hey guys I have about 235 dollars to spend in a video card. I'm still between the hd radeon 4870 and 4850 x2. they are both around the same price please help.
I'm not interested in nvidia their prices are totally insane you can get nice performance with amd/ati cards thanks|||The 4850X2 is faster than both the Radeon 4870 and GTX 260 - it's the pick for that price, just make sure you've got a good power supply.
Note that Tom's Hardware picked the 4850X2 as the best PCI-E gaming card for $300, even before price cuts made it available for under $250.
Always get the best GPU power you can afford... having a card so fast that your CPU doesn't achieve the maximum theoretical framerates isn't really a problem. It just means that if you upgrade the CPU someday, you'll get a bump in performance. It's the opposite scenario you want to avoid, where a weak video card is bottlenecking your CPU.|||You don't need a crossfire capable motherboard to run the 4850x2, please ignore the guy that said you did.
Also, like the other guys said, the 4850x2 will outperform the 4870 in optimal circumstances. However, not all games are optimized for 2 gpus, and those that aren't will run considerably worse on a 4850x2 than on a 4870. Keep in mind that 4850x2 does NOT show the performance increase of a 4850 multiplied by 2.
Personally, Id prefer a single more powerfull card like the 4870. It's easy to overclock, it has lower temperatures due to beeing a single gpu, and you'll never run into problems with games that aren't multi-gpu capable. Plus, ATI does a very poor job of keeping drivers updated with multi gpu capabilities, and keeping up to date with game manufacturers. Nvidia does a much better job of working with developers to release drivers. Also, a single 4870 keeps the option open for an additional 4870 in the future for crossfire. Having a 4850x2 means you won't be able to buy another 4850x2 because crossfiring those would mean 4 gpus, and nothing is optimized to run on 4 gpus, it would just be a waste of money.
I don't know what you mean by Nvidia's prices beeing insane. If you look at performance charts, they're high end cards are usually better than the ATI equivalent, and only cost marginally more. I have a GTX 260 core 216 and I'd take this any day over an ATI 4870.|||'There is also one thing to keep in mind if you are going to go for a dual-GPU monster card. First off, you'll need some good hardware behind it to keep the video cards running at optimum performance (a Core 2 or Phenom around 3 GHz, with 4GBs of RAM is a good base to work with.) Otherwise you might as well go for something less expensive, as you will not see as a significant performance gains if you can't keep feed that video card data fast enough.'
dont forget the card will consume about 250W+ on load so a very good PSU i would recommend
otherwise the HD 4870|||i'm pretty sure that 4850 x2 runs faster than a single 4870. if you have a crossfire capable motherboard, you might want to get another 4850x2 and have a crossfirex setup in the future. hehe..
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