[General Battuta]

I have an Antec 900 case (so, plenty of room, I think), an ASUS P5Q-E LGA motherboard (if that means anything specific to any of you), a 700W power supply with at least two PCI-E cables free, and plenty of horsepower (3.0 ghz Core 2 Duo, 4 gb of RAM).

I need a video card to replace my trusty Radeon HD 4870 (512mb), which has gone to the great beyond.

Suggestions? Price is not a huge obstacle at the moment (whee birthday gift), but a decent financial range would be in order.

What should I be looking at?

[Scourge of Ages]

All I can offer is the latest issue of PC Gamer's recommendations:

RadeonHD 5870 for $399
or GeForce GT 220 for $65 (WHAT??)

[General Battuta]

I think the 5870 is a bit much.

I'm looking at either the 5830 or the 5850 as a financial reach.

It's bizarre to see Nvidia getting curb stomped in the market like this. What happened?

[Scourge of Ages]

Beats me completely. I'm about 6 months behind on all video game/technology news thanks to my backlog of magazines.

[Fury]

If you can find 4890 or 4870 1GB cards anywhere, those I think still offer better bang for the buck than any other card in the market right now. And these cards should be real cheap now. Failing that, either Radeon 5830 or 5850 is probably best shot since NVIDIA's price/performance ratio is all kinds of buggered up.

Seems like NVIDIA is again blowing it up with Fermi, it doesn't look like AMD is in any hurry to reduce 5k series prices.

[General Battuta]

I could probably dig up a 1gb 4870 somewhere, since I just burnt out a 512 mb 4870, but if it's on my parent's dime I'm happy to upgrade to a 5830/50, and both are comparably priced to what I originally spent for the 4870.

In the future I can slap in a second one and go Crossfire.

[Klaustrophobia]

careful about that crossfire thinking.  that always seems to be the most future-proof option, but really by the time you get around to it, it would be more effective to replace with a newer single card.  i had that plan with my 4850, but throwing a second one in now wouldn't do me as well as coughing up for a 5k series.

i haven't looked at the 5k series in great detail, but if they follow form, the 5850 will pretty much be a slower clocked 5870.  the 5830 might skimp on a couple things.  if memory serves, it has lower memory bandwidth and such.  if you've got the cash, go for it.  if you feel like saving some, the 5770 should be pretty much the same horsepower as a 4870 with the latest bells and whistles.  i don't know how heavy into the games you are, but you really don't need the latest hardware to run things decently.  i get by in crysis with a 4850 and an AMD 5600+, 2gb ram.

as for why NVIDIA has fallen, they were happy to ride out their brand name for far too long, and didn't really develop anything new.  they pretty much just keep upping the horsepower.  have they even graduated to GDDR5 yet?  last i saw, their top lines were still on 3.

[Ghostavo]

What resolution do you use or plan to use?

[Admiral LSD]

Seeing as you had a 4870 before, the 5770 is probably the absolute lowest card you want to be looking at (in the 5 series. If you can get another 4870 or 4890 cheap enough then they still aren't bad options). Performance is somewhere between the 4870 and the 4890 and you can pick them up for around USD$150-170. The 5850 is considerably more expensive, starting around USD$299, but will leave the old 4870 eating its dust.

Don't bother with Crossfire, the performance from both it and SLi have never justified the cost, not just in monetary terms, but in power consumption and heat output as well. A single 5870 is faster than pretty much anything you could achieve using two GPUs from the last generation while using less power and putting out less heat. More importantly though, performance doesn't tank when you run a game that isn't fully optimised for multiple GPUs. The 5850 isn't far enough behind the 5870 in real world performance to really worry about it.

It's bizarre to see Nvidia getting curb stomped in the market like this. What happened?

What happened was that nVidia (along with everyone else) wrote ATi off after the 2000-series fiasco and so sat on their hands for the next generation releasing re-badged versions of the 8-series in the low-end and the GTX260 and GTX280, an architecture that wasn't quite ready for the prime time, into the high end. When ATi released the 4000-series, nVidia weren't (and still aren't) in a position to properly compete.

Seems like NVIDIA is again blowing it up with Fermi, it doesn't look like AMD is in any hurry to reduce 5k series prices.

The problem with Fermi is that the performance isn't that far ahead of the 5000-series Radeons given the increases in price, heat output and power consumption. It has a few aces up it's sleeve, but none are worth forking over for at this point in time. As for pricing, it's less about AMD not wanting to reduce them than it is TSMC still having production issues leading to limited supply, something that nVidia are having trouble with as well.

[General Battuta]

Looks like I'm getting a 5850.

Currently posting from a screen rendered in 640x480 in 16 bits of color! At least it let me boot into safe mode this time instead of disintegrating into visual hash on the BIOS screen.

[Fury]

Weren't you supposed to have another Radeon in your PC for time being?

[General Battuta]

No, I had somebody else's old 8800 GTS, but I had to give it back.

Now on a laptop.

[Hades]

have they even graduated to GDDR5 yet?  last i saw, their top lines were still on 3.

They have with some of the newer 300-series mobile cards, the new GTX 480m laptop card, the desktop 400-series, and perhaps some quadro cards. Oddly enough, they had GDDR5 cards for mobile computers before they did for desktops.

And yeah, go for the 5850.

EDIT: I don't think anyone will take advantage of the GTX 480m anyway, many of the more major laptop makers (like Acer or Alienware) seem to be moving away from Nvidia to ATI. Seems to have an exceptionally high memory clock, higher than the GTX 295, I believe, but it has a lower core clock. Damn, wish my Acer came with this card.