The Test

Test Setup
CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 @ 3.20GHz
Motherboard EVGA nForce 790i SLI
Intel DX48BT2
Video Cards ATI Radeon HD 4870
ATI Radeon HD 4850
ATI Radeon HD 3870X2
ATI Radeon HD 3870
EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX KO
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
Video Drivers Catalyst Press Driver (8.7 beta)
Catalyst 8.5
ForceWare 177.34 (for GT200)
ForceWare 177.39 (for 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+)
ForceWare 175.16 (everything else)
Hard Drive Seagate 7200.9 120GB 8MB 7200RPM
RAM 4 x 1GB Corsair DDR3-1333 7-7-7-20
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
PSU PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W
AA Image Quality Comparison Crysis
Comments Locked

215 Comments

View All Comments

  • paydirt - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    You guys are reading into things WAY too much. Readers understand that just because something is a top performer (right now), doesn't mean that is the appropriate solution for them. Do you honestly think readers are retards and are going to plunk down $1300 for an SLI setup?! Let's leave the uber-rich out of this, get real.

    So a reader reads the reviews, goes to a shopping site and puts two of these cards in his basket, realizes "woah, hey this is $1300, no way. OK what are my other choices?"

    This review doesn't tell people what to do. It's factual. You (the AMD fanbois) are the ones being biased.
  • Jovec - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    "This fact clearly sets the 4870 in a performance class beyond its price."

    Or maybe the Nvidia card is priced above its performance class?
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    it could be both :-)
  • Clauzii - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    I think You are right. nVidia had a little too long by themselves, setting prices as seen fit. Now that AMD/ATI are harvesting the fruits of the merger, overcomming the TLB-bug, financial matters (?), etc. etc. it seems the HD48xx series is right where they needed it.

    This is bound to be a success for them, with so much (tamable) raw power for the price asked.
  • Clauzii - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    Yeah! Nice to see competition get into the game again.

  • gigahertz20 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    Page 21 is labeled "Power Consumption, Heat and Noise" in the drop down page box, but it only lists power consumption figures. What about the heat and noise? Is it loud, quiet? What did the temperatures measure at idle and load?
  • abzillah1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    I am in love
  • 0g1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    "NVIDIA's architecture prefers tons of simple threads (one thread per SP) while AMD's architecture wants instruction heavy threads (since it can work on five instructions from a single thread at once). "
    Yeah, they both have 10 threads but nV's threads have 24 SP's, AMD's 80 SP's. But the performance will probably be similar because both thread arbiters run about the same speed and nv's SP's run about double the speed, effectively making 48SP's (and in some special cases 96).
  • ChronoReverse - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    Perhaps it's drivers but if AMD intends for the 4870x2 to compete as the "Fastest Card", they better fix their drivers ASAP.
  • FITCamaro - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link

    With a few driver revisions it will likely improve.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now