Desperate for some information

[Bruce]

Hi guys and gals, i am putting a whole new PC togeather and just bought this mother board (ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard CPU Type Athlon 64 FX/Athlon 64
FSB 1000MHz Hyper Transport). I am going to buy next the video card. any suggestion on what kind of card should i get. I also bought the amd anthlon 64 3000+ venice intergrated into chip fsb socket 939 processor and two hitachi deskstar 7k80 80gb 7200 rpm 8mb cache serial ata 11 hard drive i am setting them up in a raid format. any sugesstion on the viedo card please.

[gw]

You'll probably do better posting this in the hardware forum.  Maybe one of the Mods will be kind enough to move your post there.

gw

[RollerBall]

Obviously the choice of card depends on your budget. At the lower end my choice would be for an ATI X600Pro. If you can run to it, at the top end an X850XT.

I still prefer ATI over NVidia. In the early days of FS2004, almost all the problems with weird colours and things seemed to be with new NVidia cards. ATI didn't have any major problems. I decided to go ATI then and have stuck with it.

I've just received an order from a client for a PC with the following spec

AMD 64 4000+
1 or 2 GB DDR 400 RAM
160 GB  SATA H/Drive
ATI X600 Pro 256MB PCI-e graphics
Logitech cordless KB/Mouse
Samsung SM913N 19" TFT monitor
DVD-RW

For cost reasons, had to make slight compromise over the graphics and I've gone for an ABIT board that's slightly cheaper than yours but with almost identical spec. I'm really looking forward to this one. Will be very interesting to see how it benchmarks as it will be the fastest machine I've ever put together.

BTW - he's moving up from a 1.4GHz Duron. Think he'll notice the difference?

[asda_price]

I agree with my fellow British chap, Rollerball, it certainly does depend on your budget. If you can afford an FX-55, then you will no doubt afford a high end card. I like both ATi and nVidia, although I think I just about prefer ATi, just for the excellent 3Dc (a new texture compression format). High end cards include the ATi Radeon X850 XT PE, and the nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (Extreme). Either way it's up to you, but ATi cards have always won in things such as FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering.  :)

BTW - he's moving up from a 1.4GHz Duron. Think he'll notice the difference?

Without a doubt, Rollerball. He'll be over the moon.  ;D

[congo]

Didn't anyone notice Bruce bought an SLI mainboard?

Guess what Bruce? You get to buy TWO very nice and expensive video cards if you so desire! That will work extremely well!

SLI is a chipset feature which makes running two graphics cards on the PCIe bus at once possible, but that's why you chose that mainboard isn't it?

[Weather_Man]

FLASH! I read at OCAU news that ATI are releasing "SLI" cards as well, or have just done so. They are called "Crossfire". Not sure if they run on the SLI boards, but I would think so.

Initially, they won't be compatible with SLI boards, though it may change some point down the road.

ATI is using a different method than Nvidia's SLI. Crossfire also requires ATI's new motherboard chipset -- Radeon Xpress 200 (RD480 or RD400), and only works with  X800/X850 cards (or the coming R520), one of which must be a new Crossfire Edition.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=146
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/mvp/index.php?p=i02

[GunnerMan]

Yeah well that 3000 Venice will work well especially overclocked. I doubt ATi version of SLI will work on Nvidia SLI. Unless  am mistaked wouldint nvidia have it trademarked or something? Congo ATI does beat 6800 series i FSAA and AF by a very small margin some people post comparison pics I can not see a difference really, a lot of those pics are taken at an angle so ATi has the edge anyways, striking comparison to those Macsters. Back to it I would choose a nvidia card for fs because last I checked M$ devs on nvidia. I think many people that buy ati get sucked in by the higher clock rates, much like Intel and AMD. That is my speculation why it beats Nvidia in FSAA and AF because higher clock rates but Nvidia has twice as many pixel pipelines wich gives it more bandwith and smoother running. If you do go 6800U route dont get the extreme, you can get the BFG 6800U OC wich has clocks half way there of the "extreme" counter part. You loose like 25Mhz on the core but most cases thats easyly remedyed. Im an Nvidia guy as you may have guessed because it is stable, overclocks well, very few problems ever arise, I personally spend my money on a problem free and stable product over the edge of performance. If you ever Overclock a cpu an you are playing a game on an unstable cpu and all of a sudden your computer crashes....it sucks.

