The Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 have clearly got Nvidia rattled and the result is that GeForce 8800 and 9800 have been discounted to the same levels as the new cards. Should you buy a GeForce 9800 GTX or an HD 4870 then? That would be the AMD option, thanks. It’s got stonking performance and has the added bonus of DirectX 10.1 support. But if you do choose the Nvidia product, you might at least offer a few words of thanks to AMD for making your graphics fix cheaper.
Power Draw Results
Power in Watts (W)
How about a GeForce 8800 GT or GTX in a straight fight with HD 4850? Glad you asked. We’d give the HD 4850 the nod on this one too - despite its toasty hotness. It has to be said, though, that there’s not a great deal to choose in either case. Once again, that’s because Nvidia has slashed the price of its 'G92' products by a painful amount. In our opinion, the price needs to come down even further, to £99, to make GeForce 8800 GT attractive. That doesn’t seem very likely.
Verdict
AMD's Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 are stunningly successful. Nvidia owns the highest of the high ground with GeForce GTX 280 but down on Planet Earth where people spend real money on real graphics cards it’s AMD all the way.
AMD Radeon HD 4850 and 4870
COMMENTS
EPIC FAIL!
What were you thinking when you made those graphs?
They tell you nothing, NOTHING I tell you!
And another thing...
Can't understand folks' bleating about the PowerPlay thing. There are so many folk giving it "ooh once again ATi screws us with the drivers, this is a joke, I'm sticking with nVidia at least the drivers work"
1) nVidia are just as bad if not worse for feature support in early drivers - look at the 7800GX2 fiasco.
2) If you want to spend more money on a card that will do the same job and consume more power then go ahead and quit whining
3) Er, wait a few weeks?
The only way I can see the "ZOMG the drivurz are skrewd and now I have to w8 a hole month" argument making any sense is if you're a spoilt kid buying into the latest architecture every time. Even then they don't come out often enough to make much sense out of such pissy bitchy whining.
PS: I'm not an ATi fanboy (until a few weeks ago I was poised to buy a 9800GTX) but I am a big fan of not having to filter out pissy whiny moans whilst reading comments on a mature IT news site.
Crysis?
Come on guys, everyone knows that Crysis is not an accurate Benchmark. It has been dropped from tests on a number of occasions.
Im waiting for anyone to do a fanless 4850 for xFire
@Pointless
Wow... a PS3 fanboi, hey?
/golfclap
I'm not even going to go into it, since so many people already did. I'd just be beating a dead ... vulture?
Regarding Crossfire
There is one situation, and one situation only, where Crossfire/SLI come into their own. Big displays. Really big displays. I'm running at 3840x1024, with two 7900GTXs (I'll upgrade before too long). In an ordinary machine, the difference between one card and two isn't worth the money. However, on a really big screen, having 1GB of memory instead of 512MB means something, and HL2: Episode 2 will run at full res on this machine, no worries. It sure as hell wouldn't with just the one card!
I would love to buy a 4870HD (or, as is far more likely, two), but this motherboard is all nVidia chipsets, so I'd need a new system core first.
