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4870x2 or the gtx280

petemyster

petemyster

petemyster

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11 Sep 2008
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670
Location
Northern Ireland
your opinion for long term gaming? Which is the best choice? From what i can make out, the GTX280 beats the 4870x2 in crysis, and thats about it, and the 4870x2 out performs it in almost everything else, like in 3dmark vantage and COD4.

Which graphics card do you think is better?
 
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Your forgetting the oc'ing capabiliies of the 280 tbh...
Also your forgetting that to get the most out of that card you will need to run it at huge resolutions...which makes the extra money pointless :/ Also unless your cpu is awesome it will 'bottleneck'
 
your forgetting that i said, in the future. When 3 years time when the 2 graphics cards (the 4870x2 and the gtx 280) will be pushed a lot harder, it will be apparent which will be better for the long term
 
petemyster said:
your forgetting that i said, in the future. When 3 years time when the 2 graphics cards (the 4870x2 and the gtx 280) will be pushed a lot harder, it will be apparent which will be better for the long term
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Yes but your forgetting that the nvidia cards are all optimsed for games, plus with the 280 you can get 3 way sli, which owns having 2 of your pissy '4870x2's' in crossfire :D
Besides im talking about today...as in right now...not 'the future' :P
 
Rage474 said:
Yes but your forgetting that the nvidia cards are all optimsed for games, plus with the 280 you can get 3 way sli, which owns having 2 of your pissy '4870x2's' in crossfire :D
Besides im talking about today...as in right now...not 'the future' :P
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you wanna blow your cash of 3 SLI, go for it. And thier optimisation can vary, from very noticable (crysis), to unnoticable.
 
petemyster said:
you wanna blow your cash of 3 SLI, go for it. And thier optimisation can vary, from very noticable (crysis), to unnoticable.
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Im not going to pay out for 3 way sli, but im just saying that its always a future option and that it beats ATI's current 'best' card combination. And also im not just talking about crysis, in most games with the lower resolution the 280 is better, apart from if your playing on like a 30" monitor :D
 
1 card v 1 card the x2 is the very best you can buy atm and is on average 30% faster than a gtx280 so that should answer your question. For the future the x2 is what you want.The gtx280 can be overclocked but so can the 2 cores on the x2 so rage your arguement is pretty pointless as he was asking about 1 card v the other not tri sli. Also in some games the x2 is faster than gtx280sli and not to far behind in others yet costs a lot less. Thegtx280 is not better at lower resolution either they are around th same and its usually because of the cpu bottleneck as the res goes up the x2 shows which card is more powerful because it has the extra power so for the future games which should push the cards more the x2 will be faster at lower res.
 
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Rage474 said:
Im not going to pay out for 3 way sli, but im just saying that its always a future option and that it beats ATI's current 'best' card combination. And also im not just talking about crysis, in most games with the lower resolution the 280 is better, apart from if your playing on like a 30" monitor :D
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firsty, you said long term gaming, which implies without upgrades, IE a another GTX280 in SLI. And yes, in some games on lower resolution it does play slightly better, but remember "long term gaming". We don't know how the cars will perform in 2 years time though the 4870x2 will perform better in the future.
 
You sound like you've already made up your mind. But I'll give you some things to think about:

NV has greater support from developers
CrossFire support is somewhat poor outside of benchmark games. Basically if its used for benchmarks, driver support will come out at some point. But if its not a benchmark game, well, nuts. SLI you can force, CF not so much.

COD4 runs fine on any decent GPU, 3D Mark Vantage is irrelevant. HardOCP have a good article here with max playable settings with loads of GPUs: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU1OCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Basically the 4870X2 is a bit bi-polar, it (like the 4870) tends to offer either extreme performance, above its price. Or alternatively, offers poor performance. If the games you play are the high performance ones - quids in! NV tends to be more consistent, it performs well in everything.

The 280 is up to £100 cheaper than the X2 too, so there's something else to think about.

Personally I like consistent performance, quiet HSF and the ability to uninstall drivers even if I don't have the card in the PC at the time - so I went with NV.

Oh - don't try to 'future-proof' your card purchase - especially with dual-GPU solutions. You're relying on profiles coming out for those games - as well as the ability for your GPU to actually run them. Taking energy costs into account as well - it might be cheaper to buy two mainstream cards over the 3 years - as well as greater performance. In 3 years time, cards for £100 will offer greater performance than your £350 X2 - while using signficantly less power. I'd rather get a £100 4850 now, then next year get another £100 card, then the year after yet another £100 card. I've got good performance - for £50 less + energy savings + money back from selling the cards.

If you're gonna go high end, then it'll be for current games - not future ones.
 
petemyster said:
you wanna blow your cash of 3 SLI, go for it. And thier optimisation can vary, from very noticable (crysis), to unnoticable.
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Same goes for CrossFire too - don't forget the X2 is a dual GPU solution. Guru3D found triple SLI offered extreme performance for an extreme price in all major games. At the same time while they found the X2 on its own was mostly trouble free - it had lots of troubles with two of them in quad CrossFire.

We don't know how the cars will perform in 2 years time though the 4870x2 will perform better in the future.
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You're contradicting yourself, and definitely stretching. No one knows which will perform better in the future - the architectures are very different. Depending on how games develop, you could end up in a worst case situation for the 4870X2 where not only does CrossFire support fail, but the game doesn't work well with the cores of the 4870 - meaning it would perform below even a GTX260. Or it could go the other way where the card beats the living snot out of the GTX 280. The 280 will offer consistent performance in the future, while the 4870 is a lot more volatile. Its the very nature of the architecture - a gamble that has paid off for ATI fantastically well this generation - and not so much with the 2900XT generation.

Either way, AA will be less possible in the future with the 4870 simply because the shaders perform AA. There's so many that it doesn't matter with current games, but in shader-intensive games AA has a larger hit than with NV cards. Of course at the same time, chances are performance will be so low with the 280 that it can't run AA either. Thus the pitfuls of purchasing for the future are shown - don't do it you'll be disappointed.
 
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/9225-palit-radeon-hd-4870-x2-2gb-video-card-review.html

Check this review out to see what both cards can do when they are not cpu bottlenecked there is just no comparison even in games that favour nv when the x2 has the cpu power behind it its faster in the nv games also. In the games that are not nv orientated the x2 blows it away so if its a card you want to keep for awhile get the x2. The above review is one of the only reviews that use a cpu with a decent overclock in this case a q9 at 4ghz.
 
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The 4870X2 is a great card, and with the 280s at around £300 now, a good buy. It does have its issues, but if you're at 1920x1200 or above, it's the best option IMO.
 
N19h7m4r3 said:
Only when it comes to money. For some money is not an option so they'll get SLI. I'd go for bang per buck :P
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HD4850 for you then! Best value by far, even in CrossFire it's borderline best value.

Admitidly its practically worthless at 1920x1200, but below that res it's very good tbh. At £100 its a bargain, for the price of 2 280s in SLI you can get FIVE 4850s!
 
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