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Pemalite 4 days ago
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Bofferbrauer2 said:
Pemalite said:

All AMD needs to do is a pull a Radeon HD 4870/5870. - It may not have been the fastest GPU on the block, but they were stupidly good value... And AMD was awarded handsomely with volume sales.

They need to realize they don't have a premium offering, thus their prices need to reflect that.

My current GPU is getting very long in the tooth, so I am looking to upgrade sooner rather than later... But I am not seeking the fastest or the cheapest, I am seeking the best bang for buck... Like the Geforce 8800GT, Radeon 9700 and other legendary parts.

When mentioning both, you should really have mentioned the legendary Radeon HD 4770.

  • Performance almost on par with the 4850, sometimes even beating it? Check!
  • Affordable? Doublecheck! (MSRP was just $109(!), the 4850 cost almost twice as much with $199)
  • Cool and quiet? Also check. TDP was just 80W for the card.

It was really the best GPU one could get back in the days without breaking the bank, and NVidia had nothing to counter it. Oh, they tried with the GTX 275 (the first 70 card btw)... but it wasn't really faster, much more expensive ($250) and much hotter with a TDP of 219W

The irony is the Radeon HD 4730 was a better GPU than the 4770.
Same number of functional units, but the 4730 had the bandwidth of a 4830... And some variants had higher clockspeeds than the 4770.
And the other benefit? It was cheaper and overclocked like a champ being a die-harvested 4870.

But you are correct the 4770 was a legendary card.

The 4850 at $199 was still stupidly affordable compared to what we have today... $199 USD in 2008 accounting for inflation would be the equivalent of $293 USD today.


...I should also mention how legendary the Radeon 6950 was.
I had four of them in Crossfire... And using a simple BIOS mod, I was able to unlock the extra shader cores and turn them into full-fledged Radeon 6970's.
..And this was at a time when you could use a BIOS glitch (ACC aka. Advanced Clock Calibration) to unlock CPU cores and cache on Phenom/Athlon processors.

Last edited by Pemalite - 4 days ago

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