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Hello! A boring thread to keep you warm of a Monday afternoon.
As a motivational technoique, I kept telling myself that when i got a new job I'd buy myself a shiny new top of the range graphics card as a 'reward'. So, now that time has come, and Toshiba has - for free - given me a widescreen monitor with a 1280 by 760 resolution (pay attention, these numbers are important), the time has come to splash out.
Now, i've always compromised on price before with GFX cards, and bought pretty unwisely, and I'm determined not to make the same mistake again. So! What to buy? My budget is about £300, but! my system is...
2.8ghz P4 1 gb RAM 800 Mhz FSB
So obviously I don't want to spend all £300 if something else is going to 'bottleneck' the performance.
The one I've been looking at is this ASUS 6800. Ringo, whose advice I trust, told me that Asus were a good manufacturer who excelled in not just churning out chipsets, but adding to them too. He also said it's best to spend as much as possible, because performance generally relates to price.
However!
This 6600 is a clear £100 cheaper than the Asus. What am i losing for that £100, and will it make any difference on a monitor that only goes up to 1280 x 760 anyway?
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If anyone else wants to offer some (useful) advice, there's a copy of Rebirth by J-Lo kicking around the flat that needs a home.
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posted
You could always sell it for £3 in Beano's on Church St, in Croydon, or D'Vinyls on Mackintosh Place, if you live in Cardiff.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: You could always sell it for £3 in Beano's on Church St, in Croydon, or D'Vinyls on Mackintosh Place, if you live in Cardiff.
I done a car boot sale a few week's ago and had a box of crap CDs on offer. One bloke came up and picked up the Garbage CD Version 2.0.
"Who's this then?"
"Er, fairly well known American/Scots band. That album was in the charts a couple of years ago. Think they've got a new album out soon. Shirley Manson? Ever heard of her?"
"Nope." Puts it back in box. Picks out strange "Farm Jazz" album which I have no idea where it came from and have never heard of the artist. Gives me a quid for it and walks off. I dunno, I suppose these people know what they're up to.
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What a fucking dull waste of £300. I'll spend it for you, save you the effort.
-------------------- What I object to is the colour of some of these wheelie bins and where they are left, in some areas outside all week in the front garden. Posts: 4941
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I wouldnt go for the NVidia. ATI are definately the market leaders on the graphics front at the mo. I have an ASUS ATI 9600 or something along those lines and even with my pokey old 1.5Ghz with 380 odd MB of RAM it managed Half Life 2 reasonably well.
Well... It was shite but better than I thought. If it was my money, Id go with the ATI.
quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: What a fucking dull waste of £300. I'll spend it for you, save you the effort.
Fuck it, give it to me. Think of it as debt relief for Africa. After you give me the cash you can write to me monthly like Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt.
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Hmmm. Im pretty sure Im right but I have been known to make mistakes before. I am not sure about state of the art graphics cards but for 160-odd quid I am fairly sure ATI is the way to go. Pretty definately sure. Almost positive.
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Just depends -how- future proof you wanna be i guess, ive got a 6600 and runs fine on my measly xp1800 + 512, and i got my 6600gt for 100 quid....There isn't much to choose between nvidia and ati at the moment.
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I think you need to realise that whatever you get is going to be short of 'state-of-the-art' since you're still using an AGP interface rather than PCI-E, and as such the highest speed graphics cards within your budget are not available to you.
Personally I would go with an ATI shipset, but that's more a matter of preference because I prefer the drivers, rather than a comparison of outright speed. Basically most cards at the uper limit of your budget will be well suited to your needs.
There will be a difference between those two cards, but not £100's worth of difference. Personally I'd avoid buying computer hardware from ebay though, especially unbranded reference cards which have no warranty.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: I think you need to realise that whatever you get is going to be short of 'state-of-the-art' since you're still using an AGP interface rather than PCI-E, and as such the highest speed graphics cards within your budget are not available to you.
Yes, but I've no intention of upgrading the entire rig for a long while yet.
Anyway - plumped for the Asus, figuring that if I was going to treat myself I may as well do it properly.
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quote:Originally posted by jnhoj: but pci express doesnt actually do much above agp yet...
Except allowing you access to the higher end of chipsets which are only being developed on PCI-e and being able to run two top end graphics cards at the same time, linked up for double speed, double bandwidth mayhem, you mean?
You've probably made the right choice Thorn. It's more expensive but at the end of the day, if you've got £300 to spend then spend £300.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Except allowing you access to the higher end of chipsets which are only being developed on PCI-e and being able to run two top end graphics cards at the same time, linked up for double speed, double bandwidth mayhem, you mean?
If you buy two of * these (Pny Quadro Fx 1400 PCI-Express 16x) from the bargainalicious eBuyer.com, you'll be billed £1,116.81. You'd really have to like computer games quite a lot to justify that...
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I hate being a shitty aruging tech nerd but afaik the chipsets that do sli arent actually much faster than single chipsets, certainly 2 x 6600gts dont come anywhere close to one 6800, and i dont think 2 x 6800 gts go much faster than one. Indeed, none of the current chipsets can take advantage of the 16x bandwidth yet.
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Well, I plugged it in and it does nothing but emit a high pitched scream. So it's going back to ebuyer and I'll spend the money on books instead.
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Here's a thing: It's DDR3. Is there any chance that that's incompatible with my PC? or is that unlikely? If it was just a case of a new PSU, I may be tempted to hang on to it. If it's likely to do with DDR3 RAM, then it's being shipped back on Wednesday and I resign myself to playing future games at ever decreasing resolutions.
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I shouldn't have thought so. The memory speeds are controlled by a multipler which multiplies the base bus speed. This means that the only thing which needs to be compatible is the bus speed itself, which is always the case because of the interface you're using.
Can you give me some more information about the problem you're having? Is the noise coming out of the PC speaker and is it constant when you start the machine? Does it load the BIOS screen? What sort of power supply are you using? and have you checked the seating of the graphics card to make sure it's sat properly in the slot?
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I checked it was seated properly over and over again, because it was the only thing i could think of to do, so it's definitely not that.
What happens is, when the PC's powered up, there's a horrible high pitched whine from inside the machine - it's hard to tell exactly where it's coming from (whether it's the card or something else) because even with the case open the sound's so piercing it just kind of sounds like it's coming from everywhere. The card lights up a pretty blue colour, and the fan spins, but that's it: there's no output to the monitor whatsoever.
Unfortunately I can't tell you what PSU I have, as the I won't be back home until Monday. The machine's a Dell 8300, about a year and a half old.
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![[Frown]](frown.gif)
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