[jrm20]

Corsair is great but if you want to "Overclock" your pc at all you should look at the corsair xms series ram. It is meant for overclocking and gaming. The corsair value is good for people on a tight budget looking for stable ram not meant for overclocking.

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Like i said it depends on how well you put it on i get 30C idle and the highest it has ever gone on the stock was 49C load with it overclocked up to 2800Mhz which is as high as it goes without water. The more expensive HSFs are good but they are very heavy and can damage the board and there is no need as long as you put it on carefully, even when you dont there is no need for a high end HSF as most people never overclock near the CPUs limit and with value PC3200 its not going to go that far.

They do vary the HSFs that come with the CPUs depending on your location and some are better than others but its like alot of things you get good ones and you get bad ones.

Then new SLI the biggest differences it can do 16x speeds on both channels but as far as two different cards as far as i know thats a rumour but they are working on it but it will probably be SLI v4 before we see that. Its SLI v2 thats coming out there is a few boards with it allready and it has better power managmement. They were having trouble keeping the chipset stable with two 16x lanes simultaneously on some boards from what ive read.

The 7s dont kick [bleep] framerate wise they are an improvement of about 3 or 4fps at most over x1000s with no AA or AF at high res, however even the GTX struggles to beat the 256meg x1800xl at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 with full AA and AF. Also the fact that you cant run anti aliasing and HDR at the same time on the 7 series as a gamer is pretty crap because HDR rocks but it looks kinda crap without AA. No point in FPS beyond the range of your visual detection threshold but the game looks crap.

Crossfire is pretty amazing its efficeincy is pretty good but production and shipping difficulties are holding back its release but the fastest system in the world is a crossfire based system so you cant really argue with statistics like that.

Im not the biggest fan of dual card set ups its pretty pointless to me, and it is pointless for most, it costs more money and you have to replace two cards when you want to upgrade and i dont know about you but im a skinflint and i hate throwing hardware away just because its not fast enough.

Im also giving him advice and offering counterpoints so you can see the whole picture. And most of all minimising costs is my big thing its all fine and dandy planning a great system but it kinda sucks if you cant afford it.

[warriorscot]

Like i said it depends on how well you put it on i get 30C idle and the highest it has ever gone on the stock was 49C load with it overclocked up to 2800Mhz which is as high as it goes without water. The more expensive HSFs are good but they are very heavy and can damage the board and there is no need as long as you put it on carefully, even when you dont there is no need for a high end HSF as most people never overclock near the CPUs limit and with value PC3200 its not going to go that far.

They do vary the HSFs that come with the CPUs depending on your location and some are better than others but its like alot of things you get good ones and you get bad ones.

Then new SLI the biggest differences it can do 16x speeds on both channels but as far as two different cards as far as i know thats a rumour but they are working on it but it will probably be SLI v4 before we see that. Its SLI v2 thats coming out there is a few boards with it allready and it has better power managmement. They were having trouble keeping the chipset stable with two 16x lanes simultaneously on some boards from what ive read.

The 7s dont kick [bleep] framerate wise they are an improvement of about 3 or 4fps at most over x1000s with no AA or AF at high res, however even the GTX struggles to beat the 256meg x1800xl at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 with full AA and AF. Also the fact that you cant run anti aliasing and HDR at the same time on the 7 series as a gamer is pretty crap because HDR rocks but it looks kinda crap without AA. No point in FPS beyond the range of your visual detection threshold but the game looks crap.

Crossfire is pretty amazing its efficeincy is pretty good but production and shipping difficulties are holding back its release but the fastest system in the world is a crossfire based system so you cant really argue with statistics like that.

Im not the biggest fan of dual card set ups its pretty pointless to me, and it is pointless for most, it costs more money and you have to replace two cards when you want to upgrade and i dont know about you but im a skinflint and i hate throwing hardware away just because its not fast enough.

Im also giving him advice and offering counterpoints so you can see the whole picture. And most of all minimising costs is my big thing its all fine and dandy planning a great system but it kinda sucks if you cant afford it.

[anoobrew]

Most games are built around nVidia products, as a result, ATI doesn't do as well. For example in the game F.E.A.R. even the 6600 GT has a better frame rate than the x1800 xl. But ATI cards do better at the Source engine: thats it. Stick to nVidia, games are built around them.

[warriorscot]

No they arent what are you smokin, Nvidia pay to advertise on most games you can count the number of games that gain an advantage from a specific brand of card on one hand, and thats usually only temporary until the next driver patch to the other card, FEAR does not get better framerates on a 6600GTs(its pretty bad on a 6600GT actually, and you cant even run it on full on a 6800ultra) i dont know where you are getting your facts but they are seriously flawed. FEAR actually gets very good framerates on ATI cards better than Nvidias when you have any kind of effects running which is where the engine efficencies of ATI kick in.

[The Colonel]

Calm down everyone LoL!

