I noticed you mainly gravitate towards ATI products which I suspect is due to their peformance vs price but you did try some of the newer nVidia stuff although I noticed you didn't stay green very long!
Yeah, I basically just hate spending over 150 quid on a GPU....I spent 165 on the 4890 which I'm not happy about but it's quite an awesome GPU and I don't see the resale value dropping below 100-110 in the next 4-5 months.....
Also a huge reason I gravitate toward ATI more is the ease of watercooling...I am using an old maze4 gpu block that does an amazing job considering its age. The nvidia cards sometimes have adapter blocks but cooling the rest of the card is quite expensive....whereas I have a 6 quid zalman VRM cooler that works on the 3870, 4870,4890...and who knows...maybe even the 58xx series although that sounds a bit hopeful.
For those that use the stock cooler, the reference nvidias are pretty much always loads better than the reference ati....both in performance and noise. Some of the non-reference ATI coolers are quite good but none that I can see exhaust the heat out of the back of the case...
How are you finding the new HD4890? Did you volt-mod it or do you have one of these cards that feature software voltage adjustment?
I wonder if its possible to tell the difference between a 1GB HD4850 and a 1GB HD4890 outside of benchies?
I like it a lot..it's very quick and an awesome overclocker.....I have flashed the bios to 950/1000 for my 3d clocks at the stock voltage of 1.312V...and sometimes I will use the Asus voltmod tool to raise this to 1.375V 1ghz/1150 core/mem...but never really see the need to.
...and yes I can tell quite a significant difference between the 4850 and 4890...but only in games like CoD4, Crysis (huge difference in Crysis)...more modern FPS games really...
In games like UT3 and Left4Dead, and of course RTS games like Demigod there really is no shred of difference that I can detect.
