Which ati manufacturer?

[Scart]

I'm sure these pop up all the time, someone really needs to make a definitive thread, but anyways. The 3870 I got from my friend is messed up so I'm in the market for a new card, most likely a 4850. However there is the age-old question of which brand to go with. All I've heard is sapphire service sucks and asus has a good warranty, but other than that i got nothing. I was wondering if there was some sort of simple list of the pros and cons of the different brands. I know they all are essentially the same but some always have better cooling, warranty, price, etc.

[sswilson]

Better stock cooling is generally going to be the HIS IceQ3 (IceQ4 for the 4850s I think) but you do pay a premium for it, so an aftermarket solution might be better.

Other than that, the only real difference I've seen between Sapphire, Asus, and the HIS cards I've had my hands on is that the ASUS software actually works for controlling the fan speed.

[Scart]

I doubt I'll be ocing the card so i don't care too much about extra cooling

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by Scart

I doubt I'll be ocing the card so i don't care too much about extra cooling

For the longest time (including some current cards) ATI's reference design cooling paired with too-low auto fan settings in their bios' could cause problems even without OCing.

[NyteOwl]

For the longest time (including some current cards) ATI's reference design cooling paired with too-low auto fan settings in their bios' could cause problems even without OCing.

I have the Palit that was reviewed here a month or so ago. It's a nice card but the default low fan setting was about 21-22%. AT that setting in my ambient (23C) the GPU idle temperature was around 80C. Much too high. So high in fact that the labels with the bar code, model and serial numbers lifted right off the back of the card. So I started playing with profiles.

With the fan set to 100% the GPU temp dropped to 27C but sounded like an F4 at takeoff. After some experimenting I ended up setting the default low at 35% which puts it just below the edge of being audibly noticeable over the PSU and combined case fans and the GPU now idles at about 30-35C. I set the profiles for default and gaming as desktop shortcuts and can select at need.

Card is mildly overclocked - GPU@700 MHz, MEM@1000 MHz

[Rommel]

Diamond and Palit.

[Apollo4g]

HIS and Gigabyte for me from NCIX, since both of them the 1st year is covered by NCIX directly.
Makes it so much easier to RMA if something is wrong, since ill probably sell it and upgrade by the end of that 1st year lol

[Boldeagle]

Here I explored this issue a bit because all the early cards were heavily based on the reference model so I looked at the after sales service:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/video-cards/8220-brand-off-hd4850-should-i-get-want-technical-input-2.html

[CTA]

odd... why no one mention about visiontek... is it really bad? i mean it has lifetime OC and swap heatsink warranty compare other... (i am not sure about lifetime part... please correct me if i am wrong)

[Squeetard]

My next card will be a Palit, to support them for giving us a card for the sweepstakes.