidia months to work out the problem (it affected almost any 8000 series Nvidia card). I actually stopped playing for three months because of it. Now that same card runs great in the game.
 
At the various "you can find posts all day long on any card family" etc.

Yes, I'm aware of this. However, if you really look hard at most of these, a lot of them are individualized, and often end up springing from a very specific hardware config, installation error (underpowered psu, cpu bottlenecking the application, etc.). The 4870 series problems seem especially prevalent, however. Check the MMO section of the ATI forums, and you'll see an endless parade of people with a wide variety of hardware configs turning up problems specifically with WoW on the 4870 cards, and have since the creation of the card line. I've found enough posts on various forums by people displaying a good working knowledge of how to troubleshoot such issues that I'm convinced this is not some mistake I've made in troubleshooting the problem myself. After spending awhile looking over any info I could find on it, this seems to most likely be a driver issue, but a driver issue that has existed for some time and still has no end in sight. I have heard of a couple cases of people getting good frame rates on the cards, but these were so isolated in terms of information available I had to treat them as anecdotal. Sometimes a particular hardware config can manage to sidestep what is still a glaring driver problem.

As for personal experience. My old card is in the sig. I had it running factory spec. Compared to the old card, framerates went down by a considerable amount in all areas. I removed all UI mods, problem still persisted. Adjusting graphical detail had little to no effect. Everything in my system was far from being technically overtaxed and was well below safe temperature marks. Still the problem persisted. It's important to note this problem, as so many others have reported, is only with World of Warcraft. As a test I fired up Fallout 3 and Half-Life 2, both at maxed settings and the card performed beautifully on both. For those who don't play WoW, I don't really have anything negative to say about the card.
 
Jeffredo said:
An 8800 GTS 320 isn't an Alpha Dog 8800 GT. The HIS he got may have just been a crap card compared to what you got. It can happen. I agree though, you can visit the WoW tech support forum on any given day and find loads of threads about either GPU family. When I first got my 8800 GTX (when the Burning Crusade first came out). It would lock up intermittently if any sort of AA was used and took Blizzard and Nvidia months to work out the problem (it affected almost any 8000 series Nvidia card). I actually stopped playing for three months because of it. Now that same card runs great in the game.
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This quote actually has a great example of why I'm not going to wait around and hope as opposed to exchanging the card. The frame rates I'm getting on this card are just unacceptable for raiding, especially once Uldar rolls around which is more graphically demanding than Naxxramas, a raid instance with interior modeling that dates back to vanilla WoW. I'm not willing to quit the game for an unspecified period of time in the hopes that they'll eventually fix it when the 4870 series of cards has been around for some time so far without this issue being fixed. I'm certainly not willing to do so because of a card I spent a decent amount of money on.
 
The HIS he got may have just been a crap card compared to what you got
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I have a HIS card. I chose them over all the other vendors (even though there were a few cheaper models from Saphire and Powercolor). Despite how many people talk them down on this board, I consider them the best ATI board partner next to Visiontek.
 
The changes you're talking about in Naxxramas are window dressing. If you've been following the Ulduar design, it's top-down an extremely complicated, graphically dynamic instance with every new trick they can possibly throw at it.

As for fanboyism, I think you've seen so much of it you're seeing it when it's not there. I have no particular axe to grind for ATI or Nvidia. Why do you think I was open to either in my OP? I think that, generally speaking, they both make a fine gpu.

To reiterate, yes. Google any card family and wow and you'll find a bunch of people complaining about all of them. Do you think I did zero searching into this before I made my purchase? I'm honestly irritated with that noise myself, because it makes it harder to research legitimate problems. And it's when I dug deeper into the information available, looking specifically for people who knew what they were doing and didn't have an obvious bottleneck or similar (as my last post said, but it feels like you only read part of that), that I found what's indicative of a serious epidemic specifically involving World of Warcraft and the 4870 series of cards.

Does that mean it hits everyone? No. For every problem, there will be some people cropping up that are somehow immune. There were quite a few people that didn't have problems with Hellgate: London's performance, but this didn't mean that the game's graphics engine didn't have serious problems.
 
as I mentioned in another post today, Specs are in my sig and running WoW Bee E A You-tifully maxed out with only frame issues during peak times in dalaran but still pulling decent lower 20fps. Everywhere else in WoW is 40-60fps.
 
