The Glade 4.0

Yes, one of these threads again . . .

I think the time has come to upgrade my Radeon 4850.

I did some poking around and found that the Radeon 5700 seems like a good card for a good price.

On the other hand, nVidia is yet another option.

Is there a card from nVidia that is generally thought to be "better" than what I am looking to upgrade to in the ATi family?

I'm looking at around the $200 range.

There are no nvidia cards that are better than the new ATI 5 series.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I've heard for a while that nVidia quality has been slipping, but I wasn't sure if these were words brought on by brand loyalty to ATi or not.

I'll keep an eye on the 5k series for sure.

Nvidia doesn't have a DX11 part out yet from what I understand, so that, in and of itself, is a reason to go ATI.

The icing on the cake is the 5-series cards are faster, more efficient, and generally more cost effective than the nVidia offerings.

If I had the $800, I'd go purchase a pair of 5870 cards and try to stuff em in my box.

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Holy shitsnacks!

nVidia quality isn't slipping. They just got backstabbed again by MS on the DirectX thing.

That said, if ATi driver support hasn't pissed you off and driven you away to date, there's no performance reason to switch to nVidia at the moment.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Not quite sure what you mean by driver support... I've had nothing but ATI cards, and never had any problem whatsoever with drivers.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Get another ATi. I haven't been religiously reading the tech forum so not sure whether this has been covered, but have you read anything about nVidia's G84/G86 issues? Seriously, read this long, excellent, long, detailed, long, three-part series of articles to learn how glaringly nVidia screwed up in engineering these chips.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... -defective

In a nutshell, nVidia selected a material for their dies that couldn't handle the job. Everything they designed on a 55nm or 65nm process before changing materials (google Namics 8439-1 underfill) is flawed, and is prone to fail. To hell with them. I seriously won't buy another graphics card for them for a solid couple of years at a minimum, until I can see if screwing up is going to become a recurring theme with them.

I'm a little biased, granted. I've had to tell students over and over again for the past year or so that this is why their laptop display died. It's a thermal issue, and laptops are on again/off again, in and out of the bag. As far as I can tell, the greater frequency of heating and cooling taxes the GPU more rapidly than the far less frequently turned off desktop systems, so the failure point in desktop based nVidia GPUs on these chipsets is farther out.

What's really messed up is the notebook manufacturers like Dell and HP issuing BIOS updates to run the fan all the freaking time, which a) kills battery life and b) really only lengthens the period of time before the GPU is going to die anyway - hopefully for the manufacturer, at a point likelier to be after your warranty's lapsed.

Anyway, sorta related to your question... just thought I'd approach it from a different angle.

The only issue I am having that (I think) is video card related is I blue screen of death when trying to access the task manager. The reason I think it is a video card issue, is because the screen "fuzzes out" right before it blue screens. Kind of like how a scrambled TV station looks. Odd that it does that at the task manger tho . . . don't think I have ever heard of that happening to anyone else.

Anyway, I'll be taking another look into the Radeon 5700. Thanks for the suggs, all.

funny, the 4850 is on my list of possibilities when I get a new PC (likely I'll go for a five series, the "bang for the buck," the 4850 is awesome.)

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OK, Jeryn, I'm gonna 'fess up and tell you that I just brought this up at work, where we just start leasing Dells Latitudes this year and are starting to get reports of batteries losing their life after doing a BIOS update to fix some graphics issues. Just wanted to say thanks for making me look smart.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge