Radeon HD 4870 X2: Four Cards Compared

[dagger]

[citation][nom]Pei-chen[/nom]Unless you are a fat as a cow you don't need a power house SUV to move your ass.It seems that people don’t care their 4870 X2 cost $100 more per year to run over GTX 280/260.[/citation]
Unless you game 24/7, you'll be lucky to get $10 per year savings in electricity bill.

 

[dragonsprayer]

bummed!
where is visiontek the only one with lifetime warranty?

 

[L1qu1d]

This article def doesn't make sens, 1 9800 GX2 beating 2 280s in crysis?

WoW I realyl am never taking THG articles seriously anymore I wish they were like they a couple of yrs ago.

 

[jerreece]

[citation][nom]Pei-chen[/nom]Unless you are a fat as a cow you don't need a power house SUV to move your ass.It seems that people don’t care their 4870 X2 cost $100 more per year to run over GTX 280/260.[/citation]

LOL $100 more per year? What kind of math did you do? Seriously, the power use between video cards is not that dramatic. Even if the card used 150W more, that'd be like running two extra 75W light bulbs in your house. Your Kilowatt hour usage isn't going to jump that dramatically....

If you had a 100W light bulb running 24/7 for a month you're talking about 731 hours (give or take). That's 73.1 kWh use. Here in Montana, we're paying about $0.10 per kWh which is $7.31 per month to operate a device 24/7 at 100W for a month. That's a total of $87.72 a year, to run a 100W device 24/7.

So there's no way the small difference in power usage between two video cards can cost you $100 extra per year.

 

[crockdaddy]

Mostly whiners posting here. Post something constructive.

I say be happy you have many hardware sites to look at. I figure no one site can do it all. Too much product is released to keep up with it.

To those whom complain about spelling/grammar .... **yawn** I see the same complaints on major newspapers. If major news papers have grammar issues then guess what .... your not to grammatically focused sites will have more issues not less. Plus, we all want all information delivered immediately all the time. To get quick info dissemination you can expect mistakes. Live with it.

For the guys complaining about the topics covered. I see solar power and cars covered on other sites too, so suck it up.


For me ... I personally enjoy the big charts for helping making my decisions a bit easier and the Second Take videos are great keep it up.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]Chizops[/nom]Why didn't they try using core i7 (extreme maybe)[/citation]

For exactly what you're asking for, please see this story.

 

[crockdaddy]

L1quid, why is it so hard to believe the GTX280 getting beat? Anyone even casually following the graphics cards industry over the last two years knows certain games respond different depending on local conditions ie, RAM, Processor speed, Stream processors, Shaders, # of processors, driver optimization etc etc. I gave up looking at replacing my old super card (GTX7800) with a new super card and simply chose best in class mainstream card (ATI4850) ... I am for the most part happy with my decision. BTW, I am card agnostic, if I had purchased a few months earlier I would have bought a GT8800 instead.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]Scryer_360[/nom]These charts do not make sense either, we're getting a 9800 GX2 seemingly more powerful than a GTX 280 in here.Was is das? Ich bin TERRIBLY CONFUSED.[/citation]

It's confusing, but that's certainly not the reviewer's fault; from the benches it looks like the 9800 GX2 offers wildly diffrent performance, sometimes losing to a single GTX 260, sometimes beating out two 280's in SLI.

 

[ravenware]

Toyota Prius like efficiency at idle.

Prius is a BS answer to a real problem. There were cars getting similar mileage before it's release. This is probably the most overhyped vehicle/product of the decade.

A real solution would be to abandon gasoline as a fuel source all together or use it at an absolute minimum; not to make a care that gets 40MPG.

 

[boostercorp]

[citation][nom]ravenware[/nom]Prius is a BS answer to a real problem. There were cars getting similar mileage before it's release. This is probably the most overhyped vehicle/product of the decade.A real solution would be to abandon gasoline as a fuel source all together or use it at an absolute minimum; not to make a care that gets 40MPG.[/citation]

hmmmm my car barely gets 15mpg
but i run it on E85 ethanol so i'm green ...

exept with my computer,
i keep it running for days on end and the 1000W psu combined with the high-end hardware is sure to use some power...

 

[guyladouche]

I always look forward to tom's video card reviews, but I kinda feel like they can be very hit and miss. One thing they actually decided to include was an "image quality" section--which composed of 3 screenshots for each of the cards, but other than that, there was no discussion whatsoever. Why is this? I mean, i know the ongoing myth that ati has better image quality than nvidia, but to this day, no one picks the myth apart, and it seems like they intentionally didn't discuss it again... And to me, the 9800 seemed to have slightly better quality, but that also could have to do with slightly different positions in the game.

Also, the choice of video card comparisons seems odd. Granted, this article was to showcase 4 different 4870 cards--fine. But if you want to compare high end cards to competitor's cards, make good choices--like a gtx280 or gtx280 SLI'd--not a single 260 for FS... maybe gtx260's in SLI. A gtx260 can't compete with a 4870x2, so why even bother wasting the time to include it in the tests? Maybe 'cause some people will bitch and moan that it wasn't included, LOL...

