Hd4850 or HD4870?

[Nelsaidi]

Im someone that always wants more and more, and wants the best. But, I dont want to spend alot. My question is, the performance gained fro mthe hd4870 over the 4850, is it worth the extra £50 you have to pay?

nAnd does anyone know when the new sapphire hd4850 with the zalman coolers start selling?

EDIT
Also, the saphire ones that sell on scan/ebuyer, are they the retail versions? ie the ones with the 2gb memory stick and the software, like the one hexus reviewD?

[kalniel]

Im someone that always wants more and more, and wants the best. But, I dont want to spend alot. My question is, the performance gained fro mthe hd4870 over the 4850, is it worth the extra £50 you have to pay?

Depends what you're using it for. If you're driving a 30" then yes, definitely.

nAnd does anyone know when the new sapphire hd4850 with the zalman coolers start selling?

Nope.

EDIT
Also, the saphire ones that sell on scan/ebuyer, are they the retail versions? ie the ones with the 2gb memory stick and the software, like the one hexus reviewD?

I thought hexus reviewed a powercolour card? The sapphire cards sold in this country aren't the full retail package, no.

[wzix]

Nope sadly they take out all of the fun stuff

[badass]

IMHO, if you are buying a 4850, 512MB is the best one to go for.
Now there are 1GB 4870's appearing, I would suggest its between a 1GB 4870 and a 512MB 4850.
I suspect that the 4870's have enough power and bandwidth in them to smoothly render games with more than 512MB textures required to be kept in memory, however I think that 512MB is probably the sweet spot for the 4850.
I am waiting for a 4850 with a decent dual slot cooler on it that doesn't cost much more than reference ones. IMHO the core/memory clockspeed (on a 4850) is totally irrelevant and will only be noticed in benchmarks.

[Zhaoman]

If you think about it, since ATi haven't hacked anything off the 4850, the 4850 is just a 4870 with GDDR3 memory instead of GDDR5. But GDDR3 isn't exactly "old" since the 9800 and the new GTX series use it, so given the modest speeds of the stock 4850, it should overclock to at least the speeds of the 9800GTX+. The lack of a second 6 pin power connector would limit its potential but if I were a betting man, and I'm not really , I'd say it'll be able to reach very close to the speed of a stock 4870. Once again, the decision is down to whether you need the extra 5 - 10 fps from a 4870 (are you running a large display?), and whether you're wallet is happy with parting with £50. You can't really go wrong with any of the £120 - £180 cards at the moment.