The Old King (3870x2) vs. The New Blood

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LAiN_OfTheWired

Gawd
Joined
Nov 6, 2008
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825
Hi all,

On day one of its release, I bought a Radeon 3870x2 because it was time to upgrade, I had the cash, and I wanted an impressive card. I got exactly what I ordered and am happy with it. I need to get rid of it now, though. The energy costs are eating away at me, and going to a single GPU card is one of the ways I'm cutting down on those.

I was offered $180 for it, which will be used to get a new card, but would like roughly the same performance or better performance. My real issue is that I can't find any comprehensive answers as to whether or not the 4830 and 4850 actually offer in-game performance near the 3870x2.

Depending on which review site you look at, the results can be very different. For instance, Tom's Hardware's Q3 2008 charts show the 3870x2 dominating the GTX 280 in 3DMark06, while some other site shows the 8800 GTS and 3870x2 being within 5% of each other in 3DMark Vantage. These aren't even the most radical results I've seen.

Also, no review site does their testing with an AMD processor (understandable considering that the Core2s crush their AMD counterparts and reduce the bottlenecking for more accurate results). It is also hard to find a site that does benchmarks for 1440x900 (my monitor's max res.), or the games I play.

So here's what I'm getting at with this post: If anybody can help me make an educated decision whether I could live with the 4830, bump it up to a 4850, or won't notice a difference with energy/performance and should stick with my 3870x2, that would be AWESOME.
 
3D-Mark is a sucky comparison to figure out video card perfomance.

That being said, the 4850 would be a better choice in my opinion and should give you quite a bit more performance than a 3870x2 (640 vs 800 stream processors) The 4830 will have the same amount of shader processors as the 3870x2 (640) but should still be a bit faster than the 3870x2.

Both the 4830 and the 4850 should draw quite a bit less power than the 3870x2.

Definitely take the $180 for the 3870x2.. not sure why somebody would want to pay that for that card since you can get a 4800 series card that will blow it away for less money.
 
The $180 is actually a good deal considering its never been overclocked, the card is disassembled/cleaned/re-thermal pasted with arctic silver 5 every 6 months, has never been higher than 46C on the warmer core, will come in the original packaging with all the original extras 9except 3DMark06 disc since I used the serial), and has not ever really been PUSHED. I kept game settings backed down a bit on it to keep it from maxing out (call my crazy with an enthusiast card). Considering the person will be getting a lightly-used card in excellent condition with free pro software and whatnot, that is what he offered me. Plus he's a friend, and he's currently working with an 8500GT, so he's happy to pony up the $180 for pretty instant gratification.

The 4850 may have more stream processors, but remember, the 3870x2 doesn't have 640 stream processors, it has 320x2. On a 4850 you only have one core doing all the work, but on a 3870x2 each core works alternately.

Dont get me wrong, I was eyeing that ASUS TOP 4850 and if/when this guy buys my card I do plan on looking to see if its still available for that price. At the moment, though, and definitely after Christmas, there may be a couple 4870's under the $200 range. Worth it on an energy/performance perspective?
 
To the OP some of the benches I've seen show the 3870x2 performing better than the 4850 or on par with. Though I have heard of micro-stuttering on the 3870x2 and the 4850 wouldn't have that issue.
 
LAiN_OfTheWired said:
The 4850 may have more stream processors, but remember, the 3870x2 doesn't have 640 stream processors, it has 320x2. On a 4850 you only have one core doing all the work, but on a 3870x2 each core works alternately.

Dont get me wrong, I was eyeing that ASUS TOP 4850 and if/when this guy buys my card I do plan on looking to see if its still available for that price. At the moment, though, and definitely after Christmas, there may be a couple 4870's under the $200 range. Worth it on an energy/performance perspective?
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I've never heard of a dead 3870x2 due to OCing or heat, so your first bit of justification is entirely moot.

The second part, about 2 cores being better than one, is straight insanity; you are /always/ better off with a single core with more power than two cores with less power, theoretically adding up to the same amount of power. Dual GPU introduces numerous opportunities for the reduction of performance, and scaling /never/ reaches 100%. The 3870X2 will only get with ~75% of the speed of a 4830, assuming that the 4830 GPU hasn't been tweaked further to improve performance, and... it has.

