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Hello guys.
I have £120 to spend on a graphics card. My current card is a 3870, and I'm noticeing slow downs in the games I play at max settings. Mainly WoW and WAR.
My question is, if I upgrade from a 3870 to a 4850 512MB, would I notice an FPS increase? Because obviously I don't want to spend £120 if the card isn't going to be of any difference to me.
I play on a 22 inch monitor, so that's a 1680 by 1050 res.
Cheers.
At your resolution you will see around a 40-50% increase in FPS in most games, http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/gigabyte_4850/ that compares it to a 3870
Yes when you go from a slower card to a faster card you generally see an increase in FPS. This is normal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Denic
Wow, that's pretty amazing. For £120 delivered I don't think I can go wrong. CheersQuote:
Originally Posted by PeterStoba
Have you tried overclocking the card first?? My HD3870 when overclocked from 777mhz to 877mhz showed noticeable improvements in most games. Also making sure that you install newer drivers too as there was a good performance increase !! Also make sure you have uninstalled the older drivers entirely and use Driver Sweeper too.
TBH I am a bit surprised you are getting slowdowns in WoW with an HD3870. With games like GRAW2 and Bioshock I could play them both at 1680x1050 at the highest settings.
Even Crysis Warhead at mostly enthusiast settings(the highest settings under XP) was playable at 1440x900 and 1280x800. Dropping the settings to gamer meant relatively smooth framerates at 1440x900.
If you want to compare cards this review is better:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Diamond/HD_4870/
The HD4870 will be much faster than your HD3870 but at least try to maximise the performance of the latter card first!!
I'm buying a 4850, not a 4870 btw. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
All's I wanted to know is would a 4850 give a NOTICEABLE fps increase in games!
Cheers
TBH the HD4870 is dropping in price. The same goes for the 192 shader version of the GTX260.You can get the former for around £140 to £145 and the latter for around £135. You are looking at a 20% to 30% increase in performance over an HD4850. Unless you use Ebay the HD4850 is usually over £100. It is retailing for £80 and has a great aftermarket dual slot cooler too! If I were going retail I would buy an XFX HD4830 instead and overclock it. An HD4830 when overclocked will beat an HD4850 and the former overclocks very well.
I would personally get one of these(HD4870,GTX260 or HD4830) instead of an HD4850. Going from an HD3870 to an HD4850 is not worth it either unless you can get the latter cheaply.
Here is a new HD4850 for £85:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sapphire-ATi-R...3A1|240%3A1318
Either wait for a cheap HD4870 now or wait a few months for the replacement for the HD4850 and HD4870.
My budget is an extreme maximum of £120. I really need a graphics card soon as I can't really cope with the slowdown in WAR. You don't thing from a 3870 to a 4850 would be noticeable then? Do you think it could be possible to get a 2nd hand 4870 for £120?Quote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
Cheers
Hi again,
I can stretch the budget to £150. I can get a 4870 for £150 delivered.
I have another question, will my HX 520W Corsair PSU be capeable of running a 4870? Cheers
easilyQuote:
Originally Posted by Denic
Also, I'll be clocking an E4600 from 2.4Ghz to 3.00Ghz. Still safe to use the 520W PSU with the 4870?
Cheers
Yes. When you overclock the E4600 make sure you check the stability of the overclock with 25 iterations of IntelBurnTest and at least a few hours of OCCT and Orthos.Quote:
Originally Posted by Denic
Here is an HD4870 for £144 delivered from Novatech:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s....html?SAP-4870
TBH I would first do the following:
1.) Overclock your CPU to 3ghz and check for stability
2.) Uninstall the old ATI drivers and CCC and use Driver Sweeper to remove any old driver fragments. Install the latest version of the drivers and CCC. The HD3870 has better performance with later drivers. For instance performance in Crysis was a bit buggy with the initial drivers but once the game was patched and the drivers were updated to later releases the gameplay was much smoother. If anything isn't WOW not meant to be that taxing on graphics cards?? I have run more graphically taxing games at 1680x1050 and the gameplay was smooth.
3.) Overclock the GPU core of the HD3870. It won't be hard to get upto at least 840mhz from 777mhz.
4.) Patch the game to the latest stable version
I did all of theses changes and it helped performance of my HD3870. Make sure that the slowdowns are just down to the card itself and not any other reasons. At least try doing this first as with the release of the HD4890 and GTX275 next month prices of the HD4870 and GTX260 will probaly start dropping a bit more!! :)
Also I noticed that you have a 160gb drive too!! Is this a 2mb or 8mb cache drive BTW and is it an older model?? If anything even with 4gb of RAM a slow hard drive can be a major system bottleneck especially when the game is trying to read data off the hard drive.
Hi, my HDD has 8MB Cache. It's just a small HDD. I'm going to buy a new HDD in a few weeks.Quote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
Thanks for the tips, but I'm going to just upgrade to the 4870 anyway, then I'll be able to play more hungry games.
As long as it'll perform fine on a HX520W I'll be happy!
If you haven't ordered, the XFX XXX edition for £103 on Scan (Pricing error, IMO) might be worth a pop.
EDIT: Ignore me, you've gone for the 4870. :P