Quote:
Originally Posted by stabiz
Anybody know how much faster the HD4890 1Gb is than the HD4870 512? The 4890 is really cheap right now, and i cant get nVidia. (current drivers totally **** up rFactor in DX9)
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You mean the 4870 is really cheap right now. And the 1GB 4870 is the better buy. It is actually faster than the 512 and worth the extra $10.
The 1GB 4890 is not much faster since it is a the same GPU, just slightly modified electrically and clocked up a bit. Same memory. Same everything. The only real advantage, besides the extra 5% to 10% performance (is that really worth $80 for 5%?) for the higher clock is that the new electrical layout allows it to overclock more. Since I hardly ever overclock a board except for benchmarking, this is not a big deal to me.
The point is, the 4870 is an awesome buy. I own one. The 1GB of course. If the 4890 were properly priced at about $200, then it would be worth the extra $$$, but it's not. It is hovering around a premium price of $230 to $240.
-S
PS. BTW, my 4870 clocks to 790 MHz fine. I could probably go faster, but I don't care because a 4870 already plays every game I have maxed out with full detail / resolution. I clocked the memory up to 5500 MHz (DDR5 @ 1100) and that works fine too. The 4890 clock speed is 850 Mhz GPU, and 975 MHz (4875 Mhz) memory. So with my extra clocks on the mem, and within 60 Mhz of the GPU, I was probably pulling similar performance numbers to the 4890.
PPS. Here is an example of the performance numbers with Crysis maxxed out at crazy resolutions. Notice the speed difference between the 1GB 6870 and the 512MB 4870. THe 1GB version seems to give you a 10% performance advantage for only $10!!! Now that is worth it ($10) for 10%, wouldn't you say? As you can see though, any of these boards are fast that are in this list. Even the outclassed 4850 in these charts is still pulling decent numbers, and so is the NVidia options. They would all make decent boards to own. Remember, if you can get 25 FPS with detail maxxed out in Crysis, you can play any game on the planet for now or the forseeable future with full detail. Nothing will catch Crysis for some time for video card stressing.
Same test at lower resolution. Notice the speed gap between the 512 and 1GB again:
