1GB 4870 OC vs GTX 260 Core 216 OC?

[maudio3]

Ok i am down to these final cards for the setup.. Which one should i go ahead and get? I will be overclocking them so i am wondering which will give me the best performance when overclock it as well..

1GB 4870 OC vs GTX 260 Core 216 OC?

 

[Priest]

All the benchmarks say go with the 4870 1GB for the most part. I just made this decision myself (it was very difficult). I decided to go with NVidia with the GTX 260 216.

One thing I noticed in benchmarks with the NVidia card is that a lot of them did not score as well on average framerates as the ATi solutions, but for reviews that had min framerate also posted the NVidia card were almost always higher. Sometimes by a good margin. I would rather have high minimum framrates, then the absolutely highest average.

Also I much prefer NVidia manufactures, they usually have better warranties, tech support and with EVGA and BFG they have a awesome trade up program.

And this is coming from who's last video cards were a 9800 Pro, X850XTX PE, X1950XTX PE and I had a HD4870 1GB, but it had a faulty fan and I had to RMA it. I got a BFG GTX 260 MaxCore OCX instead. As a matter of fact I just got it and installed it 1 hour ago and am currently stress testing it.

Also for OCing, the 4870 runs decently hot so its a little hard to OC and keep the fan at a tolerable level. And for the 1GB version it has higher density chips that do not overclock nearly as well as the 512 version. if you were to the the 4870 though definitely go with the 1GB version, its a good performance increase and OCing the memory on that card does not give much for results.

 

[maudio3]

Yeah i need somthing that is going to run pretty cool in my HTPC.. PLus i need some quietness ..

 

[BigCactus]

Alright, I had the 4870 1gb card for a couple of weeks...and I eventually switched to a msi gtx260 OC version. I will say don't go with a gtx260 core 216 video card...as there isn't going to be any kind of performance gain whatsoever on those cards to warrant an extra $100 on the price tag over the regular gtx260.

For an HTPC I'd say stick with a 4850. But if you have to choose, consider this:

4870 1GB card is going to have better image quality in games and video apps. The Sapphire 4870 1GB card I had ran very cool at 55-59c idle and 79c load. It's quite apparent that the 4870 1GB cards run a lot cooler than it's 512mb brother. Performance of the 4870 1GB card is pretty much equivalent to my MSI GTX260 OC card in cod4. The 4870 will consume more watts at idle.

My msi gtx260 runs just as cool as the sapphire 4870 1gb card, but a lot cooler at idle. The gtx260 clocks itself at a whopping 300mhz at idle and temps are in the 40s. At load temps are in the high 70s for me. Keep in mind though that the msi gtx260 oc card uses solid state capacitors and are probably just plain better than the reference models from evga and bfg. Also the gtx260 costs $100 less. I got my msi gtx260 oc version for $197 at the egg. Granted it was open box, but the card runs like a champ, and came with box and accessories, and will be covered under msi's warranty. Plus your getting close to gtx280 performance for about the same price of a 4850. My buddy had a core 216 video card and even though we clocked it to superclocked speeds, there was absolutely no noticeable difference in performance. I'd say if you do get a gtx260, get the cheaper 192 version.