Bah. I prefer nvidia because their cards are smaller and produce less heat, and my tower is already pretty crammed. The fact that my motherboard supports SLi and not Crossfire is another incentive to go nvidia, as well, just in case I ever decide to get a second card in the future.

Don't give me this fanboy stuff.

Right know this is incorrect, the new chips a huge monolitic desings, they suck a lot of power and make a lot o heat :S

So far nVidia right now is a bad choice, a bunch of defective chips (motherboards and video cards) are out there, and the life time of those cards is significant lower than a normal and no defective cards...

No, it's even more stupid than the console wars. With consoles you've got a company making exclusive games for it, different interfaces, controllers, lots of stuff.

With cards, it's price for performance, that's all, and the new ATI cards are beating the newest Nvidia cards. There are tons of great Nvidia cards, probably more than ATI, but there's no reason to buy one over the other if the reviews are good.

Read customer reviews and if they're good, buy the card. That's all you have to do.  Same with processors...AMD usually has a better price/performance, and Intel has more cutting-edge typically...but there's a processor from both makers for any desire...fanboyism for PC hardware is dumb.

I had better luck with the nvidias I have owned vice the ATI cards. Seems like the drivers work a little smoother....ehh...who knows. This is a great deal though, I may look into a new rig. I am one of those guys still sporting an AGP slot on my desktop........(sob)!

Any recomendations for a top AGP card, seems like they stopped making them for AGP slots after the 8500? Oh well.

Assuming you don't upgrade mobos with each video card, which no one does, choosing Ati or Nvidia essentially means being stuck with one make or the other.

Until someone develops a Xfire/SLI certified mobo, which I don't see happening.

Ati did have a clear lead in price to performance with the 4870/4850, but that forced Nvidia to adjust their prices significantly on the GTX280/260 as well as their G92 based lineup. Good deals on 9800GTX and 9800GX2s to be had currently.

Either way, the consumer was the clear winner.

In some ways the GTX260 is still a better card than the HD4870, but it boils down to which applications (games) you're running as well as the price you're able to buy them at.

Just bought a 4870 for $225 after rebate even though I have a preference for Nvidia cards. This means in the future, I'll be buying a Xfire mobo and a second 4870 card.


Doing the "buy a cheap pre-configured CPU and then upgrade it" can be a decent strategy (still far easier than a complete build), but depending on your upgrade path, it can actually end up costing more over the long run unless you are strict about what you're planning on upgrading.

I've done this myself, but feel that a complete build allows for using better quality, hand picked components at roughly the same prices, maybe more, maybe less depending upon the deals you can pick up in sourcing parts.

That's not consistantly true, and it's actually a misconception.

In this cards case, for instance, it runs competely cool and is easily powered by the PCI slot, yet it manages to take advantage of that ice-cool heat sink and fan. There's no way that it'll run hot, lol.

@OP

This is actually a great deal, I'm considering getting it soon. The PC and the card. It'll run pretty much any game on the market at stardard settings and that includes Crysis, though you won't get the performance you want, and you certainly don't wanna run it on high settings, lol.

Yes, but there are a couple of assumptions that you're making here.

A. That we want a future-proof machine.

B. That we won't tear up the parts we buy putting them together.

Now, I'm not totally ignorant of PC building. I built my current rig. However, basically(and I'm taking my info from that review and analysis), this cheap card available here is able to run pretty much any current gen PC game, and any close future games(Dragon's Age) and even on modest level, Crysis, at a steady clip. It also comes with Windows Vista, and is literally plug and play. It would take 2 minutes plus install time to have this baby up and running whatever game you want to play that's currently out, and look better than the Playstation 3/Xbox 360 while doing it. It'd cost you around 500 bucks after shipping, which granted, is much more than the 360 costs.

It would also not overheat like a built rig might(in my limited experience, first rigs usually suffer from this issue), and if it did somehow become unrepairable, you have a warranty.

Now, certainly, for 500 bucks after shipping, you could build a slightly better rig, assuming you are also buying Vista. However, in doing so, you're getting a relatively small return for a lot of work.

Because, what you're buying/working for isn't actually the ability to play most current games better, though granted they would play better assuming it came out right. What you're buying/working for is the security you have in an upgradable system. A "future-proof" system. You're building a foundation on which you can upgrade and modify your current gaming pc so it will play the games released in 4 years, not just the ones out today.

There's two lines of thought on that.

A. You upgrade your current rig.

B. You buy a new one.

If you're in the "I will buy a new one when I must" camp, and don't really care for all the technical jargon and just want to play games without having a world of technological know-how forced upon you, then you need to buy a pre-built rig and a low power consumption graphics card, like this one, and just play the damn games, and forget about how many mega-gigs your pixil-cagbak maligns.

Where am I going wrong?

I'm sold Squallim. PC gaming is almost appealing to me after reading your thread and its links.

I just didn´t like ATIs sofware in the past... getting multiple screens or a TV running was always a pain in the ass... maybe this changed but I just like Nvidia more because the software just always has woked for me... the rest is card specific anyway...

 lol

Its an awesome little card. Im seriously considering getting the 4670 for my Home theatre PC because you can output sound + video through the DVI ports on the modern radeon cards with the HDMI dongle that you get with a lot of these cards. Its quite a powerful little number anyway and ATI has hit the jackpot in the $80, $160, $240, $300 price brackets. HD 4670, HD 4850, HD 4870 and HD 4870 1gb all beat their respective Nvidia counterparts at the price ranges listed. I don't see why anyone would want to pay extra for an SLI motherboard when an Intel motherboard is better, cheaper, and does Xfire with ATI giving the beat down to Nvidia at every price point a reasonable person might pay and at the unreasonable end with the 4870 X2.

@Everyone - This is the mainstream card at the moment. High performance, easy to set up, it works in every computer that has a PCI-E slot and it won't overwhelm the stock cooling of any computer because A. It doesn't output much heat and B. It dumps the hot air out the back of the case and it would probably make your computer cooler.