260 and 4870 are the same price. Help!

Now that both the 4870 and the 260 are $270, what is better to choose?

I will be buying 1 card now and another one to run sli/crossfire in the future.
I will be running flight simulators, cod4, crysis, and video editing software.


Thanks


And please! Stop arguing, just give me the facts and your opinion about the subject, not about each other's opinions

About how long do you believe it will take for the updates to come out?

Ok, thanks

i think at this point the 4870 is better than the 260. it gives the 280 run for its money. if i was you. ill get the 4870.

Heres an example of that domination http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14990/9 It even beats the G280 here

OT?

I don't know google it.

Benches from alot of games







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

wow even 4870 CF cant beat Nvidia's mid-range GTX260 SLI LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

There is no guarantee that ATI will put out some driver that really gives it some kind of advantage.
I personally don't bank on stuff I have no guarantee of. For all we know the drivers could get worse or just continue to suck.

Looking at the here and here, the 4870 and GTX 260 perform very much the same. Maybe the 4870 is 2 or 3 fps faster in some games, yet the 260 wins in other games.

On top of that (and not sure why this doesn't get mentioned), the GTX 260 is definitely the better overclocker. I know one person with a 30% overclock. I know 2 people who can't even reach a 10% OC with the 4870. When you add OC'ing in as a factor, which you damn well should since everybody and their mother does it (and companies like eVGA are even throwing in their own OC software), then the 260 is the better buy IMO, you really can't make a bad decision here.

The 260 also has the better cooler, and the better drivers right now. You here that the 4870 *will* have better drivers coming. Even if that is true, we need to consider that Nv will be putting out better drivers as well. And you never know when that Cuda will come in handy.

Also, with the software you mentioned you are running, you might want the 400mb more memory the 260 offers. Granted it isn't DDR5, but the 260's DDR3 is still plenty fast and its memory bandwidth is not all that far behind that of the 4870's.
If 512mb of memory is enough for you in all situations, then clearly DDR5 is the better choice. But let's remember that we already have games released that recommend 512mb.

Cut to 5 months from now and games/software will only be more vid ram hungry. There comes a point where if your rig is wanting a tad more vid ram, it doesn't matter how fast ddr5 is when you don't have enough of it. More ram can cure many things that faster ram can't.

I'm not telling you what to get, but rather helping you look at the entire big picture here. What is best for you might not be the best choice for somebody else, especially if you are considering SLI'ing one of these cards in the future.
The 260 definitely isn't a clear loser here. Nor is the 4870. If you run at lower resolutions, are fine with 512mb ram, and don't overclock, then perhaps the 4870 is your better choice. If you do run at higher rez's, think you'll want or need more than 512mb ram, and do want to overclock, then I say the 260 is the way to go.

Think about these things and you really can't make a wrong choice.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I think about it for a while and see. I want the new computer to be able to last several years before updating the hardware.

Here is another question that might affect my choice. Is the 780i mobo or the x48 mobo "better"?
I was looking at the GIGABYTE GA-X48-DS4 costing $225 or the xfx 780i costing $220

Thanks again

Its a legit German site, they are the german version of Maxishine.

Several weeks ago when the GTX260/280 was alone out there in the market and Nvidia was price gouging their faithful to the tune of 400/650 dollars plus. Then when the ATI cards hit the shelf at less then half the price and very close performance. People were buying these ATI cards like it was boxing day!
Now that Nvidia has finally brought their cards down to the price they should have launched at we have a real choice to make.
Myself being a long time Nvidia fan have decided to jump camps and go the ATI way. My brother has one and the image is quite nicer looking than the Nvidias.
Just my thought on the subject.

Plus Ill add this quote from [H], arguably NOT a favorite for ATI "AMD’s 4800 series and NVIDIA’s GT 200 series maintain a very competitive antialiasing image quality. However AA framerate performance is a bit different story. In real world gaming scenarios, with enthusiast-level 4870 X2 and GTX 280 cards, both in single GPU and SLI/CrossFireX configurations, AMD’s high-end antialiasing techniques are more likely to be useable than NVIDIA’s. We can finally say that all of these super-quality AA settings that have been little more than marketing fluff in the past have finally become attainable with the right hardware." So, in conclusion, what was shown is an exception, not the rule, where the 4870 in CF or the x2 win out

780i - Can do SLI, not CF
X48 - Can do CF, not SLI

Which one is "better" is determined by which brand, NVIDIA (SLI) or ATI (CF) you buy.

Every game has there preferred card John, those links you posted showed HD4870 CF beating GTX 280 SLI in AOC, switch the page and 280 SLI is pawning 4870 CF in Crysis.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, is tired of Crysis, so dont go there. Look at all the rest, not 1 game that no one plays, and for the most part has given up on. Read what you want, determine what you will, makes no difference, as we are all gifted with brains to discern the difference on these cards. Believe what you will, just dont foist it upon people who dont know. Because the vast majority of us know better, and which card or cards are better, thus the other responses in this thread.

Youre still hanging on, thats good, for nVidia. Ill settle for what Ive posted here in 3 months, the question is, will you?

You gave one with no sli/crossfire review and the other had 280 sli not 260.

4870.

Unless of course you WANT to support a company that has been reaming us for well over 2 years. Personally, I would wait a week or two for the price cuts to the 4870 to come in and undercut the 260GTX again. By that time the new drivers will be out and you won't have people quoting obscure german sites in an attempt to prove the 260 is better.....

Is it true that 4800 serie doesnt support monitor bigger than 30 inches?

I see alot of Greenish in here .. from every review that I saw , 2x 4870 cf beats even 2 gtx 280 sli in almost every game but for crysis. and those were reviews from trusted sites , known system specs , driver versions .. etc. this also applies for single cards .. a single 4870 is way better than the gtx260 in every aspect (performance , power consumption , heat , noise)
also sayin the gtx260 will be superior to the 4870 for the extra memory the gtx260 has is misleading . show me a single case where the 4870 performance hit at high resolutions , even those fishy benches don't say so ..
still there's one point though , a pair of those cards in SLI or CF is too powerful for any application now .. to an extinct that nobody could notice the difference .. and in the only title where u can care about the difference(crysis) , 2 gtx260 in sli will beat the 2x4870 in cf due to poor CF support

Find me a site that does a comparison between gtx 260 sli vs 4870 cf and takes the average score at the highest res possibile with AA and AF from 10 games +?

I have showed yee.

No one cares about resolution of 2560 x 1600. Do you realize how crazy of a monitor you need to support that?
Most gamers care about the 1280 X 1024 to 1600 X 1200 resolution.

Check out the chart about the percentage of users who use certain resolutions. Over half of the total internet population uses 1024 x 768 or less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution

One no ones heard of, everyone questions, and Ive shown 3 we know. Heres another http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3341&p=21 Now, going by what was said by Guru3D, we all know these other games will only get better. So far, it looks like its even with old drivers, and hurried support. Like I said, in 3 months, this will not be the case. And after reading Gurus preview, itll be sooner than that. Watch for the real reviews of the x2 when it arrives, as Im sure theyll have all these questions answered by then, and then we can readdress this, fair enough? Im confident

Pretenders? Place to hide? What on Earth are you talking about?