4830 Crossfire

[Arthalen]

That's a nice price on the XFX 4830 card on OcUK at the moment, and was wondering if two of these is going to beat a 4870 1GB?

Any thoughts?

I currently only game at 1440x900 at the present but will soon be getting my 24" Dell

Most demanding games I play are probably Crysis:Warhead, Far Cry2, Fear2 and GRID.

 

[reflux]

Yeah, they'll beat a 4870 1GB at lower resolutions but at 1920x1200 the frame buffer is going to be a bit on the small side. I think you'd be better off with a 4870 1gb.

 

[FrenchTart]

As reflux said, for 1920x1200 or higher resolutions I'd generally be looking for more than 512MB ram on my graphics card. For your current setup two 4830s in crossfire would absolutely trounce a single 4870 1GB though

 

[Arthalen]

Well, price Difference between 2x 4830 and 1x 4870 is very similar. And I definitlye want to upgrade my monitor in the future. So thinking, that the 4870 1GB option would be the best one to go for.

 

[james.miller]

look at the 4830 XF benchmarks before letting people tell you the 4870 is better....4830 in crossfire is definately faster than a single 4870 and hands it to a gtx280 in a lot of benchmarks.

 

[CSA]

Interesting , ive been debating about upgrading my 4850 card to a 4870 or even a one of the new ATI cards 4890 ? but as a cheap alternative i could just buy a second hand 4850 and crossfire

is crossfire worth the hassle ? how is the x64 driver support ? do you still have to create a profile for each game ? , i dont plan on gaming past 1680x1050 as im very happy with my 22" sammy monitor

so should i try a cheap crossfire upgrade or just go for a new single card solution ?

 

[eyetrip]

Interesting , ive been debating about upgrading my 4850 card to a 4870 or even a one of the new ATI cards 4890 ? but as a cheap alternative i could just buy a second hand 4850 and crossfire

is crossfire worth the hassle ? how is the x64 driver support ? do you still have to create a profile for each game ? , i dont plan on gaming past 1680x1050 as im very happy with my 22" sammy monitor

so should i try a cheap crossfire upgrade or just go for a new single card solution ?

I ran crossfire 4850's for a little while on Vista X64, and didn't really have any problems.

Though I ended up dropping to single as I only had a 22" monitor and was hardly gaming on my pc. I have now upgraded to a 28" and am getting back into gaming, so have been considering 2 x 1GB 4830's in crossfire.

A single 512mb 4850 still handles 1920x1200 quite well, but there is the odd occasion where it flags a bit.

So if you need a bit more grunt, go for the crossfire. It will help game such as Crysis (which was almost playable on very high on 22" for me) and FC2 (which I could max and add AA).

Only thing making me hesitate with the 4830's is that I am familiar with how the 2x 512mb 4850's were in crossfire, and if its much slower it will bug me. however, the extra memory, overclocking them and improvements in drivers since I got them might mean it runs things even better....

 

[Arthalen]

A single 512mb 4850 still handles 1920x1200 quite well, but there is the odd occasion where it flags a bit.

This makes me think that a Single 4870 1GB for 1920x1200 would be sufficient then, and not have to deal with Crossfire....

 

[gurusan]

Most of the time 4830s will beat pretty much any single card setup, but in the odd occasion that you run out of vid memory performance will suffer. I'd just get a 1gb, I have a 4870 1gb at 2048x1152 and it handles everything flawlessly.

 

[reflux]

Hmmm, depends what you define as flawlessly mate tbh - my 280 struggles with a lot on screen in DoW2 for example at only 1920x1200.

 

[gurusan]

I think that's due to software limitations or some other factor though. The GFX are hardly impressive...