I need a new graphics card

Originally Posted by Cam

[HD4850]'s by amd/ati, so it's not at the top of the line.

I'm afraid you'll need at least 8600-line or equal video card at bare minimum if you want to play anything half decent-looking.
$100 for a video card is pretty cheap already.

Oh my god. Can we ban this guy for being stupid?

8600GT can run Crysis and UT3 etc. at low/mid resolutions and settings, yes, but dear god. HD4850 is THE best bang for the buck right now, as they cost ~$170 retail and most have $30 rebates as well and destroy NVIDIA 9800GTX performance. (I know you said this is out of your price range.)

If you need a graphics card now, the 512mb 9500gt might be it. It can be had for as low as $55 after rebate at Newegg, but I recommend going with the GDDR3 models ($80 before rebate). It will offer performance comparable or much superior (hello Crysis) to the 8600gts.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Cam

ATI cards run too hot, so they can gtfo kthx. I haven't even read the benchmarks for the newer ATI cards, anything idling at 80c can go fuck itself.

You're still being stupid. My XFX GeForce 8600GT with no modifications to bios/ForceWare ran hotter and louder than my VisionTek HD4850 at idle (52 vs 50 at same room temperature). And if I did set the fan to a higher speed for my XFX, it would sound like an airplane. Furthermore, at load the 8600GT would easily peak 90C in Crysis or UT3, when my HD4850 RARELY reaches 68C at load.

Just because the HD4850 fan is set to run at essentially 0% speed in the drivers, does not mean it idles at 80C. It's extremely easy to set the fan speed to any abritrary number, and everyone running at 30-40% (me included) can barely hear it and idle around 50C (NVIDIA does comparably.)

btw, can you please stop being stupid? How the fuck do you know what temperature the HD4850 idles at if you haven't read any benchmarks? because EVERY customer review for the HD4850 on Newegg, for example, says the card runs hot BUT after applying the "HD4850 fan fix" (which is just changing a freaking text value in the Catalyst drivers' profile file) it runs at very acceptable temperatures. Only a troll would say the card idles at 80C and leave it at that.

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Originally Posted by Megalith

Does the HD4850 blow away the 8800 GT.

I was under the impression that Nvidia was very much ahead of ATi these days.

...oh, it's only $170...not bad. I wonder what it takes to run Crysis with everything maxed out. I think I have a pretty good system (3 GHz Core 2 w/ 4 gigs of Corsair Dominators), but it was still laggy when textures and such were set to the higher settings.

Yes, the HD4850 is a better card than the 8800GT. As previously mentioned, the HD4850 is equatable to the 9800GTX, which is why NVIDIA recently announced/released the 9800GTX+.

Whether the HD4850 is a better buy than the 8800GT is up in the air though. That depends on just how much money you want to spend.

As for me personally, I can only run Crysis at medium settings at 1280x800 to maintain ~40fps in the more intense portions of the game. It's better than my 8600GT which had to be set at all low settings to maintain ~25fps in the same areas. I blame my Athlon X2 4800+ for holding me waaaaay back... I wish I had a Core 2 Duo (or Quad, as I'm more interested in encoding videos these days than playing games...)

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