Which GPU 4870 or 8800 Ultra

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Dmac122383

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2011
Messages
437
Which one of these video cards is better:

ATI 4870 or Nvidia 8800ULTRA?

I also have 2 9600GTs I could run in SLI

I'm trying to figure out which card would work best with this system

Intel C2D e8400 3.0ghz (trying to OC to 3.6ghz+++)
4gbs OCZ DDR2 800mhz
150g VelicoRaptor HD
MSI 680i Diamond P6N Platium MoBo
550w Thermaltake PSU
Corsair A70 cpu cooler

I just ordered an Arctic Cooler Accelero L2 vga cooler for the 4870 card so I should be able to get a decent overclock outta the 4870
 
HD 4870 > 9600GT Sli > 8800 Ultra

Sell the HD 4870 for $50 - $60 shipped if 512mb or $65 - $70 shipped if 1gb , the 9600GT's for $35 - $40 shipped/ea and the 8800 Ultra for $45 - $60 shipped = $130/$140 to $165/$175 after shipping which you use to buy a new single kickass card :)
 
I just bought the 4870 recently off a member here really cheap as an upgrade to the 9600gt so I really wasnt looking at purchasing another card.

The set up that is running the 4870 is a C2D e8400 (getting OC'd as I speak) 4gigs of ddr2 800mhz. This pc is for my gf to play WoW so it really doesnt need to be very powerful.

So maybe If I can sell all these cards I can take the money and get something like a 6850 or 6870. Those cards have been going pretty cheap with MIRs. I had a 6870 earlier in the year before I upgraded to a 6970, and I was very happy with the performance of the 6870.

Thanks for all the info.

Btw how are 4870s for overclocking? do they usually yield decent OC's?
 
OverClocking is always hit or miss. I had a Sapphire HD 4870 512 a couple years ago that shit you not did not OC at all. It was an early revision though so don't know if that had anything to do with it.

For WoW I would go with a single GPU setup though reguardless unless they fixed the negative multi-gpu scaling issue where Sli or Xfire rigs actually lost FPS over a single card.

If I were you though tbh, I'd keep the HD 4870, sell the other 3 cards and get a Q6600 G0 as a CPU upgrade will do way more good than a GPU upgrade for WoW. The 3 cards alone even after shipping will net you enough to buy a Q6600 then you can sell the E8400 and be way better off.
 
Relative performance:

9600GT: 100%
8800 Ultra: 165%
9600GT SLI: 175%
HD4870: 220%
HD6850 (suggestion for a new card, on selling the others): 290%
GTX460 1GB (as above): 300%
HD6870 (as above): 360%
 
compudocs said:
For WoW I would go with a single GPU setup though reguardless unless they fixed the negative multi-gpu scaling issue where Sli or Xfire rigs actually lost FPS over a single card.
Click to expand...

WoW hasn't had any significant multi-GPU issues for quite some time - I'm talking years.
 
samuelmorris said:
Relative performance:

9600GT: 100%
8800 Ultra: 165%
9600GT SLI: 175%
HD4870: 220%
HD6850 (suggestion for a new card, on selling the others): 290%
GTX460 1GB (as above): 300%
HD6870 (as above): 360%
Click to expand...

Does that apply to WoW as well? Isn't WoW nVidia biased?
 
This is overall - so if a game is nvidia biased, you will need to take that into consideration.
From a toms hardware benchmark from late 2010 - WoW: Cataclysm appears neutral - there is only a 0.1% bias to nvidia (in other words, none).
Given that THG is known to favour nvidia cards (some bribery went on in the old days) - it's likely to be AMD-biased.
An older test from PCGamesHardware of WoW:Wrath of the Lich King proves it to be AMD-biased.
 
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We all seem to agree the HD 4870 would be your best bet to keep but I still say you sell the other three cards and get a Q6600 because I don't think anyone can disagree that WoW see's nice bennefits all the way up to i7's as that is a largely CPU bound game.
 
Is WoW that multithreaded these days? The Q6600 is much slower per-core than the E8400, so he might actually lose performance in a lot of cases. The minimum should be a Q9550 really.
 
I've been running the 4870 while playing WoW and I'm very happy with the performance.

I do like the idea about getting the q6600 to replace the e8400 however this motherboard I have sucks for overclocking.

I can overclock the cpu and keep it stable at 3.6-3.8ghz but thats only thru nvidia ntune and dual core center. I can increae voltage in dual core center but not clocks, and I can increase the clocks in ntune but not voltage. So when I create profiles in the 2 seperate programs ntune will load the OC clocks before dual core center loads the voltage profile so I get a instant lock up after starting windows. I can probally figure out how to get these profiles loaded corerectly and have a stable oc i would def look into getting a q6600 and Ocing it.

Thanks for all the info guys, but I think I am going to hold out on this system until I can afford to upgrade my main pc rig. I'll give the girlfriend my current amd pII x6 set up and I will get an Intel i5 2500k and call it a day.
 
Wow doesn't use more than two threads. So a stock q6600 for wow would be a downgrade.
 
The 680i boards were very poor for overclocking (you're also meant to do overclocking in the BIOS, not with software in windows!), but that's what I suspected about WoW - the Q6600 is indeed probably a downgrade because of how much slower each core of it is. The 2500K idea sounds good :)
 
Seriously, is WoW really that performance hungry? I think it looks like ass and the cartoony, blocky characters cannot put up that much of fight, can it? I don't play WoW. Looks too much like cartoons.
 
It's not to everyone's taste, but the game has had a plethora of updates since its release, which make it reasonably demanding, albeit not to the same extent as modern titles.
 
The Q6600 should run 3ghz on that board and WoW fully supports 3 cores not to mention people conveninelty forget to remember that background processes ( the OS for starters ) needs CPU power too and if using Vista or W7 the OS can and will help manage programs on those extra 2 cores. Not to mention it's a win-win for newer better games than WoW.

It's not always just about what a game can use as other stuff uses the CPU too, it's not like your OS, AV and all the other crap on a typical PC magically stops running when you fire up a game.
 
FireBean said:
Seriously, is WoW really that performance hungry? I think it looks like ass and the cartoony, blocky characters cannot put up that much of fight, can it? I don't play WoW. Looks too much like cartoons.
Click to expand...
Lots of characters at once and also the graphic effects from spells,maybe?
 
WoW still does the majority of it's processing in a single thread, and in addition there are several threads that handle model loading. It benefits very little past 2 cores.

Q6600 vs. E8400, the E8400 might have a small advantage but also remember that In a scenario like WoW where only 2 cores are really being used, each core on the Q6600 will have it's own 4meg block of L2 cache to work with while the E8400 will be sharing a single 6meg block of cache between it's two cores.
 
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