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3870 or 4850

ninjabib

ninjabib

ninjabib

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Joined
16 Apr 2003
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UK
Looking to buy a new gfx card this month defnitely. Been waiting for the 4850 but i've seen a brand new 512meg 3870 for £80.00 ,£50-60 cheaper than a 4850 will be. I only play at 1280x1024 and my new monitor will only be 19" so probably move upto the 1440x.. res.

Would a 3870 be fine at that res? Would the 4850 be overkill?

I am kinda broke currently and will not be playing on a higher res than 1440x whatever for the 18 months at least.

Thoughts?
 
I would get the 4850 and at that rez its not overkill just a damn fine card going from the reviews that are around. Its much faster than a 3870 also. The main change apart from the speed is ati seem to have fixed the aa probs and at that low res you will probably be using lots of it.
 
Yep, the 3870 takes a biggish hit with AA on at the higher res, so def worth getting a 4850, although they're prob gonna be about £140 so a 3870 will be cheaper.

Or buy my 3870 :p:D
 
At that resolution I would go with either the 3870 or a used 8800GT.

The 4850 is of course a better card but at that resolution it is not going to be THAT much better than the others, at least not with current games.
 
I would still say 4850 if you can afford it :) IMHO the 3870 is only just enough for modern games. COD4 with everything on (including shadows) dips into the 40's sometimes and in the midst of a firefight you don't want that.

Please bear in mind that I am running my 3870 on a 4x slot and limited to 2.67ghz on a e4300, so if you have at least 3ghz and at least a 8x slot you will get at least 10% performance increase if not more compared to me. But mine card is o/c'd to 825mhz which might migate some of that difference.

One thing to consider is that sure, you may not want to run high AA, but if you had the choice and it only did 3 fps difference to run it, you would prob use it!

Get the 4850 (as long as it's a reasonable price, don't pay the initial high prices) :)

Matthew
 
4850 or a GTX+, those are both good choices and you might want to just see prices on them both when they really come out, and aren't just paper launches/media launches.
 
^ i agree...

and at Scougar: with 3ghz and a x16 slot the 3870- is a very capable card... mine when clocked to max in CCC was within 500 points of an 8800Gt at stock
 
At lower res's without AA/AF on (or HDR) the graphics card is seriously limited by the CPU. Basically the higher you clock your cpu at those lower res's will vastly improve your graphics card performance :)

Iceblade (back at yah): I know it's a good card for the money (or was at the time) but the 8800gt has really come down in price, so it ain't such a good deal anymore. I do however agree that it my performance would be vastly improved by a better motherboard.

I still say 4850 though as it is looking like a very good card for the money, and I am pretty darned sure ATI will be gunning for super good driver support with this one.

As a side note: I just love the way that ATI has sorted the AA out now but still has the ability to do shader based AA if needed. Awesome :D

Matthew
 
Scougar said:
I would still say 4850 if you can afford it :) IMHO the 3870 is only just enough for modern games. COD4 with everything on (including shadows) dips into the 40's sometimes and in the midst of a firefight you don't want that.

Please bear in mind that I am running my 3870 on a 4x slot and limited to 2.67ghz on a e4300, so if you have at least 3ghz and at least a 8x slot you will get at least 10% performance increase if not more compared to me. But mine card is o/c'd to 825mhz which might migate some of that difference.

One thing to consider is that sure, you may not want to run high AA, but if you had the choice and it only did 3 fps difference to run it, you would prob use it!

Get the 4850 (as long as it's a reasonable price, don't pay the initial high prices) :)

Matthew
Click to expand...

Oooh. Looks like you have a very similar spec to me :)

Think I'm in the market for a new graphics card, but I'm tempted to get a new MB at the same time for a proper PCIEx16 slot + room for more DDR2 RAM.
 
Would my Corsair HX 520W be enough to run 2 4850's in Xfire?

1HD, 1 DvDrw, E2200 (oc'd to 3.2), 2 120mm case fans and Xigmatek HDT-S1283.

Would be nice not to have to upgrade my psu just yet.
 
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