Sorry, i don't mean to sound like a nit-picker, but this article seems very disorganized. It has a lot of good info, but lacks organization (and some logistics in choices). Sorry tom's...

 

[hashbrown]

This review is pretty worthless without the 2560x1600 resolution.

 

[Cuddles]

I run a 1970 GTO with a 455 and get about 9 MPG. I also rev my engine at idle because I like the warm fuzzy feeling it gives me.

 

[arkadi]

Well this article definitely made me think....how about doing it all over again, but on i7. The last article on i7 covered only very hi end configurations, but here we could see how much can pare of 4850 gain from cpu power. Just saying it will be nice to see how much we can gain from i7 systems with cheaper cards. On the other hand it can be to early and we can wait until better drivers will be available. As for my self, waiting 4 my 920 the other to just not worth it.

 

[jesseralston]

The only issue I have with the article is the fact that they do not include the 4870 1GB. I would love to see how this card does in crossfire compared to a 4870x2. I know that it is new and everything, but how hard is it to add one card to a lineup?

 

[wavebossa]

the 9800GTX2 has awalys been one of the best cards. i remember when teh 280 game out (before they made the new drivers), the 9800GX2 was better in everything and cost less.

 

[jesseralston]

The only issue I have with the article is the fact that they do not include the 4870 1GB. I would love to see how this card does in crossfire compared to a 4870x2. I know that it is new and everything, but how hard is it to add one card to a lineup?

 

[jesseralston]

Sorry about the double post. Is there a way to delete it?

 

[fonzy]

Nice cards but it might be wise and wait for the next 5800x2 series of cards to come out...DX11, plus more games to come that will take advantage of these cards.Crysis is the only real game that needs that much power.

 

[Guest]

Why benchmark all the same pack of outdated games (except Mass Effect)? I'd like to see up to date games like Fallout 3, FarCry 2, Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, etc.

 

[keither5150]

When they list 33FPS is that a minimum?

The FPS seem low compared to what I get. I have a HD4870 x2, E8400 clocked at 4.0 I do have 4 gigs of 10666 ram. 1680x1050 (Crysis contact) no AA I get 37 to 50 FPS. I average about 44. My driver is 8.10. My board is the a P5E3 deluxe. No matter what I do in the game I can't get it down to their reported 33fps. Running in speed mode while moving from left to right I drop down to 37. Throw in firing of your gun and it still does not drop below 37. During normal play I get between 40 and 52 FPS.

I even clocked my CPU at 3.6 and then saw a drop of about 1-2 FPS on average.

I think that they should have used 4 gigs of ram as well. Nobody will have a system like their test system with only 2 gigs.

Very good test.

Hopefully this card lasts more than a year for me.

 

[Hameedo]

Finally 9800GTX+ is used in Tomshardware reviews !!

That's certainly good news , although the GTX 260 Core 216 is yet to be here !

and what a nice lead for 9800GTX+ over HD4850 .

 

[Dannar]

[citation][nom]Slomo4shO[/nom]I highly appreciate the "fps per watts" chart. Seems the bottom line still is that everything past the 9800 GTX+ or 4850 is basically overkill for most 1680x1050 game play with the obvious exception being Crysis(this game is just coded poorly). Anything over 30 fps will hardly be noticable to the human eye so there really is no sense in buying a card that consumes 150 extra watts of power and costs $300 more so you can have 100+ fps.[/citation]

They didn't run tests at 2550 x 1600, which is where the graphics horsepower of the 4870x2 really outshines all the competition. I realize that's probably

 

[guyladouche]

[citation][nom]keither5150[/nom]When they list 33FPS is that a minimum? The FPS seem low compared to what I get. I have a HD4870 x2, E8400 clocked at 4.0 I do have 4 gigs of 10666 ram. 1680x1050 (Crysis contact) no AA I get 37 to 50 FPS. I average about 44. My driver is 8.10. My board is the a P5E3 deluxe. No matter what I do in the game I can't get it down to their reported 33fps. Running in speed mode while moving from left to right I drop down to 37. Throw in firing of your gun and it still does not drop below 37. During normal play I get between 40 and 52 FPS.[/citation]

I think it's average fps they show.

Yeah, I noticed this about tom's fps results--they're always on the low end of what I actually get with the same specs and same details for some reason, even back when I had my x1950pro. In their charts somewhere, they reported BF2142 fps on a system with a 1950pro but faster CPU and more RAM than my rig at the time, but at the same resolution and same detail settings as their bench I was getting 15+ fps more on average. And it's like that for pretty much all their results for some reason. Don't know why...

 

[Dannar]

[citation][nom]Dannar[/nom]They didn't run tests at 2550 x 1600, which is where the graphics horsepower of the 4870x2 really outshines all the competition. I realize that's probably[/citation]

And I forgot, 4870x2 is the only single pcb gfx solution at 2560x1600 that is still essentially cpu throttled.