Introduction

Date:: Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Category:: GPU / Video Cards
Manufacturers:: Various
Author:: Brent Justice
Editor:: Kyle Bennett

Radeon 4800 & GeForce 200 Series Value Guide

We look at the 10 combined Radeon 4800 and GeForce 200 series configurations. Our evaluation scales from what you get when you spend $150 on a video card, to what gaming gains should be expected when you spend $1100 on 4870X2 CrossFireX . Real world gameplay and Apples-to-Apples as well.

We want to see how today’s new generation of video cards stack up in terms of gaming value. There exists a wide range of video cards you can purchase; from the $150 Radeon HD 4850 to the $1100 Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX. How do figure out what will suit our needs? Also, is there such a thing as “GPU overkill” right now? We are here to answer these questions and find out what kind of gameplay experience and performance is delivered between $150 and $1100 using the newest generation GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA in single and multi-card configurations.

Please Digg to Share!

The format of this evaluation is quite different from most, think of this as more of a buying guide or a “value guide” as it is titled. If you click on the article’s drop-down menu, you can select which game and price range of video cards you’d like to see and how they stack up. We have used real-world street pricing as is current on Newegg.com as of September 19, 2008 (and we did go back and check again this morning to make sure we did not miss our targets by much / as of writing this though, TigerDirect is advertising a 4870 X2 for $500).

We have created three groups of video cards that fall within a certain price range that we defined.

We have ten combinations of video cards being evaluated today in four games. We have the Radeon HD 4850, Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire, Radeon HD 4870, Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire, Radeon HD 4870 X2, Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX, GeForce GTX 260 (original), GeForce GTX 260 SLI (original), GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 280 SLI.

For our price range groupings we have chosen to group as such:

$150-$300 Price Range

Radeon HD 4850 - $150

GeForce GTX 260 - $215

Radeon HD 4870 - $250

Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire - $300

$390-$550 Price Range

GeForce GTX 280 - $390

GeForce GTX 260 SLI - $430

Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire - $500

Radeon HD 4870 X2 - $550

$780 - $1100 Price Range

GeForce GTX 280 SLI - $780

Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX - $1100

As you can see, there is a large gap in between $300-$390, there are simply no video cards that currently fill that gap, which we feel is an important space not being tapped right now. There is also a large price difference between GTX 280 SLI and 4870 X2 CrossFireX.