I in the early stages of pricing out a new rig and I have one very important factor I am looking to consider. I want to hook it up (almost exclusively) to a 37” Aquos 1080p LCD and I am looking for a mobo/GPU recommendation.

I know all the rage these past few weeks are the 4850 and 4870 but do these cards have enough juice for the higher resolution/ image size? Will I get a top notch gaming experience running one of these on my HDTV? Is crossfire something I should consider?

I ask because my old rig (stress old) has a X1900 card and athough its HDCP compliant and has DVI out the picture just doesn’t look 100% right. Part of the trouble is probably that I really only play WoW on the pc right now and I’m not really sure if I’m using the right resolutions. My future usage should change significantly as I would love to be playing AoC or Crysis or whatever and I am hoping to build in other components to make this rig a true media centre for blu-ray etc.


Any insight would be very helpful!

a True 1080P, 1920x1080 resolution or similar will run your games very well on most any Nvidia 8800 series on up as well as 47XX and 48XX series AMD cards. There will be some games that will start to choke in FPS with these cards, like Crysis at this resolution. A single 280GTX, dual 8800's or dual 47 - 4800's in crossfire will fix that. I think 1920x1080 is a resolution that starts to hit the memory limitations of some cards but most higher end cards can still cope real well these days.

BTW, I have a 37" 1080P Westy that loves my dual 8800GTX's, so I have been real hesitant about upgrading to anything based on what the latest cards have been. A little sad actually.

Thanks warezme. I had been leaning towards the new 4870 with the idea of maybe crossfiring them as a "cheaper" upgrade somewhere down the road.

Them's good cards from what I hear tell. Whatever card you get just make sure it sync's up correctly with your big screen and your picture will look crystal clear and sharp as a tack at its native resolution. I occassionally have to fiddle with my driver upgrades to turn off font smoothing and make sure its using the correct signal format but I haven't had to do that in the past 4 driver upgrades so I think its been fixed or its keeping its prior settings. Good luck.