Upgrading

R

Royaltramp

n00b
Joined
Jun 22, 2008
Messages
26
So I've had my 8600GT since last august, and it's running at pretty high temperatures, crashing occasionally and generally giving me the impression that it's time for an upgrade.

Originally I wasn't sure what to buy, but after a while I decided I wanted a 9600. For £115 I could get a 9600 with a nice beefy fan that'd give me some room for overclocking.. So I was going to get that.

And all of a sudden I was shocked by the 4870. A couple of people recommended I look at it, and me being me, I thought that being ATI it wasn't going to impress me, so I'd take a look. But boy was I wrong, looking at the benchmark results, the new features, and the clocks, I am thoroughly amazed by this card. The fact that in the UK the 280GTX is selling for between £450 and £600 and the 4870 is only £200-230 is even better.

So right now, I'm looking at the 4870. However, I'm running the following:
Intel E6550 2.33Ghz Core2Duo
2048Mb 667Mhz DDR2 Kingston RAM

And I wonder if both/either of these might bottleneck the card a fair amount. I'm willing to upgrade the memory, though probably not straight away, as for the CPU, I may overclock it, but I don't fancy upgrading, given that Intel are expensive :<

So, what do you guys think? Should I go for the 4870. It's quite a bit above my initial budget of £110 odd, but I think it'll be worth it. Or do you guys think it'll drop in price within the next couple of months? How will it fare in the following games:

Oblivion @ 1440x900
Crysis @ 1440x900 DX10
COD4 @ 1440x900
DiRT @ 1440x900
etc

-Matt
 
Should handle all those games with no problems at all. I don't think the prices will change much unless nvidia decides to take a huge hit because the GTX 200 series die is so expensive to produce and yields so few cores comparatively. They will drop the prices on the 9800 series though, but performance VS dollars = 4800 series for this round. Your system specs are good, maybe go to DDR2-800 and get a nice CPU cooler to overclock that E6550.
 
Royaltramp said:
So, what do you guys think? Should I go for the 4870. It's quite a bit above my initial budget of £110 odd, but I think it'll be worth it.
Click to expand...

4850. That card is only $199 in the States (vs. $299 of the 4870) and it will probably be way better than the 9600GT. The 8800GT slighly outperforms the 9600GT on some things, and the 4850 outperforms the 8800 pretty handily.

So, if you're considering teh 4870, take a second to look at the 4850.
 
Thanks for the advice. Yeah I'm also looking at the 4850. If I was going for the 4850 though I'd be tempted to get 2. But alas, my motherboard doesn't support crossfire so I'd have to splash out on getting a new mobo. :\

I'm more than considering the 4870, right now it looks like I've decided on it, but eh, could change my mind. I was saving for other things, so it's a pain to blow £200 on a card for a PC that only cost just over double that, but meh.

Are there any benchmarks out with C2Ds? I can only see Quads in all the benchmarks, and I'd like to see some stats that closer match my actual spec.

I would ideally like to be able to max crysis in 1440x900, or 1024x768 with a good amount of AA+AF. And I must be able to get Oblivion maxxed in 1440x900 with 8xAA, 16xAF+

-Matt
 
Haven't seen any review with dual-core rigs yet.

I recommend going with the HD4850. it's cheaper than the HD4870 but will still allow you to max out all of the games you've listed so far.
 
Wait, you were going to be satisfied with a craptastic 9600, and then suddenly you're lusting after a 4870? Why the hell don't you compromise and go with the 4850? Right now, it will run EVERYTHING out there at your native resolution, including Crysis.

FYI: 1280x1024 has the exact same number of pixels as 1440x900, so you can use those results for reference.

Wait until you get a higher-resolution monitor to drop all that dough on an expensive video card.
 
Yeah, I'd get a 4850 and see how you like it. It's less of an investment.
 
Yeah. I'm quite tempted to buy a 4850, given that I originally wanted a 9800 and was basically going to "Buy a 9600, see if I like it, and if I really didn't, return/sell it and buy a 9800". My previous machine was running on an Nvidia 5200, and the one before that an ATI 9200SE, so even my 8600GT seemed like gold dust at first.

My main reason for looking at the 4870 was as a future-proof card. It'd allow me to completely forget about my graphics card for some time, and spend money on upgrading my RAM, switching to 64bit, buying a new CPU, getting myself one or two WD raptors, etc.

So what about the prices? I've heard that the 4870 may drop in price within the next month. If the 4870 went down to £150 or lower it'd be a sure buy for me, given that I was willing to pay £120 for a 9600 with a big-ass fan, and the 4870 would give me a huuuuge improvement on the 9600.

I am slightly dubious as always though. Before I bought my 8600, a lot of people told me it was a bad card, and not worth buying unless I was getting the GTS. Nevertheless I bought it, and was very happy with it as a price->performance card, alright so it's not amazing, but considering I can max Oblivion in native res if I don't put much into AA and I'm not worried about FPS losses in fights/etc, it was a lot better than anything I'd had before. Now when the 9600 first came out, I read a good few reviews that suggested that the XFX and Palit models were beating the 8800GTX in some tests by as much as 8-10 FPS, however when looking at newer reviews I see this isn't really true, and the 9600 comes closer in performance to being just above the old 320/640 GTS models. The 4850 is really tempting though ^_^

-Matt
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top