At your resolution the 4870 offers almost nothing over the 4850.
 
silent-circuit said:
I've never heard of a dead 3870x2 due to OCing or heat, so your first bit of justification is entirely moot.

The second part, about 2 cores being better than one, is straight insanity; you are /always/ better off with a single core with more power than two cores with less power, theoretically adding up to the same amount of power. Dual GPU introduces numerous opportunities for the reduction of performance, and scaling /never/ reaches 100%. The 3870X2 will only get with ~75% of the speed of a 4830, assuming that the 4830 GPU hasn't been tweaked further to improve performance, and... it has.

At your resolution the 4870 offers almost nothing over the 4850.
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QFT....
 
a 4870 will provide about 25-30% higher performance over a 4850 at his resolution. so it depends on the value proposition. at newegg, there is a 33% price difference between the cheapest 4850 vs the cheapest 4870. for me, i would say the value is there. after all is said and done, he would only be out of pocket $16.49. and who knows, he might get a better monitor in the near future, or maybe as a gift by next week, lol. it's always better to be prepared, i say :D
 
Definitely not getting a new/better monitor anytime soon, I live in Michigan, and anybody that watches either the national news or the Colbert Report on Comedy Central knows EXACTLY how our economy is doing. The only reason I'm looking to switch out cards and these ones in particular is because less energy and roughly equal performance.

Still, I have seen mostly arguments to go with the 4850 (which is really what I was thinking of going for). I think the comment about the microstuttering on the 3870x2 and not being there on the 4850 is pretty much the swaying argument at the moment. I have noticed tearing on a couple occasions in Gears of War for Windows (only when the last Ageia Physx libraries are installed, they also cause a few random graphical glitches in-game, too, for me).

Can anybody back up the comment about the 4830 outperforming the 3870x2? Every benchmark I've looked at (synthetic or in-game) says otherwise to a pretty good extent. Then again, that's why I'm HERE, I didn't trust any of those sites to begin with!
 
kumquatsrus said:
a 4870 will provide about 25-30% higher performance over a 4850 at his resolution. so it depends on the value proposition. at newegg, there is a 33% price difference between the cheapest 4850 vs the cheapest 4870. for me, i would say the value is there. after all is said and done, he would only be out of pocket $16.49. and who knows, he might get a better monitor in the near future, or maybe as a gift by next week, lol. it's always better to be prepared, i say :D
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25-30% better at 1280? I doubt thats possible even with the fastest cpu out there.
 
Trimlock said:
I'd like to disagree, the main selling point to me was their freakin stellar AA performance and at 1280x1024 you could crank that QxAAA
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depending on the cpu, the difference between a 4850 and 4870 at 1280 could be nearly nothing.
 
cannondale06 said:
25-30% better at 1280? I doubt thats possible even with the fastest cpu out there.
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according to the guru3d vga charts, it is possible based on the benchmarks.

cannondale06 said:
depending on the cpu, the difference between a 4850 and 4870 at 1280 could be nearly nothing.
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yeah, i was just basing those numbers from guru3d vga charts, but i see now that the op has an amd processor, so the difference would most likely be nominal.
 
Good call, I do in fact run an Athlon64 X2 6400+. I have taken the CPU as high as 3.45GhZ on air without going over 47C under load (Gears of War for Windows, speedfan used to measure, dont even get me started on its incredibly off-seeming numbers but they were only 1C off from the BIOS so not TOO inaccurate). I generally keep the processor at 3.32GhZ though, mainly because I don't find too much reason in overclocking it YET.

I'm also running a pretty vanilla ECS motherboard, mATX with 1 PCIE x16 slot, 1 PCIE x1 slot, and 2 PCI slots with 2 RAM slots (K8M890-M or something along those lines but I can't remember). The motherboard has been pretty rock solid, though. Trust me, I have NO regrets about getting this motherboard. Being that the PCIE x16 slot isn't even 2.0 spec, the difference between the 3870x2, 4850, and 4870 would be marginal it would seem. Still, I can't resist the energy use difference and the smell of a brand new card!

The only thing left on my agenda is to get a new, decent paying job so that I can pay my student loans and build an AM3 Deneb system.
 
When a game scales nicely with crossfire, the HD 3870X2 can outperform the HD 4870 512MB by a nice margin, but when it doesn't, it will hit the bottom rashly. I wouldn't go with any card beneath the HD 4850.
 
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