ATI 4870, New Beast?

[Khalil]

I wonder how 2 of these are going to perform in my vista machine http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102748

Newegg is out, they are selling faster than they can get them luckily I reserved mine through distribution.
Anyone got them yet?

[shadowpr]

They do look sweet.

Think I heard there was problems with the drivers though in crossfire. Not sure if that's been fixed yet.

[pam123]

Crossfire is having problems with drivers so I would wait on a two card solution, skip over to Rage3D and check it out for yourself : http://www.rage3d.com/

That said, if they get everything working I'd be tempted.

[shadowpr]

Not bring this off topic any, but is there a new site that has the latest comparisons? Seems like tomshardware is falling behind the times.

[Ahura]

309.........


I paid that much for my 8800GT.....And that was like half a year ago. GOsh, I hate how update things are, and curse you for overcharge me.

On the other note, good for AMD.

[Masaki 7-11]

AMD has released a hotfix for the HD4000 series cards which is supposed to improve stability and performance. Most of the reviews I've read about the HD4000 cards have crossfire working fine and the scalability for the cards in crossfire is good, especially at higher resolutions. I'm definetly going to take a look at getting a HD4870 for my new rig, but I'd prefer it to have 1GB ram instead of 512MB (I plan on getting a high resolution monitor, so the added ram helps), if it's a popular card, I'm sure that there will be companies which offer the cards with more memory, better cooling, overclocked, ect.

[Khalil]

I got mine a few days ago, it is working awesome. I can see big improvement in performance over the 3870

It is doing well by itself so I am not in a big hurry to add a second card.

Very stable, had an issue loading the drivers a couple of times from the CD it came with so i went to AMD.com and downloaded the drivers and they worked flawless. I am very pleased!

[cantputt04]

It uses GDDR5 RAM, which so they say can run up to three times as fast as GDDR3. So really 512mb is really more like... 1.5GB of GDDR3? I don't know, but as I have read the GDDR5 is incredible.

Also: Ordering one of these later.

[liambl]

Memory speed doesn't compensate for memory size, no matter how fast it is you still gotta fit the frame in it.

I looked at the RAM specs a couple of days ago and saw in the specs "800MHz (3600MHz effective)". To me that looks like QDR RAM, not DDR?

[cantputt04]

I'm just saying what I've read from places

[Lespaul20]

According to Ati it uses 256bit GDDR3/4/5. You would need a huge resolution to need 512MB for a single frame.

[liambl]

Originally Posted by Lespaul20 According to Ati it uses 256bit GDDR3/4/5. You would need a huge resolution to need 512MB for a single frame.

I'm sure run out of framebuffer in Crysis with 16x AA at 1280x1024. A good evidence of not enough frame buffer is the 256mb and 512mb 8800GT's and 3850's, at x resolution they perform much the same but at y resolution the 512mb card is 400% faster.

Originally Posted by cantputt04 I'm just saying what I've read from places

I know it uses GDDR5, what I'm saying is how is it DDR (double data rate) if the frequency is quadrupled. That looks like QDR (quad data rate) RAM.

[Khalil]

The way I am using this card is with an AMD 9850 Quad CPU, 8GB DDR2 800 Memory on Asus M3A with 150GB Raptor HDD and Windows XP Pro X64

In Everquest2 I run 2 characters at the same time on 2 seperate 22" LCD monitors.

This card is out performing the 2 3870s I was using before by iteself running the 2 accounts.

[liambl]

Kahil, is that the straight M3A? Because I have the same motherboard and was wondering if you had any issues with the LAN or audio, and how well that Phenom 9850 is working.

[Ahura]

Tell about the temperature. Lots of complaint over how notoriously hot the new HD4000 are.

One review from newegg said the card idle 80C.....

Oh, and the new beast is the 4780 X2.

[vtfanmv5]

Originally Posted by Ahura Tell about the temperature. Lots of complaint over how notoriously hot the new HD4000 are. One review from newegg said the card idle 80C..... Oh, and the new beast is the 4780 X2.

It's just a driver issue. One quick CCC profile change and the 4800s idle at 40C with no extra noise.

[liambl]

Thing is, the last generation cards had the same fan speed problem. Surely it isnt hard for a company like ATi to get the fan speeds right from first base, especially with experience from the 3800 series.