Thread: Radeon 4830 or Geforce 9800gt??

Originally Posted by MoufRoof

Originally Posted by SoySoldier

Originally Posted by MoufRoof

I bought the Sapphire hd 4830. Got it installed yesterday. My god that thing is big. I had to move the hard drive up one slot to make room to plug in the 6 pin pci power plug. So far I can't tell a whole lot of difference over the 8600gt, but that's because I haven't upgraded the motherboard. That's coming here in the next couple of weeks. Bf2 does run a little smoother though.

The mobo should not be bottlenecking your card; the difference between PCI-E busses is not being utilized yet and especially at that level of card (the 4870x2 maybe). the 4830 is a HUGE upgrade over the 8600. it may be that BF2 does not push the 4830 very hard. Do you have Crysis or Oblivion? Turn up the AA and Af and let 'er rip. Should be a world of difference.

So what you're saying is that the difference between pci 1.1 and 2.0 only matters in more demanding games? I've tried to read up on bus speeds and 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, etc... and it really goes over my head. On a 1.1 motherboard how much am I losing running my 4830 compared to running it on a pcie x16 2.0 motherboard? I currently have an Asus M2NE-SLI.

Each "lane" in a PCI-E bus has a data rate of 250MB/s and a transfer rate of 2.5GT/s.
16x implies there 16 "lanes" to use.
2.0 implies it is twice the bandwidth of 1.0 (there is a 3.0 also).

So, PCI-E 16x 2.0 allows for 8000MB/s and a transfer rate of 5.0GT/s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

Now I am having a hell of a time finding out what any modern video card actually in terms of transfer rate and data rate...

I read on one of these bizzilion pages a GTX280 has a transfer rate of 1 GT/s... well less than even the 2.5 GT/s offered by PCI-E 1.0.

Most specs I find give the memory bandwidth in terms of GB/s.. but that is not helpful... anyone?

We need to find the bandwidth these cards actually use in the PCI-E not in the memory. I have been at it for 40 minutes...

I still have not found any definitive source on exactly what the transfer rates and data rates are for newer cards. I found some on AGP (and they are way low) cards. Most discussions I see indicate that the difference people see between using a 2.0 card in 1.1 or 2.0 slots is minimal or nonexistent.

Did you try it with a really intensive game yet? I bet Oblivion had to be turned down pretty far to get good frames on your 8600, but oughtta run beautifully on the 4830. Crysis would be another good one.