DAAMIT 4xxx

[Philosophical45]

*philosophical just slapped himself*..

 

organizing a possible departure with my current gpu now..  hope de person serious

[Arcmanov]

Unfortunately, Newegg is kind of a pain to purchase from...and then there's this:

With two 4850s paired up in CrossFire, we once again ran into issues with our power supply. Our 1000W OCZ EliteXStream wasn't always enough for the dual-GPU setup and in Call of Duty 4 our system rebooted in the middle of our test at 2560 x 1600. Thankfully OCZ sent us a PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W unit that is certified for use with GeForce GTX 280 SLI, and if it works on that beast, it had better work with a pair of 4850s in CrossFire.

Courtesy Anandtech

With that said, I guess Crossfire is out for me.  I just not ready to invest in a 1KW+ PSU just yet.

So, before you run off and sell the 88 there Philo, at least wait and see what the power consumption of the 4870 is like.
Take care you don't need a new PSU to run it (I know, its just a single card).

[Spazosaurus]

4870 ftw. I looking for a good price vs performance ratio, but the extra power of the 4870 may be well worth it. Crossfire could always come in the future though. I just want to see how these things will perform on a pci-e v1.1 system though. This is my main concern.

[W1nTry]

Wait... OCZ sent a PC Power & Cooling... aren't they TWO DIFFERENT COMPANIES??? O_o

Also Tech report did the power consumption test and didn't show it being a ridiculous power hog... in fact they also showed tests for 4850 in XFire and didn't mention any SPECIAL power arrangements. Arc I hadda wonder about Anandtech for those 2 inconsistencies.. first citing power issues and OCZ sending another company PSU? and then saying it needs 1200W? er....

[Philosophical45]

errrr... power issues... errrr amm let me see how the 4870 performs..

i have the OCZ 850watt gamexstream psu btw

[Nephilim]

Wait... OCZ sent a PC Power & Cooling... aren't they TWO DIFFERENT COMPANIES??? O_o

pc pwr and cooling is owned by OCZ

[Arcmanov]

Kinda confusing...as Tech Report's article didn't say that any mega-PSU was required, but then their tests
did not include any Crossfire or SLI results, so who knows, they might be right.

[W1nTry]

did not include any Crossfire or SLI results, so who knows, they might be right.

Hmm funny this: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14967/7

... maybe i'm just seeing things....


Yes I AM seeing things... like Xfire score...

[Spazosaurus]

Lol why does crossfire results come as a surprise? I would be surprised if they DIDNT do those.

[W1nTry]

Lol why does crossfire results come as a surprise? I would be surprised if they DIDNT do those.

You'll have to excuse arc, after DAAMIT put his beloved green team on the proverbial shelf, he's not seeing straight XD

[Arcmanov]

'...beloved green team'....?  Surely you jest W1ntry.  I hold no brief for Nvidia.  You self have an 8800 GT, so what does that say?
I have to PAY for their cards too.  If I was getting em free, well thats a different story.

As for the crossfire results there, I may have missed that, but I'm glad you pointed it out,
because they did in fact use a 750W PSU, and didn't get the same issues that Anandtech did.

Thats the significant point.

[TrinireturnofGamez]

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/731/1/

4850 versus 9800GTX+ review , the overclock pushes the GTX slightly faster than the 4850 in a few games , also included is on-card PhysX support (through a driver) which boosts the 3dmark Vantage score significantly .
       

http://www.viddler.com/explore/bootdaily/videos/2/ 

ATI promotional videos running on the 4850... can you say photo realism?


with all this competition things are surely confusing , and the 4870 and 4870 X2 aren't even out yet !

I'd advise anyone without cash to burn to wait till september for the situation to become clear :

 Nvidia's CUDA initiative and PhysX drivers might make them the worthwhile choice if lots of companies go their way .
   We might see a 300 US GTX260 on a 55nm process , with 256bit memory bus and GDDR5 before the end of the year (complete speculation coming from my head only, no news source,but it makes sense, the 9800gtx went down to a 256 bit bus from the 8800gtx's 384bit to save cost).

