Graphics card advice (linked to FM2010)

[AlexB]

My old ATI Radeon x1300 Pro card just died, and I need to buy a new card. I'm not a big gamer, but want to continue to be able to play FM, Civ IV, etc and want to buy a half decent card that's a year or two old so that it's good value...

Dabs has these two cards on offer and they have good reviews from the people that have bought them, but I just wanted to make sure that there were unlikely to be any power problems, etc

1. Gigabyte ATI Radeon 4670 HD 1GB DDR3 PCI-Express 2.0 DVI

2. Sapphire Technology ATI Radeon HD 4850 625Mhz 512MB PCI-Express HDMI/DVI

The 4670 is £25 cheaper so is immediately my favourite, and seems to be quicker and with more memory. I don't need HD on my PC, so I'm assuming that there's no need for me to have HDMI capacity.

Is there any reason not to buy the 4670?

[gstelmack]

Aside from the fact that ATI writes crappy drivers, no.

[sovereignstar]

I'll be using that same 4670 card soon as it will ride along with the delivery man in my Dell Studio XPS 1645 that's due to arrive in 2-3 weeks.

It's described as an upper middle class card. Should be plenty suitable for the games you listed, which just happen to be the two games I play the most.

[AlexB]

Originally Posted by sovereignstar

I'll be using that same 4670 card soon as it rides along with the delivery man in my Dell Studio XPS 1645 that's due to arrive in 2-3 weeks.

It's described as an upper middle class card. Should be plenty suitable for the games you listed, which just happen to be the two games I play the most.

Cool - I found a 1GB 4670 card with inbuilt fan for only a couple of quid more, so pulled the trigger on that (had read that a number of the 4670's hadn't got the cooling capacity). Even if it's not the nuts, I'm sure it will be better than my old card.

Only downside is I can't play the FM demo for a few days, and this is the first one for a few years that I've genuinely been looking forward to.