Hardware Autumn 2009 Graphics Card Upgrade Guide

The first salvos of the this years graphics card showdown have been fired, but where does your graphics card stand? We've retested every major card from the last eighteen months and beyond to help you decide if now is the time to upgrade.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2009/10/01/autumn-2009-graphics-card-buyers-guide/1

 

Excellent article, but shame about the lack of a 5850 anywhere as you mentioned.

The bang for buck graphs were pretty well rationalised, in my view.

 

Yeah, really needs some 5850 results considering a lot of sites have reviews of it up already.

It looks like most places are getting stock of them in on Monday, and going by reviews they're not too much slower than the 5870 but at a much nicer price point. If I had to upgrade my card in the next few weeks/months, then it would probably be to a 5850 at current prices.

 

Time to upgrade from my 8800GTS 640 MB ? What do you guys think ?

 

I'll keep my eye on factory-overclocked HD5850, an 880/1400MHz overclock is all you need to match an HD5870.

For higher than 1680x1050 yes.

 

Suprised you didn't use the 8800 GTX as one of the test cards.

 

I play my games at 1920x1200 (Samsung T260), and I need a fast GPU... This should be a no-brainer... I'd just buy the HD5870... but, I have a Q6600, I'll be holding the HD5870 back...

What do you think? HD5850 or HD5870?

PS: It would be nice to see an article mixing old systems like Q6600, E7200, E8500, AMD Phenom 9950, with new ones, to see how much GPU power we are loosing, and what sould be more "fit" to buy, accordingly to the CPU

 

At the moment I game at 1280x1024 due to my monitor and the 8800GT I have is not as good as it can be due to it having 256mb ram. So I'm looking to get an upgrade by the end of the year. Looking at the GTX260, I see it'll need a 700W PSU on my AM3 system and I only have a 500W PSU (and a good one). I don't want to have to buy another PSU just so I can run a GTX260 as it'll end up being quite a lot of cash. So I'm looking at the 4870 card as it has lower PSU requirements. Good choice?

 

Think the 4770 should have been in there as well

 

This my reasoning for upgrading my CPU - I think while the Q6600 is an AWESOME processor, its holding back the 285 GTX - it seemed to be coping better with the SLi'ed 8800 GTX's.

Hopefully the parts I want will stay in stock until next pay day!

 

A GTX 260 won't need a 700W PSU - a decent 500W one should suffice, providing it has enough amps.

Maybe you should try giving it more than a 40MHz overclock

 

my 9800 gtx is still serving me fine although by feb next year i may look to update although i cant see anything coming out that should challenge it at 1680

 

I would like to know if it would make a difference using an AMD chip set in a retest of all the cards. I have always been bombarded by friends and "experts" with the theory the ATI works best with AMD and GeForce with Intel? I do stand and want to be corrected on this matter so I have a better understanding of the truth...

suggestions?

 

Well im using a ATI 4850 on an nForce 720 Nvidia Mobo, and i havent had any issues, all my benchmark scores are within the 1-3% margin of error you get with any setup.

 

Nice article , makes me love my gtx260 even more... cheers......

 

Excellent article, looking to do an upgrade very soon. My PC just packed in (a crash followed by some essential files corrupted) so instead of going to the trouble of getting windows XP back on there only to go to the trouble of getting windows 7 on there in a few weeks, I'm just putting up with my laptop and waiting for win7.

Seeing as I'm only willing to pay £150 max for a GFX card, I won't be able to get a DX11 one for a good few months then? Ah well, I'll probably buy a DX10 card, seeing as there's not any DX11 games around for a while it's not a huge loss and I don't really miss DX10 on my old 7800GTX right now anyway.

Looks like I'll get a 4890, only 125 on scan for the power colour one.

 

I just have to throw in my two cents here. I love how AMD/ATI released a new powerhouse and at a price point WELL below NVIDIA's flagship the 295. I'm sure NVIDIA will come out with a monster in it's GT300 series soon enough, but it will be so unreasonably priced that it won't even be worth considering for the masses. Personally, I do have the money to blow on them if i actually wanted to, but for the (typically) marginal increase in performance, why waste it? I could get more bang for my buck by throwing the extra $300 down a hole and wishing really hard. I have no specific attachment to either brand, but I can't in anything even resembling a proper state of mind justify flat out wasting that kind of money for such an insignificant gain. Now who knows, maybe NVIDIA will come out with something so spectacular it will actually be worth the drastic price hike. But mark my words, if the past has shown us ANYTHING, if there is some sort of dramatic performance increase, the monetary jump will be equally astounding.

 

Specs of my PSU are here: http://www.be-quiet.net/be-quiet.net/data/media/_stories/220/sp_e6_500_EN.pdf

Is it enough? I'm running Phenom II X4 955 BE, 2x1Gb sticks, 1 SATA hard disk, 1 DVDRW drive. 3 120 fans, CPU fan. I want to increase the memory to 4Gb soon using 2x2Gb sticks and replace CPU fan with a Titan Fenrir.

 

The cheapest HD4890 I find in Germany is 133pounds while the Vapor X version (which should cure the noise) is 146pounds...

 

It's actually at 3.2GHz (mobo can't take more, its a shoddy one), I just keep forgetting to change it