Is now a good time to buy a new card or is there a major update coming

[Bottomsup]

I mostly play CS:S and my X1900XT handles it like butter, but its been a few years since I've played anything else and I'd like to get Crysis and GOW. I don't need to play on ultra settings, but over the years I've tended to be picky and always want to play with good settings and AA if possible. (I hate jaggies). The two cards I'm looking at are the 4850 and 3750x2 because they are at my price point of ~150.

There are some Visiontek 4850s going for a good price on ebay

Thoughts?

[Mr.Guvernment]

for Cysis and GoW a 4850 would be nice.. and the prices are good on them and they have good power (own one myself)

what other hardware do you have?

[don'tknow]

hm, thought you had another thread asking about this..

But yes, a 4850 will be enough as long as you don't turn everything up with AA on, and stay at 1680x1050 or below. Also depends on your CPU and OS. What were they again?

also, a question you had on your old thread:

"I also read that it isn't worth upgrading for Crysis since it kicks almost every cards *ss except high end SLI/Xfire configs which I have no intention of running"

^that's blatantly false. You only really need SLi/Crossfire to run it playable at 2560 res with AA, or maybe at 1920 if you don't have a good OC'd CPU (around 3.6-4ghz).

[Bottomsup]

hm, thought you had another thread asking about this..

But yes, a 4850 will be enough as long as you don't turn everything up with AA on, and stay at 1680x1050 or below. Also depends on your CPU and OS. What were they again?

also, a question you had on your old thread:

"I also read that it isn't worth upgrading for Crysis since it kicks almost every cards *ss except high end SLI/Xfire configs which I have no intention of running"

^that's blatantly false. You only really need SLi/Crossfire to run it playable at 2560 res with AA, or maybe at 1920 if you don't have a good OC'd CPU (around 3.6-4ghz).

Q6600 ~3ghz. Vista and 2GB DDR2

[don'tknow]

hmm I would recommend going to 4GB on Vista... Crysis uses up 1.5g+ of RAM easily. I'm on XP with 2GB and it's just enough, but running like that on Vista is a bottleneck. Also keep in mind your FPS will be lower, even with 4GB RAM it will be choppy at 'very high', especially in DX10. AA will be a big performance hit at 1680x1050 and high settings. Try it though.

My best advice, if you're using Vista, is up the RAM to 4gb; regardless of the video card, 2gb will be a bottleneck. And play at 1650x1080 with 'high' and no AA in DX9. If it's still a bit choppy, try a combination of Medium and High, but I think all High will be fine.

[Bottomsup]

Thanks guys. I think i'm going to pull the trigger. Is there any real difference between the various brands? There are several in the 140-160 range.

This Asus one is on sale and the core clock is 680 vs 625. Its about $10 more than the cheapest reference board which is 625mhz

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121272

[don'tknow]

I think the Visiontek is the only one with a lifetime warranty, as far as I know.

[Bottomsup]

Sorry one more Q before I click 'Buy'. I have an Antec P150 case which is on the smaller side. Will I have any problems fitting the card? Here is a pic of my X1900XT installed. Not a great picture but you can see the space on the right....

[don'tknow]

hmmm uh oh....

My case is bigger and those newer cards just barely fit in there. Mine is a gtx 260 though, not sure how it compares to a 4850. My older card is a x1900xt and in my case it had much more room to the right than yours does.. then I put in the gtx 260 and it barely fit.

[don'tknow]

ok, I looked at both side by side on the pics at newegg and the 4850 is shorter than the 260. just not sure how much.

[SeanBest]

The 4850 and 4870 are close in size I believe and my Antec 900 just BARELY squeezes my 2 in...I think your case might be a stretch.

[Bottomsup]

I measured the XT1900XT and its almost exactly 9". A little more with the power plug. Interestingly its hard to find card dimenssinos, but a few posts say the 4850 is ~9.5"

I think I could fit up to ~10" if I carefully put it in since the last .5" would go into my drive cage. Fortunately both of my drives are below the card otherwise it defiently wouldnt' work. I think it may work, but will be close.

I should just buy that P182 I've been eyeing! :-D

[Bottomsup]

Here's a better pic of the current setup with X1900XT

http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/9274/img2753ci7.jpg[/URL]

[LMFRY]

my 2 4850's easily fit in my antec 300...i just had to put my hard drives accordingly...dont know if this is much help but just in case it is.

[Bottomsup]

hmm I would recommend going to 4GB on Vista... Crysis uses up 1.5g+ of RAM easily. I'm on XP with 2GB and it's just enough, but running like that on Vista is a bottleneck. Also keep in mind your FPS will be lower, even with 4GB RAM it will be choppy at 'very high', especially in DX10. AA will be a big performance hit at 1680x1050 and high settings. Try it though.

My best advice, if you're using Vista, is up the RAM to 4gb; regardless of the video card, 2gb will be a bottleneck. And play at 1650x1080 with 'high' and no AA in DX9. If it's still a bit choppy, try a combination of Medium and High, but I think all High will be fine.

The problem with this is that I have an OEM 32bit copy of Vista so to move to 64bit and take advantage of all 4GB I'd need to buy a new copy of the OS. It would be good to upgrade though because I have these 800mhz G.Skill HZs that will clock nicely, but I'm only running my chip at 333*9. I could sell these and pick up a cheap set of RAM to save some money toward the 4850 I want to buy....

Actually now that I think about I could sell my HZs for good money and get cheaper RAM to run at 667mhz even with only 2GB :screwy:

[funnyperson1]

If you're worried about length, look at the Palit 4850 here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814261027

It's a custom PCB design with a nice dual slot cooler (temps around 55C max while GPU folding), and they've rearranged the PRM circuitry to result in a much shorter card. It's actually slightly shorter than my previous 7900gs (which I believe is shorter than the X1900XT).

[SeanBest]

If you have room to go into the hdd cages go for it, my Antec 900 with my dual 4870s don't line up with the cages, that big black thingy is there, I could remove it, but bleh, plus my board has kinda odd in it's placement of slots, but it all worked, tightly that is. But if you got cage space go for it! You can always start cutting if it doesn't :).

[Mr.Guvernment]

Your 32bit OEM key should work on a OEM 64bit disk fine.

and my 4870 is the same width as my DFI x38 T2R DK board so it is the same length as ATX width