Date:
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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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.

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System Test Setup

We will be using both an EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and an ASUS P5E3-Premium CrossFire motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3. The 790i motherboard of course supports NVIDIA’s SLI while the Intel X48 chipset motherboard from ASUS supports ATI CrossFire dual card configurations. While it might be a bit “overkill,”we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Comparison Setup

For the NVIDIA GPU based video cards (260 "old", 260 SLI "old", 280, 280 SLI) we are using the 790i Ultra SLI based motherboard. For all of these video cards we are using driver version 177.92.

For the AMD GPU based video cards (4850, 4850 CrossFire, 4870, 4870 CrossFire, 4870 X2, 4870 X2 CrossFireX) we are using the X48 based motherboard. For all of these video cards we are using Catalyst 8.9 Release Candidate, which is the same build as was released to the web, it is simply the non-WHQL stamped version. This driver fully represents Catalyst 8.9 as downloaded from AMD’s website.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit installed.

This evaluation is a bit different from the norm. You will find we will cover our typical highest playable settings, laid out by game and price grouping.

Today we are covering a huge gamut of new generation video card configurations that span a very large price range. We used Newegg on September 19, 2008 to establish our pricing groups. We used was we saw to be an average “lowest” price on the video cards as noted. Given how volatile pricing is now days on video cards, we fully expect you to be able to find pricing that the contrary to what we have published here. We do however feel as though we have represented pricing that is fair to all card builders and will be a good guide for our readers as well. As always, your mileage may slightly vary.

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in bar graph form with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.