[congo]

I'm not a big fan of "non-standard" equipment, and recently we are seeing some oddball stuff hitting the market, like Gigabyte producing a "special" motherboard that accepts a "special" dual GPU graphics card.

From what I've read now, the crossfire looks like another anomaly.

From a developmental point of view, they are curious and innovative.

This must present certain financial dangers for the developers and represents investment risk on their part.

End users are then confronted by compatibilty, support  and upgrade limitations if the technologies are dropped or superceded by new products.

We enjoyed reasonable standardisation for several years now with AGP, DDR, AMD XP's and P4's. I fear the likes of SLI, Crossfire etc may cause some problems later, especially if this is only the tip of the iceberg in a trend toward non standard product development.

Lack of standards place the burden of reliance on us to the manufacturer of the equipment in question. Consumer support of non standard gear will no doubt encourage manufacturers to continue that trend, which may have the effect of reducing competition and increasing costs for us as end users.

I hope I'm wrong and that some revolutionary new hardware is developed as a result, but I'm cautious at the moment. I guess we don't keep our PC's too long anyway, and they are almost a "consumable" item to many of us.

[Ivan]

SLI has been mature even before nVidia got it. It's the same as the Voodoo 2 link option that made these things render half of the miage  and combine it on one output channel giving you the option of going beyond the 800x600 limit that these things had in single operation.

About the RAM: get 2x 512 instead of 1x1024. believe me it's faster that way

The SLI marker only notes the capability to run the cards in SLI mode whitout using the bridge module that is usually needed

[TacitBlue]

You guys are way over my head here, but I do have some useful info about over-clocking. That ASUS MoBo should have a BIOS feature that will automatically overclock the CPU within safe limits, and automatically shut down if it overheats. I am running a slightly old A7V8X-X (I think) and it has over clocked my equaly old Athlon 2300+ to 2.0Ghz as opposed to the 1.6Ghz it is benchmarked at. And it has never had to shut down due to heat.

[GunnerMan]

Yes standardzation is a must but ther must be new development, its not standardized untill it is around and prroven. Lets take DDR2 for example, not many like it because it is fast but the latencys suck. Intel has already made the move to DDR2 and AMD will to shortly after dual cores come. Then DDR will be like SDRAM old phased out sucks. I see where you come from though on SLI we got these people buying 2 video cards, ahh wonderful now we start to see why Nvidia established this, not only are people spending money on 1 but 2 video cards doubling Nvidias profit! I am sure Nvidia could put 2 gpus on a single card but they would not make as much as someone buying 2 cards. Yes we see performance increase in SLI but its also much bigger than that for the corporations. Albeit there stillpossibility to run 1 card on an SLI board  the market could quickly devide with people buying 1 ccard boards and 2 card boards and we all know what goes on from there. As far as im concerned SLI is a money maker, dual GPUs would not be very hard I do not think but 2 6800U SLI= 1000, 1 6800U with 2 gpus would probably be 600-700 dollars. We wont get into the money Nvidia makes on their SLI chipsets. Fortunatly most people dont make enugh money to spend 1000 on a GPU interface so game devs will make games that work well with lower end systems to make money. Things kinda balance out but we must be carefull or PC will end up in similar boat as macintosh.

[Bruce]

Hey Guys let me say thanks for all who replied to my post. Sorry it took me so long to say thanks but i dont get on the computer everyday probable twice a week. thanks again to all. I will definately take the advices into consideratin when i ready to purchase the v/card.

[congo]

SLI has been mature even before nVidia got it. It's the same as the Voodoo 2 link option .........
The SLI marker only notes the capability to run the cards in SLI mode whitout using the bridge module that is usually needed

SLI is not the same but similar to the old Voodoo technology in principal. (when did the Voodoo technology mature and die a lonely death?)

So is the NVIDIA

[Ivan]

[quote]

SLI is not the same but similar to the old Voodoo technology in principal. (when did the Voodoo technology mature and die a lonely death?)

So is the NVIDIA