results upgrading from a 8800 to hd4850...

[Icetech]

Just installed a HD4850, heres my thoughts so far:)

First my setup..

P5B-E
Q9300
4gb of mem, XP pro(i know it only uses 3.3, but thats better than 2 for 5 wow's)

some 3dmark #'s with the old XFX 8800GTS 512 meg
with my core 2 duo@3.4ghz
9879
q9300 at 3.2ghz
10818
q9300@3.4ghz 11009
then q9300@3.4ghz with the vid card oc'd to 900mem/600core
12320..

highest i ever had with my setup is around 13k 3dmarks with my c2d at 3.8ghz...
Just installed the hd4850, will have results in 20 mins:)

[Icetech]

Well.. im not overly impressed, at least using 3dmark06..
with the q9300@3.2ghz i got 13128 marks... not a big jump..

will have to wait til a busy night in shat and see how bad it is.. thats the main reason i am switching to the quad and vid card...

BTW, i am mainly posting this in case anyone is thinking of getting one.. i think its a amazing deal at $175.. and the picture quality is of course amazing...

[BobGnarly]

Sad, but tbh, I'm not very surprised.

My understanding is that the 4800 series are roughly equivalent to 9800gtx, which is minor upgrade from 8800gtx, which is minor upgrade from 8800gts. So you're getting two minor upgrades and a sidegrade, which depending on how much you like to play the approximating game, could be a near wash on a simple graphical game like wow.

Still a nifty card tho, so grats anyway.

[Icetech]

well.. not costing me anythign to play around:) i run a comptuer store.. so its free fun... btw.. i guess there are some newer drivers im trying to hunt for that fix some issues... one guy went from 13k to 18k... will see.. and everytest i have seen puts the 4850 way over the 8800gts... mainly in games though.. i guess 3dmark isn't a good judge of this card.. ah well will see how it works in wow..

And while wow doesnt' take much power, when you run 5 on one card it does matter a bit:)

[Tight]

mmm i started with a 32 bit vista. with the 3.3 gig ram out of 4.
then i was having some really shitty problems with the PC so i installed the vista 64. made a huge difference on my quad core running in shatt with 4 gig's in stead of 3.3 on 5 acc..

so just a thought.

[Icetech]

Tight, yeah i switched my work machine to 64xp and it seemed to run smoother, i just can't bring myself to nuke my home box yet:)

[Icetech]

This shoulda been in the hardware review section eh? :)

Well.. im home and at first i HATED the card.. i was getting 15-20fps in a low pop area.. was like WTF!
Problem was i was stuck in ati's version of dual view... took me like 10 mins to find how to switch it:)
now im in span, and the main bounces between 53-55 while flying, between 30-35 in shatt which is AMAZING for me.. shatt was real bust tonight too.. my 8800 choked on it bad.. like 10fps and locking.. i had zero stutter:) all 4 cpu cores hanging around 75% instead of my dual core that was pegged in shat...

all in all for around $160ish amazing deal for a card..

[Freddie]

Interesting, thanks for posting this.

[-silencer-]

well.. not costing me anythign to play around:) i run a comptuer store.. so its free fun...
Thanks for testing that out for anyone else with an 8800GTS. $175 is a fantastic deal for the card if you've got an older card that doesn't cut it anymore, but I definitely wouldn't recommend that anyone with an 8800GTS 512 spend $175 for a slight boost in performance.

[Icetech]

Silencer, thing is, its not a slight boost... going from 5-10fps in shatt on a busy night to 40-45 now (upgraded to the beta drivers last night and i do hit 50 sometimes in shat) and no stutter or anything in shatt.. i would say it was worth it to me:)

[Freddie]

I think Icetech's results demonstrate that a card's average performance doesn't necessarily predict what it will do in particular circumstances. On average, Silencer is right that an HD4850 is only a little better than an 8800GTS. But in this particular situation, for some reason, it's apparently a lot better.

You can see this sort of thing pretty frequently on charts in hardware reviews. They'll test a card with six or eight games and on one of the games, the card performs much better or worse than it does on average.

Here are some nice charts of average performance for a lot of cards (although they don't include the 8800GT or 8800GTS):

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4870,1964-19.html