Reviews - Windows 7 vs. Vista: high-end cards put to the test

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GeForce GTX 260 vs. Radeon HD 4870 1GB: fight.

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Read more.

What is this GTX 290 that you keep referring to in the tables? ;)

Nice article. Great to see that gaming performance wont suffer when Win 7 comes out. I am really temped to jump straight on it. Never installed an OS before a Service Pack was released for it, but there's a 1st time for everything.

Spotted a few mistakes in the review, on the COD4 graphs it shows Windows 7 to be slightly quicker than Vista (though only by a few FPS), but your conclusion states that:-

"The two cards produce remarkably similar results in Call of Duty 4. Windows 7 performance is a little down on Vista, but it's not a deal-breaker at all."

And in your last sentence you put:-

"especially in F until the Windows 7 driver is consistently better than Vista's.

I'm assuming that F is meant to be Far Cry 2?

Oh, and obviously the mysterious 290 that has already been mentioned!

Otherwise, nice article. My own testing has found Windows 7 to be faster than Vista AND XP in everything I've thrown at it, but then again I have an older GPU (8800gts 512mb), so I'm assuming that's why. Would be nice to see another test using the 64bit version of Windows 7, so that the tests are completely fair, also using the version of Windows 7 which matches closest to Vista Business.

It should also be noted, that with some light research, one can grab a 4870 1gb for £160, I got mine for £165 earlier in the week; from a major etailer. This skews your Bang4Buck ratings slightly.

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Originally Posted by Netvyper

It should also be noted, that with some light research, one can grab a 4870 1gb for £160, I got mine for £165 earlier in the week; from a major etailer. This skews your Bang4Buck ratings slightly.

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Overclockers have been selling a 1GB 4870 at £165 for a couple of weeks now and I believe Scan also has one at £165.

Novatech are selling the Gainward Golden Sample GTX260 216 SP version for £149.98 inc vat. So that again makes the GTX260 better value, and it also includes Mirrors Edge.

Your "System Setup & Notes" page lists the card as a GTX 290, not 260

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Originally Posted by cobhc

Novatech are selling the Gainward Golden Sample GTX260 216 SP version for £149.98 inc vat. So that again makes the GTX260 better value, and it also includes Mirrors Edge.

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Thanks for that - just bought one. I'll be looking forwards to receiving, roughly, £3.91 cashback from Quidco too. That'll go towards a PSU upgrade - really want to make use of my 8800GT as a PhysX card and as an output to a third display :)

For future purposes get a 4870 I think that is the learning from this article.

But what about the value of getting a 4870 512MB?

on the bang for buck at the end the Nvid cards are listed as GTX 290s.

Cheers for the testing/effort tho guys top notch as always :D

I was clearly asleep when this was activated. It wasn't supposed to go live until today, hence the obvious and egregious typos. Sorry for that, chaps, but the overall conclusion hasn't changed from Friday evening to today.

which build of 7 was this? they have varying performance figures

I have Windows 7 running on all my machines and love it. Even bought an SSD especially for my Gaming rig's OS install.

Except I didn't do my research - Punkbuster does not work, and looks like it won't work until the OS is officially released. A pity, since all the games I tried worked really well.

Thankfully my Vista partition is still intact... I beleive some people have had limited sucess with the 32-bit version of Win 7.

Its inevitable it changes and often but the realistic price of a gigabyte 1gb HD 4870 is now below £160 and the cheapest sapphire offer is £148 + p&p. I suspect you caught the 260's on a good day and the 4870's before ATi partners reponsded. Both good cards though just not as much differnece as your showing