I'm stuck with AGP for the time being, though my system is fairly quick. I picked up the last AGP card by Ati out of desperation, the HD 3850 512 and I'm extremely satisfied with it for the moment. All my games run like butter.

If you are buying pre-built off the web, here's a nice trick to save a some cash and/or boost the spec - it's worked for me a couple of times now.

Most manufacturers allow you to tailor the chosen model to some extent and most offer a set of pre-configured "special offer" machines - often matching one's they have had reviewed in the press.

Find the pre-configured model that matches your needs/price point and pick the one just below that in specification. Then use the customisation options to bring it back up to the spec you originally wanted (or higher if you are lucky).

On my current system this saved me around £250 ($500-ish) which I then used to up the spec further still.

I cant agree with that. I use Vista64 with my Q6600 and 8800gt with 4GBs of ram and i have never had one issue at all with the card or drivers. thats not to say the ATI product is not better or worse...thats a age old argument we would do best to avoid.

But i cant be the only guy who has a had a faultless experience.

I got a 4850 for $150 the weekend they arrived. Joyous.

Vista, Business edition, 64 bit. GeForce 9600 GT. Yes, it is stable.

nVidia may have had troubles in the past, but it's my opinion that the issues have been resolved, and that both manufacturers currently have stable drivers.

But you cant beet the price to quality performance of ati.
by the way i got a 8600 gt and i hate it, driveers are messing up.

8800gt.. I think they can be had under $200.00 Do your homework and stay within your budget ( I rarely do .. lol) .

I've got a friend with an 8600GT and his framerate is lowered by nearly 100fps in Source games when using Vista. :NOTSURE:

Hell, you can pick one up for 130 bucks if you look around.

local computer shops exist for a reason

Well, my 9600 was pretty cheap, and I don't seem to be having any quality problems in any of my games - I can turn all of them all the way up. Well, except maybe Crysis.



The 8600 was one of their worse cards - it had the same amount of memory as my 6800 (256 MB), which I thought was pretty pathetic for a card two generations newer. When the 9600 came out and was performing closer to the 8800s, that's when I decided to upgrade. It works great, so I never regretted that decision.

In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, I'm getting frame rates from 70 fps to over 130 fps with maximum settings (well above recommended settings), including 8x antialiasing and 8x anistrophic filtering - and while running lots of other software in the background. I'm pretty sure if I lowered it to recommended settings and bought down the AA and AF a notch, I'd be consistently over 100 fps. That's far above the refresh rate of my monitor.

OK WENT OUT TO DAY SPOKE TO A CUSTOM SHOP THIS IS WHAT WAS OFFERED ?? PROCESSEUR QUAD Q6600 2.4 GHZ NVIDIA GF8800GT ZALMAN 512MO/DVI/PCI- E motherbroad asus p5n-e SLI NF650/SK775/DDR2/PCI E/ATX OCZREAPER HPC 2GO 2X1GO DDR2 1066PC8500 DISQUE DUR 500GO 7200TR ATAII WESTERN DIGITAL 74GO 10KTR 16MO SATA 150RAPTOR ASUS SATA DVD+/RW LIGHTSCRIBE ADVANCE SLIMTOWER BE QUIET ATX650 WATTS DARKPOWER PRO VISTAPRO 64BITS COEM FOR 1200 EUROS MY HEAD JUST ABOUT TO GO GFORCE MEGGGG BITE QUAD CORE BIGBANG WOW

No need for caps (caps is like yelling) and people find it rude.
Just a friendly advise

Depends on your resolution, if you use something like 1280x1024 a 256mb card is more than enough.

Not too bad.

Good power supply, fast Raptor HD, NForce MB chipset - I'd add a couple gigs of RAM to make it four (RAM is cheap) though and you will rock on...

Go custom build I used ASUS + X3 800 power + q6600 chip + ATI 3870 gpu rocks!!

I've bought a lot of video cards in the past, and I've come to realize that cutting-edge PC gaming is a perpetual game of catch-up.

