HD 4850 or 4870

First of all im not sure if i already posted this or if i made it on another forum but here goes.

For a new build iv been looking at the new ati cards... now will i see any difference in them on a 19" monitor res of 1440x900 possibly with a second monitor the same size in the near future? or would i be better off saving my money and getting a 3rd party cooler for the 4850 (as they get very very hot)? Or will it be too hard for a noobie like me whos only ever built 1 pc? any help welcome and opinions.

Plow.

ok awsome now if i was looking to go xfire with the 4850 in the future would a corsair TX 650W http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135514 do the job? and if so would 8x lanes on a pci-e 2.0 bus limit the card? This would be using a p45 board most likely.

Nice find by the way akhilles.

Looks like in a month or 2 ill be saving my money with the 4850

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeon [...] ments.html

A midrange P45 board is about $150 US and a low-end X38 is about $180 US. The X38/48 does Crossfire x16. Look into GA-EX38-DS4.

That question is coming up a lot recently. Normally I think it won't. The only real test has been this one:

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/ [...] index.html

But you have to remember this uses a quad core OC'd to 4 Ghz, and the only game that really got bottlenecked at was Crysis at 1280x1024. Every other game tested was fine until you hit resolutions like 2560x1600.

But in the future (say 6 months from now) it'll probably bottleneck the new games quite a bit. If the rest of your system can keep up (mainly the processor).

At the resolution you have now I doubt it'll bottleneck anything.

Oh and another thing out of these which is the best brand:

Sapphire

Gecube

Powercolour

Consider HIS too,they use great cooling in their cards.
Also all of those 3 brands are good IMO and i think PowerColour is the cheapest between them.

Thanks for the input guys.