Forums | MacLife

Wait just a bit. HD 4850s are already available at Newegg for $200 or less, the GDDR5-equipped 4870s should come shortly and the 4870X2 is a foregone conclusion. Exactly when is in question, but chip yields are apparently so good it was launched (or at least offered for sale, reason unknown) a week early. The 4xxx series has 800 stream processors and has hit the TFLOP mark in raw compute power.

They do seem to run hot right now tho, so aftermarket cooling might be considered. Could be as simple as adding a Thermalright backside chip cooler (an idea I had in '03, but could never execute so elegantly).

The P5k accepts quad core cpus and the Radeon crossfire or X2 arrangements, and that's my first choice for video so far. I guess there's online benchmarks comparing dual core ves quad core gaming. I'll look for those.

The case has two front fans and one rear fan for the case, and I'm hoping that's plenty. I'll drop some framerates to avoid fancy and pricey cooling.

My 3870 is great, but if the 4870 is available, I'd definitely go for that.

dvpierce wrote:

Ribtorus wrote:

I guess there's online benchmarks comparing dual core ves quad core gaming. I'll look for those.

The 3GHz dual core will still pull ahead, of course - even now, most games aren't that multithreaded.

But if they're doing other stuff - iTMS downloads, BitTorrent, encoding some flvs for youtube, or even trying to level a WoW alt by running multiple clients, the quad core will roxxorz the dual core.

And god forbid your automated AV scan kick in at 3AM while you're running a 3-client EVE mining op. Horrors! (It's bad enough that each client uses 400-600 MBs of RAM and hogs almost an entire CPU core, but I'm usually watching TV on Hulu too - mining is boring.)

It's a matter of future-proofing, imho.

/me hugs his Q6600

I get the gist of that.

Gists are good.

I haven't yet decided on my recommendations, but I'm leaning towards dual core Intel.

I still have AMD based machines to price out.

So many variables.

I may participate in some of the gaming, so I'm certainly considering the 3870X2 or the 4870X2 for my quad Opteron. Likely the 3870X2 since I expect it to get even cheaper when the new product is released.

Well, this is timely. Wasn't even looking. Loyd Case looks at your proposed CPU vs. the same $ in a tri-core Phenom 8750 and modern games.

Clearly, the Phenom is a gamer's solution. While it might not fare as well on the Windows desktop, nor in synthetic tests that examine the system with theoretical data, it's clearly superior, in most cases, while running real games.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 … 531,00.asp

If I go with Intel, I've decided to up the ante a bit by switching to an ASUS P5E with possibly two 4570 or still a 3870X2 or maybe even two 4870s or one 4870X2. I'm waiting for quotes.

My quote on the 3870X2 was almost the same as the 4870 MSRP.

The 4850 seems quite capable in these tests:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1471/4 … index.html

And the price is right.

Final words

The Good:

So, numbers can talk for itself. With the price tag $199(HD 4850) and $299 (HD 4870), RV770 is the BEST bang for the buck. Compare to GTX 260, A $299 only HD 4870 is a smarter choice. Yes, using this kind of word seems quite biased, but if you read all numbers from our review you will see my point.

Compare to GTX 260, HD 4870 is only 3/4 of its price while test items show the card have almost the same firepower!

HD 4850’s rival is 9800GTX, and we can see while their price keeps the same, HD 4850 have more than 15% leading.

The Con:

But, RV770 also have lot’s of weak points. First, the card is HOT, i am afraid that if you are not going aftermarket coolers or water the card can not stand long.

Second, RV770 TDP is quite terrible. HD 4870 in stress mode almost can catch up with GTX 280. Is it still a AMD card?  And the second Gen PowerPlay is not as good as AMD saids, seems can not lower the clock effectively.
   
The huge impact of Radeon HD 4800 series force NVIDIA drops price for the Geforce 9800GTX to $199, and introduces the GeForce 9800 GTX+ at $233 which supports PhysX or other CUDA programs. However, it can’t threaten HD 4850 on price or performance with that price. HD 4850 has flooded out everywhere and HD 4870 is just around the corner. It will be launch on June 25th or July 8th.

Besides, we have benchmarked two or three HD 4800 in CrossFireX, and the the review is coming soon.

http://en.expreview.com/2008/06/24/firs … d-4850/25/

Wikipedia wrote:

The Thermal Design Power (TDP) (sometimes called Thermal Design Point) represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is required to dissipate. For example, a laptop's CPU cooling system may be designed for a 20 W TDP, which means that it can dissipate (either via an active cooling method such as a fan, a passive cooling method via natural convection, via heat radiation or all three modes of heat transfer) 20 watts of heat without exceeding the maximum junction temperature for the chip. The TDP is typically not the most power the chip could ever draw (such as by a power virus), but rather the maximum power that it would draw when running real applications. This ensures the computer will be able to handle all applications without exceeding its thermal envelope, without requiring a cooling system for the maximum theoretical power, which would cost more and achieve no real benefit.

TDP can be defined in different ways by different manufacturers, but in most cases TDP is measured at the geometric center on the topside of the processor integrated heat spreader. For processors without integrated heat spreaders such as mobile processors, the thermal design power is referred to as the junction temperature (Tj).

Booksley wrote:

Ribtorus wrote:

I'm put off by the heating. A couple of those furnaces in the case can't be good if extra cooling is required. I don't know what TDP is.

I have never heard of that website, nor of ATI or Nvidia shipping a GPU that needed aftermarket cooling. Arstechnica also has their review up.

Nor I, but they were the first up anywhere. I'm a bit surprised Ars was this quick.

The 4850 apparently got a single-slot cooler as partners requested that, and everything is an Ati reference design at this point. I wouldn't say more is required, but in a gaming card it's often good. Variety will come in time. And the Thermalright I linked above is neither expensive nor complicated to add; I have one. In a case with good airflow it's inexpensive insurance and, with autoOCing a click away via Catalyst itself, confers some extra headroom for either card. Chips are happier, live longer cool, and the new version has 40-45% more transistors. SPs aren't free. Both 4850s I've seen so far OCed themselves to a stable 690 when enabled.

As Ars notes, the -70 exhausts to the outside so adds less to case temps. I'd still install my HR-11 tho, bolt patterns don't change often, and it's clocked higher. Why not cool the chip from both sides and leverage those case fans and good airflow?

I still think the fan speed/idle temp issue is a driver thing and will be sorted soon. NV and ATi should be comparable miserly then at idle, and peak performance will still cost some.

The 4850/70 both look like solid choices, really.

Nothing's really changed there. And even at 1024x768, Rib, Battlezone and ReVolt will look like new games with the kind of FSAA and AF you can crank in with these. Everything will.