Omegas said:
as I mentioned in another post today, Specs are in my sig and running WoW Bee E A You-tifully maxed out with only frame issues during peak times in dalaran but still pulling decent lower 20fps. Everywhere else in WoW is 40-60fps.
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On the 8800 I was getting perpetual no-questions-asked 60 in all outdoor environments, the only exceptions being dalaran, 25man raids, and wintergrasp in the keep with full combat underway. This is with vsynch on, with it off framerates were more in the 120, even 200 range in some areas. The 4870 was barely scraping 59-60, many environments the frame rate would bizarrely drop for no apparent reason, heaven help me if I turn around fast. Frame rates in raids/wintergrasp/dalaran were also down across the board. The infamous ~15sec stutter bug (see blue sticky at the top of the wow tech support forums if you're curious), while very low-key and mostly un-noticeable on the 8800 became far more pronounced with the 4870.

To refine my comments further...WoW is playable on a 4870. It is, however, also performing way below the technical ability of the card. I'm not shelling out extra money for what is currently a downgrade on the primary game I play.

I'm curious, do you have Vista? I saw quite a few people with 4870/WoW issues on vista having their problems clear up after installing service pack one. (Unfortunately, I couldn't test that theory as I'm runnign winxp)
 
Is this a new problem with WOTLK?
I quit playing after BC, but my 4870 doesn't go into 3D mode by default (in WoW). It stays at 2D clocks, I have to manually force 3D clocks every time I play WoW.

2D clocks are 500 MHz on the core by default.
I didn't have any problems playing BC at 500/900 although with WOTLK's graphics upgrades it might be an issue.
 
UtopiA said:
Is this a new problem with WOTLK?
I quit playing after BC, but my 4870 doesn't go into 3D mode by default (in WoW). It stays at 2D clocks, I have to manually force 3D clocks every time I play WoW.

2D clocks are 500 MHz on the core by default.
I didn't have any problems playing BC at 500/900 although with WOTLK's graphics upgrades it might be an issue.
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It's hard to say from personal experience, but some of the better, more solid posts I've seen date back to before Wrath's release. That said. the 3.0.3 patch which came out long before wrath's release is essentially the exact same client as post-release.

Though I am curious about the 2d/3d clock angle.
 
CombatLibrarian said:
It's hard to say from personal experience, but some of the better, more solid posts I've seen date back to before Wrath's release. That said. the 3.0.3 patch which came out long before wrath's release is essentially the exact same client as post-release.

Though I am curious about the 2d/3d clock angle.
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This is probably the issue you hear about. 99% of the time its because people play in windowed mode and it doesn't kick into 3d mode for some reason in windowed mode. Im pretty sure it was fixed (at least it is in the current drivers).
 
I need a new card but keep waiting for the price drop I had heard about awhile back...is this still supposed to happen?
 
lloose said:
I have a HIS card. I chose them over all the other vendors (even though there were a few cheaper models from Saphire and Powercolor). Despite how many people talk them down on this board, I consider them the best ATI board partner next to Visiontek.
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I just meant the individual card he got may have been a poor one, that's all. I'm sure HIS is fine.
 
lloose said:
This is probably the issue you hear about. 99% of the time its because people play in windowed mode and it doesn't kick into 3d mode for some reason in windowed mode. Im pretty sure it was fixed (at least it is in the current drivers).
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Originally I thought it was due to being in a window, but it stays in 2D mode regardless of my graphics settings (Full or Window). I've had this problem since I got the 4870, starting around 8.12, I'm running 9.2 now and the problem is still there.

I played WoW with a 4850 before that, I don't know if it properly adjusted 2D/3D settings since I never noticed at that time.
 
UtopiA said:
Originally I thought it was due to being in a window, but it stays in 2D mode regardless of my graphics settings (Full or Window). I've had this problem since I got the 4870, starting around 8.12, I'm running 9.2 now and the problem is still there.

I played WoW with a 4850 before that, I don't know if it properly adjusted 2D/3D settings since I never noticed at that time.
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Yeah, none of my tests were in windowed mode, fake fullscreen or otherwise.
 
Bump, I just installed 9.3 and the problem is still there.
I went into WoW today (Just standing in Org) and compared my fps when "stuck" in 2D mode, and then compared with "forcing" 3D mode, and there's a noticable difference in performance.

Though, I'm using custom 2D settings.
Depending on your card's bios (All 4800 cards), if it's staying in 2D mode when playing WoW, you might see huge fps loss. Some of the 4850's downclock to 160/200 in 2D mode. If you don't go into 3D (625/993 right?) you will probably have a big problem depending on your graphics settings.

I've tried fullscreen and window, it stays in 2D mode the whole time.
The only way to go into 3D was to force load a 3D profile.
 
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