New Vid Card(2) @ 1920x1200 Advice

[Undread]

After a long delay I'm finally going to be building my new rig in the next month or so. I'm pretty much decided on all my parts except for my Vid card. One of the main things is that I'm getting a 24" BenQ G2400W, and so I plan on running things at 1920x1200.

My original plan was to get 2x9800GTX+ in SLI, which still seem to be a top performer, and would run me around $400. After talking to some people I've started to consider some Single GPU options.

I could get a GTX 280, which under-performs the 9800GTX+ SLI across the board, costs $30 more, but is a Single GPU and thus inherently more stable (yes?).

The next option is a GTX 260 C216 which is another slight downgrade from the GTX 280, and has less RAM thus my higher res suffers a bit. This can be had for only $300 though.

Now, I've also started to consider the ATI range as well. The new 4870 1GB looks very promising at higher resolutions, performing slightly better than the C216 and winning some losing some vs the 280.

Lastly is 2x4850 1GB in Crossfire. Here's the one I'm really curious about...I have see NO benchmarks for the newer 1GB version of the 4850 in CF. The cost of two of these is $400 the same as two 9800GTX+, and I have a feeling that this will be faster than any of the above options at 1920x1200, but there is 0 evidence. I've seen some reviews of the single card, and it performs extremely well.

Well, that's my set of options. Basically, I want to see how people feel about CF/SLI vs Single-GPU, and if anyone can find some good CF reviews of the 4850 1GB.

 

[ou_phidelt]

The 4850's are going to be the best combo. They can be had for ~$300AR for the pair. I also have been unable to locate a direct comparison but take the fact the 1Gb card if on average 5FPS better than the 512MB 4870. Then take the fact the 4850's crossfired are considerably outperformed the 512, north of 20FPS depending on the game and you can come to a reasonable, if less than scientific certainty, that the 4850's will still far outperform the 4870. Keep in mind running dual cards will use more power and introduce significantly more heat into your system. Also remember that not all games scale the same with multiple GPU's, but as the drivers have matured this seems to be less and less of an issue.

 

[jayfella]

i dont disagree with ou_phidelt, but ive been putting a bit of thought into this myself lately since im gonna get a top-end graphics card in january..

My money is on the GTX260 - Reason being - Unless you have a seriously hyped up machine, a GTX280 cant even run at full rate because the CPU is going to bottleneck it to hell. Intel even admit that. I dont think im gonna have an "up-to-the-minute" top of the range machine going to be able to supply that GPU with that kinda power it needs, even when i get a quad to go along with the card. By time i buy another processor to keep up with it, it will be out of date anyhow, so i figure get the GTX260 - which is about the best you can get (that wont make your CPU the bottleneck) .