Feel the power !

[ZeroG]

Couldn't be bothered waiting anymore so ordered https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-091-PC. Should arrive tomorrow.

Will see if I need to get an aftermarket cooler for it later. Think I will test my 8800gtx in my other system and maybe get rid of it then.

 

[Negator]

i'm sure the standard cooler will be fine as its not a standard reference one.

Personally i had considered getting the 1gb version of the 4870 but from what i had read 1920x1080 even with AA/AF on high settings wasn't that bad on the 512mb. Seems great so far but then i suppose that will only last as long as i continue to play games based on older engines. I don't play crysis or anything like that. UT3 seems to average 80-90fps with all teh benchmarks i've tried with 8x aa and 16x af.

but that one on offer is a great bargain as its a 1gb for the price of a 512mb, no reason not to.

 

[MadmaN]

Couldn't be bothered waiting anymore so ordered https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-091-PC. Should arrive tomorrow.

Will see if I need to get an aftermarket cooler for it later. Think I will test my 8800gtx in my other system and maybe get rid of it then.

nice buy , but please dont come back complaining if the your ati card starts giving you shit lol , I did warn ya

 

[PseudoPhreak]

i hear mixed opinions, i heard that you should go for as much RAM as possible, so i bought the 1GB card i have now.
But lately ive been hearing its more about the RAM speed.

 

[Negator]

Faster ram > more ram to an extent. Its limited by the resolution that you are going for. The higher the resolution (basically 1900x1200 upwards at full aa/af) makes more use of the extra memory, but the flip side is that the rest of the system might not actually be able to cope with all that anyway so you will be capped at a certain performance level and the extra ram would be wasted.

the only real difference between the 4850 and 4870 is a slightly faster clocked GPU and gddr5 instead of gddr3 which offers more memory bandwidth.

stop with the ATI hate, i've yet to have any issues with them at any point over 4 different ATI cards.

My opinion on what graphics card to go for is really to look through benchmarks and choose what is the best value (not outright performance) for the particular game you will be playing most as the performance varies so much between nvidia/ati on different titles because of extra optimisation in drivers. (Quakewars is fairly nvidia dominated as ID kiss the ass of nvidia)

And for the love of god, put some context on "future proof" as it doesn't really make any sense in the pc world due to fairly dramatic changes every 6 months with hardware.

 

[MadmaN]

The extra ram will help for when games come to use it. i dont know about anyone else but i always like to buy the best of everything... so then i can push it the longest time without needing to upgrade in a month or something.

or just go with the best that you can afford.

I dont hate ATI . it's just with my past problems with ALL my ATI cards has caused me to think what make before i go ahead and buy a gfx card.

Driver problems and hardware

 

[Negator]

I like to get the best i can for a sensible price. You pay a stupid premium to get the top end CPU/graphics card for an extra 5-10% performance which at the end of the day is pointless, might aswell pocket the cash and upgrade in a year or so.

 

[Amesy]

the extra memory on the card does help but it isn't a massive gain. the speed of a graphics card is mostly down to the GPU. I can tell you that the card out performs the nVidia 260 GTX and also out performs my Dad's PC which is running 2 ATI 3850s in SLI.