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HD4850 replacement

Dogbreath

Dogbreath

Dogbreath

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
16,661
Location
Devon
It's time for an upgrade to my PC, and one thing that has bugged me for ages is the HD4850 in my system. Performance wise it's absolutely fine, I don't tend to play that many games and the ones I do tend to be older ones. However, it's got a honking great cooler on it in a bid for for low noise, and it covers pretty much all the PCIE slots on my mobo (currently LanParty Jr P45, planning on i5 based replacement).

Is there a modern equivalent of comparable performance but with low power consumption? My perfect card would be passively cooled, but appreciate that may not be possible, so as narrow and quiet as possible! No particular preference for AMD or NVIDIA.
 
Sorry for the late reply, been working silly hours this week. That looks pretty much perfect, power is quite a bit lower (66W vs 100W) and performance looks perfectly adequate for my needs. Thanks, I think I'll go for this.
 
It's tempting as it's a good price, but I suspect the GDDR3 version is going to be more than adequate for my needs. Thanks for the suggestions.
 
The Radeon HD 4850 1GB is a lot (about 30%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6670 1GB.

The Radeon HD 4850 1GB should be a lot (about 56%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6670 1GB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better.

The 6670 is a downgrade compared to the 4850. It does however have a lot less power draw than the 4850
 
Hotwired said:
Which is also known as a 5770 because AMD renamed the 5750 and 5770 to 6*** cards.

But yes, it should be about the performance of 5770.
Click to expand...

Yeah, for the price it will give him a worthwhile jump in performance for not anymore than the dearest 6670, and will yield as you say 5770 or maybe slightly higher performance. Should be nice and quiet too.
 
Hotwired said:
Well you can get a passive 6770 but you're looking at about £113 and a large heatsink on it.
Click to expand...

I already have nearly passive cooling on my HD4850 (it has a very quiet low speed fan to waft a bit of air around), but it's a huge heatsink. I have two main priorities

1) Quiet operation (doesn't have to be silent under hard use but must be as quiet as possible under normal desktop operation). Low power operation goes hand in hand with this really - the PC gets left on for extended period doing work so I don't want something burning up loads of power when I'm not around - I guess low power idle is is what I want.
2) It must take up not more than two slots.

Performance is a lower priority than the above two. Ideally I'd like something as powerful or even better than my current card, but I'm quite prepared to make some sacrifices here which is why the 6670 looked ok.

One thing I forgot to mention; I would like to get another 22" monitor (or maybe even a pair of new ones) as I have this setup in work and find it annoying being limited to a single monitor when working from home, so the card needs to be able to drive two monitors.

Budget is not a major problem, but I'm only a very casual gamer so I don't want to go mad. Say £150 max. Lower the better obviously.

I need a PCI slot, and these pics show the problem (sorry about the dust, I'll give it a clean now the lid is off!)

HD4850_1.jpg

HD4850_2.jpg

HD4850_3.jpg


If I get a two slot card I can uncover the PCI slot I need. The HD4850 will actually run ok without the fan under normal use, but any heavy 3D use gets it very toasty indeed. I suspect that it would get quite warm under idle conditions with another card right next to it and no fan though.
 
I'm waiting on the Radeon 7*** series cards to be released as these will use 1/2 the power consumption relative to performance to the Radeon 6*** series... meaning...

There will be passively cooled cards available with decent vaavaavooom!

I will probably get a 7850 as it will only consume 90Watts Max thereby I'm assuming it will only have 1 PCI-E power cord requirement which means I can happily keep my 400W PSU. There will be a passive 7850 sometime down the line.
 
Dogbreath said:
When are these due to be released?
Click to expand...

Some say before Christmas but most probably in January...

The high end cards later on again sometime but you aren't looking for one of those

The 7850 will supposedly give the same performance as a 6950 whilst only using a mere 90 Watts...

less heat, less noise, cheaper electric bills, cheaper power supply required, greener planet (who cares eh?)
 
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