4870 an upgrade from 4850?

i would say yay. I upgraded from a 4850 to a 4870. Huge bump in performance in Grid (can now set everything to max at 1680x1050). Crysis is still being a little bitch though. But thats how Crysis is...

Nay.
But you might consider; adding more memory, even on a 32 bit OS 4Gb is handy, even though a 32 bit OS can only use about 3.5 Gb of it. Taking the girl/boyfriend, husband/wife/self out for a little entertainment. Or perhaps
Investing it wisely in Prune Futures
That last one was humour.

My system:

e4600
4GB Memory
4850
Vista 64-bit
22" LCD

Would upgrading the CPU be more help? Is getting a crossfire board for 2x 4850 worth it?

I'd take a girl out, but my gf just broke up with me. And, it wasn't computer related. Haha. I just have a little extra money right now and thought I'd take advantage of Christmas sales is all. Anyways, I don't really need to upgrade anyways.

A faster CPU would give a noticeable difference?

What about a gtx 260; would that be a decent upgrade?

Consider this: Is 10%-15% performance increase worth $180? I would say absolutely not... but you're probably richer then me lol.

I like waiting a long time to upgrade, because then its like a HUGE jump. I went from:
AMD 3500
2GB DDR2-533
7900GS... to

Intel E8400 @ 3.6Ghz
4GB DDR2-800
HD4870

I used to get 20FPS in TF2, now I get 150 . Good times.

Man, times they are a-changin. I bought my HD4870 back in June for $310... and it was only the 512MB model.

I just sent my 3870x2 back for replacement. BSOD's on 8.11, and even rollback to 8.7. It just seems to have died after 10 months of no issues (so I know it's not the 8.12 Crossfire issue). I'm thinking of using it in spare PC in the bedroom.

So, I"m looking at a 4870 too. If I got a 4850, it would be as fast as the old card, but without Crossfire issues. A 4870 is a bit of an improvement and I don't have a Crossfire board. Spending over $450 10 months after the same is out of the question and I'll never get another dual GPU card again. That was my first multi-GPU setup and I wasn't impressed. Only a couple of CRPGs I played really supported Crossfire to any degree and the boosts weren't that huge.

Right now, I"m just playing LOTRO with the HD3200 IGP, not too bad, but not as good as a discrete card. Should I just use the 3870x2 until June and the next refresh, or go 4870 now? Prices are good.

My wife plays games more than I do, and we spent the whole weekend fellowshipping in LOTRO. We have two kinships we started; The Crafty Rovers on Windfola and Order of Less Important Knights on Silverlode.

The fact that she played the same Commodore 64 RPGs as me, the fact that Star Wars was her idea of a date movie (though we didn't know each other in 1976), made me fall in love with her. I feel sorry for guys with wives or girlfriends who dislike games, especially role playing titles.

No better way to waste time together. Except for a walk in the redwoods, but we don't live in Northern California. It's way too flat here in Texas. LOL

keep the 4850 and get an e8400 instead. Alternatively, keep your money and wait for when you'll actually need an upgrade.

if you're going the gpu upgrade path then yeah you'll surely get and feel the performance increase.

now if you're talking about the cpu, might as well get a quaddie in there.

he could have a good overclocking motherboard, so it could cost zero, zilch, nada, I'm saying is stick with what you've got and overclock your CPU