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Gfx Card Advice

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Joined
18 Apr 2007
Posts
3
Hello all, my beautiful ATI 4870x2 has decided to start dying a death, I'm getting lockups, corruptions, nasty tears and artifacts occurring indicating it's overheating. Im not very good at pulling these things apart/applying thermal pastes or anything too technical, I'd rather just move on and get a replacement safe in the knowledge I got thousands of hours or pleasure for a few hundred quid.

I see there are loads of new models outboth ATI and Nvidia - I can spent up to about £350 but the question is what would you recommend for someone who plays WoW/Warhammer Online/Heroes of Newerth and the occasional game of MW2 or Starcraft2? My monitor doesnt support higher than 1680x1050, I have dual core cpu and 4gb ram running vista 32 and a 1000w PSU and I obviously dont want to overkill. I am not working at the moment so the less I spend the better but having said that don't want something that's obsolete in a year or so.

I was thinking 5870 perhaps or a GTX285. Ideally I would have been more than happy with another 4870x2 but they seem to be just as expensive as two years ago and I don't see OC carrying them anymore. I'm not really into fiddling about with voltages or overclocking so needs to be fairly straightforward. I don't mind what benchmarks I get so long as i'm hitting 60+ frames per sec in modern games.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated, especially recommendations as to what brand etc. Many thanks!
 
i suggest a 5850 mate.

Good card and can be overclocked a lot.

perfect for your resolution!

send me your 4870x2 and i will have a go at fixing it :D
i have had 6 of them after all :D
 
A 5850 would be around as fast as a 4870X2, but consume less power/run cooler and has dx11 support. You could have course pay around £100 more for a 5870, but it is only around 10-20% faster than a 5850.

Also, one more thing to note is that WOW is pretty CPU demanding (because of the game poorly coded), more so than graphic demanding. A faster CPU would offer more frame rate boost than having a faster graphic card:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/62

What CPU (and at what speed if overclocked) you got?
 
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