I only turn mines off when im at work or out for more than 6 hours. any other time its on. i like my night light, lol.

actually the 4870 is better than the 5770, not by a huge amount, but it comes out better in virtually every game toms hardware benchmarked. so the 4890 is definetly better.

personally I think the new Budget quad cores from AMD are very good deals, you would be a fool to buy a dual core over a quad core.....i dont care how good the 550 BE is(and it is pretty darn good), but when it comes to multi threaded apps or games that take advantage of multi cores, that quad core will come out on top everytime.....

here are some benchmarks comparing the quad core without L3 cache to the best PHenom II X4 out:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-l3-cache,2416-6.html

Just a heads up guys....

I work at Best Buy so I know the lowdown with Windows 7. Regarding the computers, most Best Buy stores should have the Windows 7 systems out on the floor by tomorrow (10/18 ). Presale will be online only and will run from Sunday-Wednesday (10/18 - 10-21) with the official launch on Thursday, 10/22. I'm pretty sure other stores (Fry's, MicroCenter, Amazon, SonyStyle, Microsoft, etc.) will have them for pre-sale as well. No major retail chain will sell the units before launch as there are HEAVY fines and penalties for doing so. Windows 7 looks very promising, I really think a lot of people are going to enjoy it.

CStheGreat

yea, at walmart we already got a bunch of desktops and laptops in with windows 7, cant sell em yet cause of huge fines. but so far from my experience of Windows 7 it is amazing, very well worth the upgrade from XP.

You can use Rivatuner to increase the fan speed. It doesn't work under Windows 7 though. You'll need eVGA Precision for Windows 7, and possibly Vista. Someone else may know if Rivatuner works in Vista...-GeordiLaForge-

my riva tuner works on my Windows 7 x64 Ultimate.......

yea, same here, i just got a 4870, if these are better i will be pretty mad.

thanks for the input everyone, i feel a bit better now, lol. i can tell my fan contorller is working, when i bumped it up to 70% the noise difference was immense!! but only dropped idle from 60 C to 59 C, lmao. but when running crysis it dropped from 80 C to 72 C, so thats huge right there, which means i prolly only need to raise it to 70% while playing games.

ah ok, lmao, yea it shows 60% now, but still idling at 60 C. maybe if i shut down and let it cool down, then start it up with the 60% fan speed it will idle better.

yea right now it says fan speed is 10%, but when i turn on manual fan control and move it up to 60%, nothing changes, it still even shows me that its still only at 10%....i dont get whats going on.

well im not sure what are safe temps for modern day video cards, so ive come here to ask. my Sapphire radeon 4870 idles at 60 C and goes up to about 80 C when playing crysis on gamer settings. is this normal? are those safe operating temps for this video card?