It seems that the gap between hardware upgrades is getting shorter and shorter every year... so now it's time to upgrade my graphics card, currently an 8600 GTS that has served me very well (might actually keep it because it has held out so well after overclocking and running at resolutions it really shouldn't run at...)

THG's article on the 4870 has got me looking at ATi in a whole new light, and I would actually consider dropping my 'nVidia fanboy' status for it. Though I do have a few questions that I'd like to have answered before I make any purchases (or start the planning to make said purchases in fact).

I'm running an Asus P5KC and really don't want to chance it and go through the mess of cleaning my CPU and heatsink and re-applying thermal paste (hence my looking at ATi, crossfire 'n' all that).

Most of what I do is gaming at 1920x1200 (WoW, Supreme Commander, Age of Conan and CSS mostly, and no I'm not one of those people that wants to run Crysis at absolute max for e-peen rights, I thought it was a pretty poor game to be honest... shiny as hell, but poor) though I do work with 3D Studio Max a lot too.

Basically I'm wondering which I should go for...
- 2x HD 4870
- 1x HD 4870X2 (when it comes out... and possible getting a second further down the line... or at launch if I have the cash)


Any comments are welcome and appreciated

yeah,, i totally agree with you about crysis,no real substance,no real depth ,,etc,,personally i would not touch ati with a ten foot pole ,i just read somewhere that they are still having driver problems,look around before you spend,don't take my word for it,the last thing you want is a crash right in the middle of 3 weeks work,windoze don't need any help crashing,,it does that quite well all by itself.. buyer beware,being fast is not all it's cracked up to be...ahemmm,buy your self some canned air open a window and give your computer a real good "blow job"dust is it's worst enemy,can cause shorts and overheating,not good..

I take really good care of my system, all the work I do is saved onto my 2 'general use' hard drives, which are 2 500gb seagate barracuda 7200.11s in raid 0, and I do nightly backups onto 2 1tb wd caviars in raid 1, so the most a crash sets me back is about 6 hours. As far as dust goes, I have a healthy supply of compressed air thanks to a compressor/purifier, no water or dust or whatever in the air, and use it about once a month. System's totally water cooled too which means dust isn't as big a factor.

I just finished reading the article that THG put up a few minutes ago about nVidia getting DX10.1 along with apparantly having chips 1.5 to 2 times faster along with GDDR5. I know speed isn't everything, it's more memory bandwidth and raw processing power I'm looking for. If nVidia can give me a card with a 256 bit (or greater) bus, and GDDR5 memory then I'll probably invest in one of them depending on price.

I'm not going launching into any quick purchase, which should be obvious by my willingness to wait for the 4870X2

From the month of research I have done and what little there is in truth about the 4870x2 available, I would say just wait if you are not in a hurry. If they re-engineer the architecture like it seems they have, then the x2 should be a better buy. Will be faster, and cheaper then 2 4870's(all speculation atm). Ati's weak spot has always been drivers, but I haven't read any reports at this point that confirm the driver support is even an issue right now with the new chipsets.

I'd also wait for the 4870X2. If half the reports are true it's going to be a great card.

The other option is to buy a single 4870 now and an X2 later to crossfire with.

I haven't had any problems with the drivers for my 4870, other than the fan speed issue that's easily fixed by editing the profile files for the catalyst control center.

Yep, I haven't had any problems with my 4850. It always surprises me that ATI's drivers are thought of so badly. I've had good luck with both NVidia and ATI in that area. I even have had good luck with my first Vista install last week.