A couple of months after you buy your shiny new bleeding-edge graphics card, games you really want, but won't run very smoothly on your now-slightly-outdated rig come out. And it's simply not worth constantly keeping up with the latest graphics cards, unless you're a die-hard first person shooter fan.

That's why now, I just rig my PC for highly complex but graphically modest games like this one. I have a Xbox 360 for my other gaming needs, which looks amazing on an HDTV, without the constant upgrade costs.

Unless you're rich, it's simply not feasible to upgrade every generation. I tend to wait 'til prices have dropped on cards two or three generations newer than mine.

More and more games are pushing for high resolution textures and multiple layers of those textures. Geometry shaders will only make it worse by exploding the number of polygons as well.

Smaller screen sizes may mean smaller screen buffers, but that won't change the amount of memory high resolution textures are using. I think in the future texture and geometry may overwhelm the buffers so much that the resolution won't matter so much in terms of memory.



I think it just went .

whitehall, i've had 2 74 gig raptors and 2 150 gig raptors. i've used them as individual drives and in a raid array. in my opinion, if you're not running them in a raid array, you're wasting your money getting one. buy another 500 gig drive and raid them. well, that is if i'm reading your last post correctly and you stated a raptor and a 500 gig drive. getting a second 500 gig drive increases your storage capacity and doesn't cost much more if any at all. also, get a GOOD powersupply, not one that comes with the case. the pc power & cooling 750 silencer is highly recommended by me. as for the rest of the stuff, some of it i wouldn't use, some i would. what you get is up to you and i'm sure it'll serve you well but i couldn't help recommending the hdd and psu stuff i mentioned before. i hate to see somebody spend a bunch of money and not get a good deal. don't get me wrong, i liked my raptors but not as individual drives. if you get two and raid them, fine and dandy!

If I'm reading his JUMBLEDUPWORDS correctly, he's got a 64 bit machine, and should be able to put a lot of memory in it. He may see a bigger performance boost by increasing the amount of RAM in his system than by spending a lot of money on another hard drive for a RAID array.

. . . but that's just my humble opinion. From the looks of it, he's set for a while with a pretty good system.

. . . and why in the world are people talking so much about the "Q6600" or whatever numbers? Ever since Intel released their Core 2s, this number has all of the sudden become Very Important™, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Does the number of cores suddenly become 8 and the number of GHz jump to 6 just because you buy a brand new J1234400? I don't get it. Even when the number of cores and the GHz is the known, they still want to know what that number is. Why does it really matter?

i agree with you regarding the extra ram, cobra. all i was trying to do was suggest another avenue concerning hdd's. i have 8 gig of ram in my rig and i'm tickled to death with it.

a quad-core 6600 chip is a great chip but i prefer a dual core. i'm using an 8400 these days and won't trade it for any quad.

Then you really suck at PC gaming. The 8800GTS is pushing two years and it still plays anything released this generation smooth as butter.

I'll have to agree with this - I've found that rarely do you really need the latest, greatest video card for games. My 6800 could play any DirectX 9 game on the market, and even though the 7 series cards were popular, I never really saw any major advantage in upgrading it. That, plus I didn't really have the money at the time anyways - it's pretty expensive to keep on top of the latest stuff, you know.

It wasn't until DirectX 10 came around and nVidia released their 8 series cards that new games really started slowing down on my system and I seriously thought about my next upgrade. And my new video card, while it's not the latest, greatest toy, will run nearly all games on the market today without troubles.

Although he is sorta right about it being a perpetual game of catch up - nVidia and ATI are pretty serious competitors, and they are constantly trying to outdo each other.

Another possibility besides simply getting a single expensive card (especially if creating an ENTIRELY new machine) is to get a Crossfire or SLI mo-bo and go that route. I have a four way crossfire system with 4 ATI 3650's which I picked up for a total of $240 ($60 each, on sale). I don't own Crysis or anything to benchmark the setup with but its fantastic. Loud though, if you're queasy about soundproofing a case or purchasing a watercooled/air conditioned tower. Yes, the latter does exist if you want to by it custom.

well that's my two cents.

Sincerely,
Jesan Fafon