Dell wants to swap my ATI 4870 for GTX260...Am I getting screwed?

You can check my sig to see my setup. Well my motherboard and video cards died and I have been dealing with their Customer Service who keep continuing to screw up the process, and now I find myself at the point where they are now telling me that the reason they cant send my parts to the tech to replace my system is because they do not have any more 4870's in stock. They told me they would swap them with the dual GTX 260 instead. I remember back in Nov09 when i was deciding the m17x r1 setup on my system that my Crossfire cards were more expensive than the dual gtx260...and that the research (at that time) had the gtx260 giving people alot more problems than the ATI.

So my question to you gurus now is, is it a lateral move to go from the ATI 4870 to the GTX260 card or is the GTX260 a lower caliber card and I'm getting screw. Also please take into account if there are still any major bugs or malfunctions with my setup "as is" with the GTX260 instead of the ATI. I need to contact the supervisor and cancel the service ticket if im getting screwed.

I just don't know that much bout how the GTX 260 performed on the M17x R1.

 

demand for a R2. under dell's terms and condition, they are suppose to replace any faulty parts with an equivalent or HIGHER value. dont let yourself be short changed.

 

Does anybody remember what the upgrade price was for the ATI 4870 vs the GTX260. searching the forum right now but havent found it yet!

 

I don't remember upgrade price but Dell isn't going to buy the whole upgrade price thing as much, the 4870 outperforms the 260m by a bit. I hate the website but simply refer them to notebookcheck's gpu bench chart and state that you refuse to accept a lower performing peice of hardware, tell them they either need to find some 4870's in a reasonable time frame or replace it with a new system of equal or greater performance.

 

Not sure about the price, but in my opinion, the 4870s are way better than the 260s-even better than the 280s for the most part. You need to get back AT LEAST what you paid for.

 

get upgraded to the r2

if you get the 260 you will get screwed hard

at the time alienware/dell cut the m17 4850 upgrade because they where kicking the m17x 280 where it hurt for a much lower price

so the 4870 in the m17x are even better so a down grade from 4870 to 260 is a 4 lvl of performance downgrade

 

lestat, if you don't want NVIDIA GPUs, then tell them that. Explain to them that you stick with AMD/ATI. Simple as that and as for the stock situation, explain to the rep how you feel about not having your system.

 

Yeah from what I have been able to gather right now, the general consensus is overwhelming that the GTX260 under performs against the ATI 4870 and was also at a cheaper price. There have been some conflicting info on different threads about which card has more stuttering issues (4870 vs 280) and that worries me because I definitely do not want to take what I have and get something worse that was also cheaper.

 

I hear you BatBoy...but I obviously do not want to make an uneducated decision about a video card that I haven't done much research on and I informed the rep that he could restart the re-order and i would call back in the morning after doing the research if that isn't the card I want. I am only here asking because everyone here is very knowledgeable and I like what i researched about the ATI when I first bought it besides its what I have had for the last two systems. So long story short...Just need to know that the rep telling me that the 260 is their next best option of equal value is true which I see isn't quite the case.

 

The GTX 260 was more expensive than the HD 4870 i believe, but in terms of performance the 4870 mobility is a good deal more powerful.

If you mean screwed by you're getting a weaker card, then yes you are getting screwed.

However, it might just be that Dell doesn't have any 4870 mobilities in stock.

 

Actually the GTX280 were more expensive then the 4870 and then the GTX260.

I wanted to find out both the performance comparison and also the price upgrades because even if it doesn't matter to Dell it sure as heck matters to me since I paid for it.

Either way...it seems I'd rather stick with my ATI's so now im calling back to see what they can do about keeping my ATI's instead of the GTX260s

 

It used to be like this SLi GTX 280m > CF 4870m > SLi GTX 260m.
In no case don't give your 4870 for the 260.
If they don't have any 4870 in stock then try to find another solution.

 

Katalin, you've just initiated blasphemy against the AMD-slant in this forum. Everyone knows that the popular opinion goes something like this. . . Xfire 4870m > SLi 280m (by like a hair in a few titles and variety of synthetic benchmarks) > SLi 260m.

Nah, dudes. I'm kiddin'. It's all good. Kinda' neck and neck from my point of view and usage. So I would say to the OP that if Dell cannot offer you replacement 4870s, then simply press for a system replacement. The 260m GTX will not yield any kind of imrovement. Stick with the argument that you do require ATi cards, and at the very least they owe you equal or better, which the 260m isn't from any point of view.

 

Lol,Kade I was talking price wise,the ATIs were cheaper than the 280s.
As for performance I would rather enjoy Physics and bear with the tiny performance difference!
And IMO,Kade is right with the rest.

 

physic run on the cpu 99% of the time

strangely the only software that i know that make use of harware physix is 3d mark


but in any way don't settle for something lower if they don't have any ATI in stock push for an upgrade to the R2

 

PhysX is supported by a lot of games(Dark Void,Batman Arkham Asylum etc)
and can be run on one of the nVidia GPUs(See nVidia Control Panel).

 

yes it's suported by alot of games but it run on the cpu most game implement only the software version of physix since it can run on system that use an amd gpu

if they did use the HW version they would have to implement a second physic handler for he system that does not have a nvidia GPU

 

I was just kiddin', Katalin. I personally find 'em more or less the same, and the 280s can actually exude some mean power with certain games. Also, in my experience, hardware PhysX clearly outperforms CPU PhysX by a wide margin.

Op should, however, press for his Xfire combination. If they cannot offer the same cards, then I think they ought to produce an R2 with 5870s.

 

Coming from a user of the 260m cards, the problems that they have had in the past can be "fixed" by using the most recent drivers from Nvidia. I was one of the users that had odd freezes, and crashes. Since the release of the 266+ drivers from the Nvidia website, I have not had any problems what so ever.

Take it from someone who has had the problems before, they all "seem" to be gone, even when I really abuse this machine, (running extreme games at max settings).