4850, 4870, or 4850 Crossfire?

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

Well, from what I see now, ATI (yes, AMD I know) at least it seems to me, has a price-perf advantage, with the 4800s being so cheap.

So, my question is: Should I go for the HD 4850 or spend the $100 extra for a 4870?

And can anyone tell me how long it is and if it'd fit in the Antec Super Lanboy case?
and if a 600W PSU is enough? (It's FSP so it's good quality). It has 2 6pin connectors...

Also, 2 HD 4850 in Crossfire ($400) or a single HD 4870 ($300)?
I have an ATI Xpress 3200 chipset (Socket 939, Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe mobo, very few people have it so far as I can tell), so will that work?
Will a 600W CPU cut it for the Crossfire config?

[ratNukit]

Your power supply should be enough for two 4850s and the two 6 pin power plugs are sufficient.
What card/cards you choose depends on what you want to do with it. For me one 4850 is great enough, I can play all the games (exception : Crysis ) with the highest level of detail plus AA and AF maxed out (if available) at 1680*1050, which would be TrackmaniaNationsForever, RainbowSixVegas2, UnrealTournament3, MassEffect, Assassin's Creed and STALKER.
If you want to try and play Crysis at full specs I would recommend two of the 4850s.

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

My mobo only has PCI-E 1.0 lanes, but these cards are PCI-E 2.0, is that okay?

[DMB2000uk]

The cards should work fine in PCIe 1 slots.

Dan

[ratNukit]

the PCIe 1.0 is working with my 4850 just fine.

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

Is a single HD 4870 enough to run Crysis on Very High at 1280x1024 playably?

[DMB2000uk]

You can do it at high settings, probably can push it to very high (depends on what framerate you consider playable) see the crysis page from the recent review of the 4870 for numbers:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/734/11/

Dan

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

Well playable would, for me, be 24-30fps consistently.

[ratNukit]

I just checked and set the resolution to 1280*1024 and everything else to very high without AA and AF. I just loaded a save on the beach, the first time it gets day in the game and ran around shooting stuff for 5 minutes and looked at my fraps count on my keyboard.
Man I was surprised how good that went. The minimum was 14 frames, but that was only once, seemed to me like it didn't get a surface loaded fast enough. so the average was at 22 fps while running around, 19 frames while blasting a barrel and about 50 while looking into the sky. It was quite playable to me.
So now I've just got a 4850 and the 4870 is an average of 20 percent better, so you just might get you 25 frames there, but I wont take the blame if it doesn't.
Second scene I tried was Assault, the one at night where everything gets blown up, planes crashing next to you and so on. I gotta say that some textures where loaded a bit late and it looked very crappy when the first frames where thrown onto my screen, but that got fixed a few seconds later. The average framerate was a quite steady 16 frames, never really going below 15 or over 18, but I was experiencing more of the slowly loaded textures, sometimes a crate or a rock (this might not be because of the graphics card but because I only got 2 gigs of ram or a kinda old cpu, but still just saying might since i've got no other platform to test this)
So with these kind of scenes I don't think a 4870 will make your frames go at 25 per second, but if you just want to relax at the beach I think it sure will

the drivers I used where the hotfix things from the amd page, don't know if it boosts performance when other drivers come out

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

Well, I only have a 2.5ghz Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with two gigs of DDR, so don't worry.... :D

Hrm, I'm still split between 4850 Crossfire and single 4870. . . (I'm glad I went with ATI Xpress 3200 Chipset when I was building this thing though).

Anyone know when the HD 4870 X2 or the HD 4870 Black Editions are coming out?

[Apoptosis]

August is what the rumors say for the Radeon HD 4870 X2

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

*sigh* can't decide whether to go for 4870/4850 Crossfire or to wait for the 4870X2. . . *sigh*. My inner gamer is slowly dying.

[DMB2000uk]

My advice is get what you want now, as there will always be something bigger and better around the corner.

Unless at some point you are planning on going Quad XFire, then the 4870X2 isn't really needed, and you can get the same performance by picking up an extra 4870 down the line.

Dan

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

Is ATI going to improve HD 4850 Crossfire performance in Crysis via driver updates?

[InsolenceAndHeresy]

heh, looks like I can't get the card until end July...

which means I'll probably go for 4870X2, assuming its out by then. . . :D
Or if it isn't and assuming prices stay the same, a 4850 Crossfire
Or if prices drop, 4870 Crossfire.

"AMD will begin shipping reference design boards with 2GB GDDR5 memory at the end of the month, the sources detailed.
In mid-August, AMD will also begin shipping the 4870 X2 (RV770XT) GPU to partners wishing to design custom cards, the sources added."
Does that mean the cards will be available to buy end of July?