ATI's cards have  superior processing power to nvidia , the 4850 crunching 1 teraflop with its 800 stream processors , more than the GTX280 .
    If an open source GPU physics initiative is embraced by game developers , ATI would be the better choice as i will illustrate :

  9800GTX+ has 128 stream processors crunching about 500 gigaflops , half a 4850.
  4850 is crunching about 1000 gigaflops  .
   A gpu Physics thingy in a game comes along requiring 50 gigaflops of processing power.
   
 The 9800gtx just lost 10% of its graphics performance as resources become tied up in physics.
 the 4850 looses about 5% .

ATI also supporting DX10.1 etc. making them the better choice for longevity .   If anyone remembers the Radeon 8500 days , the 8500's shader 1.4 eventually made it faster and supporting more games than the nvidia solutions of its day. The same scenario may repeat , if you look it up  , ATI cards get a nice speed boost in Assasins creed when 10.1 support is enabled....

[Arcmanov]

  
 The 9800gtx just lost 10% of its graphics performance as resources become tied up in physics.
 the 4850 looses about 5% .

Are you sure about that?  Look at the carts on this page again.
Overall performance increases with PhysX operational (in physics-enabled tests).

You said it yourself: "Nvidia's CUDA initiative and PhysX drivers might make them the worthwhile choice if lots of companies go their way ."

If this does happen, then Nvidia will have come up trumps again.

My, my, my.....the proverbial 'plot' thickens.

[Spazosaurus]

Well, that is a big "of" if I ever saw an if.

Physx has been around for a while, but it didnt really pick up much steam...and we got by without it too. Just look at Crysis.

Physx comes in only with games that support Physx. Apart from that, the 4850 boasts more raw power. I mean, im not for or against anything at thios point. I'm just enjoying the show and will be choosing the best one.

[Spazosaurus]

This is really a comparison on how much differently Crossfire performs on a P45 chipset as opposed to an x48. I opted to put this comparison in the video card section because it pertains more to the graphic board handling of the chipsets.

In these times where cheap, powerful cards are the order of the day, many a enthusiast are bound to consider setting up a crossfire rig in order to squeeze that much more fps out of their games. The difference between the chipsets, as you would see, is great. The reason for which is that the X48 maintains 16X electronics on both PCI-E slots when run in crossfire mode while the p45 reverts both slots to 8x mode (8x PCI-E 2.0 or 16X PCI-E 1.1). So, if you're planning to slap those 4850's together, have a good read through this first.

[Arcmanov]

Very interesting read.

SAX!!! TAKE NOTE!!!
This article may actually drive your decision now.

The question is: Crossfire or not?

[TrinireturnofGamez]

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hkepc.com%2Fforum%2Fviewthread.php%3Ftid%3D1007750%26extra%3Dpage%253D1

4870 benchies and info , apparantly it is clocked lower than we expected @ 750mhz core and 3.6ghz (900 GDDR5) RAM.

 It scores 3600 in Vantage's extreme benchmark, 3512 GPU score... Considering an 8800ultra or 3870 crossfire scores around 2500 ,its looking good.

http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=11871

[.:Jedi:.]

also, check this review out. 4870 lookin like a decent upgrade for me if the price is right!

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.expreview.com%2Ftopic%2F2008-06-24%2F1214282167d9273.html&hl=zh-CN&ie=UTF8&sl=zh-CN&tl=en

Edit: Full review in english here
http://en.expreview.com/2008/06/24/first-review-hd-4870-and-hd-4850/

[Arcmanov]

Well, that site gettin it 'hard n veiny' whole day.  I can't get through to it yet.  Will try later at home.

[Spazosaurus]

Arc...ARC....wa I tell you bout the pr0n references boy hahaha.

Aye. That mc 4870 pwning the gtx260, a card more expensive by $100 and...well...of course its not beating the gtx280, but at $650, who among us is buying one of those anyway? Except mr messiah...(havent seen him around lately have yall?)

I still wanna see how the 1gb model fares against the 512 one and not to mention how much closer it gets to gtx280 hehehehe.

This card is gonna be the best $300 I ever spent on a computer part.