Undecided like most people here......

Please help me decide/advise me. I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card soon.

For around $250 budget, I'm stuck in deciding which one to go with amongst the following models:

Sapphire 4870 512Mb around $250
HIS IceQ4 4850 512Mb around $240
HIS IceQ4 4850 1Gb around $280

They are all within great cards under $300. Of course, like many others, I want to be able to play most games on High details if it can't handle Max. Running GTA IV on 1080 res would be awesome...

Basically, I want to be able to...

- View HD movies smoothly
- Play games at high/max details on 52" 1080 res TV
- Keeping temperature cool
- Quiet fan is a +

HIS IceQ's


IceQ4 has pretty good comments about its heatsink. It keeps the thing cools and quiet fan. This is my top preference for getting the IceQs

Are there big difference in frame rates when running in 1080 resolution TV for a 1Gb and 512Mb? Is it worth the $40 extra?

4870

Sapphire 4870 is really tempting too considering it has a higher core speed and DDR5 (although I don't really know what this does). Bench marks are much greater than 4850s and it's only $10 difference.

Only concern is that this is stock and comments often say this thing is louder and it does get hot.


So, all has their own goods and bads...now could someone please advise me which is the best way to go? Greatly appreciated!

(PS: I have been looking at ATI intensively, how about Nvidias, is it just the 9800GTX comparable but this one has lower benchmarks seems like)


Looking to further discuss!