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Originally Posted by Borg  I thought a 4870 card would be good for a cheapo but I was concerned with power consumption and temps. I guess that one is not too much over a 5850...? those cards are an improvement regarding efficiency/temps/power but just slightly? |
As an owner of a Radeon 4870 I can confirm that it has a horrible idle power consumption (enough to keep the idle temp over 40 C) although its load consumption is comparable to the other requires-two-PCIE-connectors cards you listed. Unless you are running Crossfire the 1 GB Radeon 4870 won't help much over the 512MB version as any game that takes up over 512MB texture memory will cripple the GPU itself before it overruns the memory. A 4870 can outperform a 5670 - IIRC it would be comparable to a 5750 depending on the game, minus the DX11 support.
Anyway I concur with dangtx's suggestion of looking for a GTX 460, maybe the 768MB or a 1 GB with
out the "SE" suffix.