hey all, I am genuinely pleased with AMD/Ati's new offering the 4850, and after reading the review on G3D I want to upgrade, but I had a few questions... my current spec is: p4 3.2ghz 3gb ddr2 800mhz ram 256mb 7900gt psu 460w (33A/12V) will it be a considerable boost in games? or should i wait and upgrade my entire system before moving on? i generally play crysis, mass effect, cod4, assassins creed ... will the 4850 work fine with the existing psu and other pc components? cheers! SB
Your power supply isn't powerful enough to power the HD 4850 along with your processor being a huge bottleneck and you wouldn't barely get it's full potential. I'd recommend waiting untill you buy a completely new rig.
Here is a good article on what you might expect. It shows the gains you can expect even on a subpar system with a modern video card. Basically, the CPU will bottleneck the system, but you can still expect to see at least the triple in 3D performance. Once you upgrade the whole system, the bottleneck will cease and you'll get a very healthy boost, but it's not like you'll only see a 10FPS gain by switching cards, even on your rig. I'm in an almost identical situation as you are. A full upgrade cannot come all at once, due to logistical issues. I bring in my stuff from the US (I live in Brazil where everything is triple the price), and there is a limit my contact can bring, the rest coming in August.
You will see a massive performance gain if your psu can hack it. I put a 3850 in the rig on the left and got around double the performance. Considering how OLD a 7900GT is, lots of IQ settings will perform phenomially better. For example HDR won't kill your framerates so much, same with AA/AF.
that is what i was wondering, hilbert hints that on peak usage on a fairly modern system the PSU usage is around 360-380Watts. It should not be a problem psu wise, i hope? not too sure lol
I did some digging and I think it will increase your load by 45W over the 7900GT. I dunno if there's an easy way to tell how much power your system is currently drawing or not, but if you knew it'd be easy to say. Personally I'd go for it if I had the dough.
I have 430 W psu, and it can handle 4850 very well, and i have 4 hdds, 2 pci cards, and a lot of fans , but it is seasonic, has great efficiency, and stable voltages.
Just looked up your power supply, I had trouble finding the thing and when I did it said it's efficiency is 75%+ which is terrible by todays standards. It means you have alot less than what a current 460W 85% system would have 391W vs 345W. I'm gonna have to change my recommendation to a don't buy. ETA: the seasonic has 85+ efficiency, that's 365.5 versus 345W. Your PSU is more powerfull than his.