Anyways, I can't afford going ATi atm as it raises price a bit, because of PSU complications as well with just getting plain ATi.

Also, I do not know if I indeed which to overclock this bad boy, but I'll check XMS prices out.

Also, not trying to argue warriorscot, but from EVERY review I have read on CrossFire, it seems like it is a bloody attempt to get out the door. Apparently, it also isn't very good at running games much faster.

Also, the 2 x16 lane kinks are just about gone now. Many of them have been fixed very fast with customer review, as it is new technology.

I don't go with advertising, I go with specs , reviews, and cash on the contrary.
It also surprises me how much advertising Intel does, yet AMD's market share is skyrocketing fast.

[anoobrew]

I get my information from people who compare products and dont base judgements on bias. I agree that ATI are often better cards but more game developers use nVidia.

go2 http://www.tomshardware.com/ and select "graphics and display" link. They benchmark and test all graphics cards.

[warriorscot]

I go on tomshardware sometimes but its not my favourite site(they dont review them all no one does they review a few usually one of each model from the first batch), i usually go to a few and that way you can get a good comparison, custom pc(i like these guys only ones i know of that review newer releases of the same cards alot of the time) its a magazine with a good website though you kinda need the mag, hexus, the3 pc format magazine occasionaly, there is that tech tv i sometimes visit, usually go to a few new ones every now and again, i also get the facts and i read alot of reviews you cant read only one, because sometimes one reviewer gets bad results and sometimes they get good results, but i must have read a dozen at least this month on the x1800 and they all peg it way above the 7800GT in terms of actual preformance and reccomend it above the 7800GT as the lack of simultaneous HDRR and AA and AF is a major lacking.

ATI are having alot of bother with the power managment and trying to get it to take peripherals from the nforce 4 boards as the manufacturers dont want to change the production lines too much. Crossfire is still much more efficient, the fastest system going is a crossfire system and it was scoring well over a 100 FPS in quake 4 at ultra settings from what i read of a conference where the system was. Alot of the reviews on crossfire are the reference test boards alot of them come shipped with visible damage or flaws and come with a big sticker on saying will not operate at full capacity, i read a good review on saphires go at it they are the first to have a board on the market. Problem is getting the master cards they are hard to get hold off even for reviewers, ATI were intending to roll out crossfire during Q1 or Q2 2006 originally but they pushed it up bit they had more problems than they thought they would with the R520 cores production runs. If you hadnt noticed i live off of geek news.

But it is a fact that game developers do not show any favour its a myth, its also a new thing for the few who do it, HDR is in almost all new games coming out next year if they were favouring nvidia they wouldnt have it in until next year, steam are know to favour ATI cards and the guys at ID favour nvidia somewhat(although they dropped that preference in the quake4 engine revamp). The crytek engine favours ATI cards as well, in fact out of the 3 games that most prominantly favoured a brand it was ATI, like i said though nvidia pay for advertising where ATI rarely does its not actually showing any favour to either.

Its like intel alot of games say reccomended to be ran on intel cpus, but intel paid for that they actually run better on AMD cpus.

Mind you pressure to buy new cards will go down with the release of quake enemy territory they have the best looking game ever but its also one fo the most efficeint ever made 6gb of textures can be compressed down to 8 and 10 meg of vid memory. Mega textures rule, look out some real gameplay screenies its jaw dropping stuff even on older systems.

[anoobrew]

Im not saying that the X1800Xl is not a better card, 3DMark2005 clearly indicates that, but the 7800GT is 1. cheaper (some slightly under 300 vs minimum 330 4 the XL) 2. The X1800 XL only beats the 7800 at a few games 3. the 7800 does better at higher resolutions.

Again there is no doubt that the X1800 XL is better but whne it comes down to frame rates the 7800 GT does better as much as it does worse than the X1800 XL. And for the price its much more worth it than the X1800 XL

[warriorscot]

Ah but see there is the unique price scheme in the US Nvidia heavily subsidise and i think they wangled a tax break from the US governement, in most of the european site the X1800 is about 50 pounds cheaper from the best of one to the best of the other type allthough there are somethe same price.

But whats the point of 100 and odd fps if it doesnt look good, your eye only has a refressh rate of 25Hz so basically when you take sync into account anything above 35fps is visually indistinguishable, ATI twigged on and you notice that ATI maintain a much more stable FPS where the 7800s are getting 100 fps the x1800 is gettings 85 but when the 7800 is getting 30 the x1800 is getting 45. And its only at high res with effects and filtering turned off that the FPS is higher in nvidia, i dont know about you but i never play games at 1920x1604 or something like that, and i never play without AA and HDR where its available, have you played the lost coast HDR is amazing in that and you would give that up for FPS you cant see. Almost every new game slated for release next year almost has HDRR among its features.

Games are starting to come out with it now, the new NFS looks alot better with HDR enabled, but you really need AA in NFS or it just takes away from the experience with all those supposed to be smooth lines it needs at least 6x AA to look amazingly.

