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About LinkBacksRead more.Sapphire slaps on an upgraded cooler and ramps up clocks. Enough to justify a £35 premium? We tell you.
Read more.Sapphire slaps on an upgraded cooler and ramps up clocks. Enough to justify a £35 premium? We tell you.
I like the look of that. After having high speeds and high temps with my 8800GT OC2 I told myslef I would never buy another pre-overclocked card but the cooler on this looks like it does the job very well.
□ΞVΞ□
Definitely liking the look of this - It's probably a mix between this, the 1GB powercolour or the XFX GTX260 XXX... It's a hard choice.
~'Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence--those are the three pillars of Western prosperity'~ Aldous Huxley
Looks amazing but I have a feeling that in the long term the 512mb will be more of a limiting factor for this card compared to the 1gb versions of the 4870 that are in the same price bracket.
And that's why the next card on the test-bench is the 1GB model, with particular focus on 2,560x1,600-resolution testing on the four games. The manner in which it performs will give us an inkling on what to expect in the future.
Originally Posted by Tarinder
And that's why the next card on the test-bench is the 1GB model, with particular focus on 2,560x1,600-resolution testing on the four games. The manner in which it performs will give us an inkling on what to expect in the future.
Ooh I'm interested, BUT won't the price on that be very close to that of a 280?
~'Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence--those are the three pillars of Western prosperity'~ Aldous Huxley
*Is holding of purchase until Hexus gets the 1 gig reviews*
Actually I would love to see reviews for 1 gig 4850's too.
But what is the power consumption like?
Negligble over and above a stock card. We're talking about 10W here.
Not everyone is aware of the power consumption of the stock model. Personally I think more hardware reviews should include tests of power consumption, especially seeing as the test is so easy to do with a £10 power meter. I can't help starting to feel bad about the power consumption of my gaming PC from an environmental point of view as well as having to pay out every month. I'm sure I'm not the only one. If we don't know how much power our hardware might use, how can we make the right choices? I had to read quite a few reviews before I found out how high the idle power use is of the 4870 cards compared to the GTX260. Even the GTX 260 uses more at idle than my old X1900XTX which I still think of as a power hungry monster! Power consumption complaints in hardware reviews would also likely be noticed by people at ATI and Nvidia and encourage better efficiency.
Given the financial situation that seems to be hitting a lot of people at the moment power draw and running costs could well become a selling point on graphics cards, certainly with the likes of 48** and the 260-280 level of speeds their really is not much point in driving for yet more fps in most games at the moment, with maybe the exception of Crysis but could not some of the issues with frame rates in that game be down to bad coding?
Not saying that faster speeds wont sell a card because of course they will but it could be an interesting addition to the tests on cards.
Still having said that people who can afford the top range of graphics cards probably are not going to be so worried over how much running them really costs.
We covered the idle and load power-draw in our original look, right over here:
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.ph...=13972&page=21
No gtx260 in that test even though it's the nearest competitor?
OK here is an example of what I like to see: http://techreport.com/articles.x/15651/11
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