4870 vs 260, which is best overall if they were the same price?

As I'm looking through newegg for prospective graphics cards I noticed that the cheapest 4870 is $305 and the rest are $310. It's a very small spread. On the other hand the 260 has some selling for $330 and others for $400.

Lets say at one point in the near future the lowest prices for the two cards are equal (maybe around $300). Which card would be best?

THG shows the 4870 beating the 260 on certain games and vice versa. The benchmarks over the web are all showing one card beating the other, though it's completely game dependant. For instance in Bioshock, the 4870 is the winner while in Mass Effect the 260 wins, especially when there's AA and AF involved.

Also nowhere I've seen benchmarks comparing temperatures and noise levels with fixed fan drivers/fan controller 4870; with cards as close to each other in performance I'd consider that really important.

They are both good cards. If they were both the same price, it would be a tough decision. I was looking at other reviews, and with Dual Core's it seems that the HD 4870 doesn't perform quite as well in comparison to the GTX 260 as Tom's Quad setup did. I would buy the the HD 4870 for 55NM and GDDR5 though. Expect the 1GB model to rock.

Also, expect the HD 4870 to come down in price more if you choose to CF it, the GTX 260 chips are very expensive to create, and likely will not come down in price much anytime soon. Even the 8800GTX was still selling for $350 at the egg before they stopped selling it, the GTS 640's were also around $200, much more then they should have been for their performance. The G80 chips weren't as cheap to make as the G92 core.

4870+1

Like for instance, here's a contradiction to "4870 wins at performance"

http://translate.google.com/transl [...] l=de&tl=en

I dunno if they just have a rouge test or what.

That's a really good point about crossfire and intel chipsets.

At same price i would take GTX260, more memory near 1 GB, more transistors, and maybe at actually benchmarks it win but i think those GTX200 chips have good potencial.

4870 all the way.... once beta drivers are done with and real ones come out, expect a decent boost.

Personally I would go for the 4870, but from what people are saying flip a coin as you could not go wrong with either one.

HD 4870, Mass Effect performance is likely a driver issue, and as with every ATI card, they seem to steadily get better each driver release.

As said before, you can run Crossfire on Intel chipsets, which is a nice feature as the current Intel chipsets are great, even P45 for mid-range, when compared with nVidia's offerings.

Realize, sir, that you are a fanboy yourself. Take a gander at TH's 4870 and 4850 benchmarks .

The 4870 already seems to show holding enough of an edge that one can say with confidence that it's superior to the GTX 260, by a small margin... Remember, people are comparing it to how narrow a margin it falls behind the vastly more expensive GTX 280.

Tom's Hardware, often accused of being biased in favor of nVidia, made themselves clear when hey named their review article: Radeon HD 4870: Better Than GTX 260! Note that they even threw in an exclamation point as well.

Likewise, in comes the matter of drivers as well; the GT200, in all honesty, has been shown to be, once you boil it down, just a G92 with a bunch of copy-pasting to make it bigger. RV770, on the other hand, has had a lot of its units heavily overhauled since RV670, particularly in regards toward AA/AF performance. Additionally, one must remember that AMD's smaller stream processors are more dependent upon driver tweaks in order to achieve the best load distribution, and hence, peak performance; nVidia's stream processors are generally more flexible and hence drivers won't affect their performance much.

4870. Its shown as the better card in review after review. Dont let the "great" pricing of the G260 fool you. The price came down because the 4870 outdoes it. And I think theyre still charging too much for it