There is also the ATI avivo features wich are alot better than nvidias which would make it worth more even if it did cost more than the 7800GT. I was reading one of the review on the more recent x1800s and it was beating the GTX with its 512mb of ram on games where there was AA applied at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 and those are the resolutions you play games at. They couldnt even do the lost coast in the test because you couldnt run the AA and the HDR on the 7800s.

Mind you the 512mb of ram isnt even needed now and it probably wont be needed until 2007 if megatexture is as fantastic as the reviewers say it is. Jan 11th ill be buying quake wars without a doubt.

Quake 4 looked better than Doom 3 i dont know how much better it can get and actually get easier on the PC its unbeliaveable, its great we dont have to wait for the release date in the UK either this time as it is a UK game, gonna be sweet (again i live off geek news and love games especially pretty ones, the reason why i like ATI cards i like the bling over the fps)

[The Colonel]

Lol ATi vs nVIDIA battle!

you have to realize they both prosper in different countries, respectively

nVIDIA is more known in the US. Here, nVIDIA is much cheaper than ATi. ATi also has TERRIBLE customer service in US. US citizens take notice of ATi's lackluster standard here. Because it is the most popular company, nVIDIA can afford to lower their prices for competing cards. A lot of Americans (such as myself) play at super high resolutions. I never go lower than 1280 x 1024 and my usual is 1600 x 1200.

From all my British (actually from UK) friends, I hear that ATi is what nVIDIA is here. All my friends that live here predominantly buy ATi and all my American friends always go with nVIDIA.

Also, Intel needs to realize they are killing themselves. MY friend and I run hardware reviews for people in our school. We know parents and people that work in computer industry that have easy access to parts for reviews. Anyways, we hear a rumor in school that AMD 3500+ ClawHammer demolished an Intel 3.6 GHz P4. Naturally, we tested it out. They were right. It pummeled the Intel processor (at 1024 DDR, on MSI K8N Neo, with 7800 GT). Intel is now hated in my school. Also, the mobile AMD processors kill all mobile Intel processors, save the Pentium M which is a good competitor, but hard to come by. If Intel can't realize that they need to stop price gouging and start producing better processors, they will die out. Also, another thing that pisses me off is how pathetic the Pentium D's are. Every X2 we have tested and read on demolished them. Intel puts out a crappy dual-core attempt and propagandas how AMD has lower frequencies (even though they run better at lower than Intel). Intel needs to know if they are going to brag that they have higher frequencies, how are they going to explain that it is pummeled by AMD?


Anyway, that is my view on these debates.

By the way, can someone PLEASE help me?
I am not good on finding deals.

I need

Nice GPU (GeForce 7 series or X1000 series)
AMD CPU 3000+ Venice or higher
PCI-E and audio (if GeForece GPU nFoce 4) Motherboard
Nice case
Good power supply
1024 MB RAM

all this for up to $700
post names and links
Thank you m8s

Edited by The Colonel, 13 December 2005 - 03:42 PM.

[warriorscot]

Im confused you have your whole over thread, arent you buying stuff, im so confused your messing with my tranquility mixing up my two similar threads doesnt help you both have ranks in your name either.

Thoses res you use are normal by ultra high im meaing well above 1600x1200 you know the 1900 odd plus by 1600 odd plus resolutions, and no one plays at beyond those because i dont know about anyone else above 1600x1200 games hurt my eyes.

Intel CPUs are good for commercial use, for a home user or gamer they are utterly useless and overpriced they really should just quite that market alltogether.

ATI is big here because they started on the opposite side of the atlantic, more people on this side with computers and too much money, so all the money went here, and it does all its market research for Europeans we lovers of shiny pretty games, all the pretty games come out of Europe or long lost cousins the canadians, interesting how the canadian software houses are all ATI lovers as well, its very weird.

Intel and nvidia are very similar in the way they do business, very agressive and somewhat lost at times, ATI are much more laid back like AMD basically figuring hey they will see how good our stuff is and get it, if they dont, there loss. That kind of marketing appeals to Europeans, refined power is better than raw power.

[The Colonel]

I am moving to Canada after college, thank god.

But anyways, reason i added was I want the best deals possible.

BTW, what do you think of the Athlon 64 3500+ ClawHammer ($200)?
Is it worth the extra money? I think it is, hust want 2nd opinion

[anoobrew]

The 3500 is defininitel worth the extra 60 or less. The increased performance is well worth it. Check on eBay I got one for 170 new.
Also at tigerdirect.com they have a Ultra case and 500Watt Modular PSU for $50 after rebates

[warriorscot]

If you can get a 939 one you should, they are old but still pretty good, not san diego core good but still good.

[The Colonel]

I cannot afford San Diego lol.

Is it New Castle, Venice, ClawHammer, San Diego?

BTW, can you trust eBay?
It could make things A [bleep] OF A LOT cheaper.