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This is useful considering I'm building a new rig next month but such a shame they didn't provide benchmark charts. I like to see graphs for these sort of things rather than a vague performance analysis.
No AGP or PCI? I have an old PC, and I don't really have the disposable funds to replace the motherboard, CPU, and related components. I have a 6200, and I've heard mixed news about the newer PCI cards.
@BubbleF**kingBuddy:
Whether you have the money to replace the rest of your system or not it isn't their fault that your hardware is quite literally obsolete. There's no point covering hardware that was phased out about 5 years ago. I mean it's not as if AGP or PCI are even recent anymore.
Trust me you're better off just saving up and buying a new system rather than wasting money on something that's just getting more and more outdated and harder to maintain.
The PC may not be as popular for the home theater as it is for gaming... but it would still be nice if we could occasionally be given more info about what graphics cards are best for use in our home theaters. Like which ones can do 7.1 lossless audio over HDMI? Or which ones are hdcp compliant?
Sigh. None of those meet my requirements. Damn Dell and their pretty space saving design! Who has a normal PCI gfx card with half the normal card size that they want to sell to me?
@Pessimippopotamus: Normal PCI isn't going to give you enough bandwidth for gaming anyway, so I wouldn't really bother if you don't have a PCI-E slot handy.
@Necrotoxin: I had that thought, but I don't want to open that can of worms. I'll end up replacing every part of the computer while making sure each and every single bit is compatible. I'd rather save up for an i7 computer and milk my computer dry as dry as possible.
I've got two of the exact Sapphire HD 4850's pictured Crossfired in my system, and I can attest to their amazing performance for the price point. They also create enough heat to warm a decent-sized apartment, so bonus in the winter! (seriously, make sure your case is well-ventilated)
I recently installed a Radeon 4650. It's one of the relatively few GPUs available in a low-profile PCIe format. It more than doubled performance over my previous nVidia GPU, making the most recent games actually playable! It really is a great bang-for-the-buck GPU.
From the research that I'm doing before purchasing my new graphics card for my new rig (going to buy everything after Christmas) the 5850 is the hands down winner. Best price to performance ratio and there is no way that two cards in Sli or Crossfire will be able to compete with it. Needless to say I am going to be purchasing a 5850 and an I7 920 processor. Now I just need a good motherboard for overclocking at an affordable price... any tips?
What's most striking about this article is how NOT obsolete my 1.5 year old 4850 apparently is. Somehow I managed to get it for $130 which was almost unheard of at the time, and I fully expected to be completely embarrassed by cards half the price a year later.
@lpranal: I feel like games aren't increasing hardware demands as quickly as they used to. I'd assume has something to do with most games being developed for consoles, which don't get upgraded graphics hardware very often, first and foremost. Note: I have no evidence for this at all.
@lpranal: This is something I'm always thinking about, especially when I'm always being bombarded by the "pc gaming is so expensive!" crowd. I bought a 9800GT for $120 almost 2 years ago. On a 1440x900 screen, it's playing current "console ports" at max visuals (as long as AA is turned off, oh that tricky AA). $120 to beat out any current gen console graphics? For multiple years in a row? Sign me up. That ole 8800 needs to win an award.
Same story with the $200+ 9800 GX2 I got for the gaming PC last year as well. Pretty damn cheap, if you ask me.
@EtrnL_Frost: I'll agree with that. My previous rig got me about 4 years of gaming goodness (although there was much setting tweaking by the end, at least I was still able to play new games). I finally broke down and upgraded last summer; I'm now running a Phenom II x4 940 on a 790GX motherboard with 4GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 260 video card. I re-used my drives, power supply and case. Total cost to me? About $350 (I'm a bargain hunter, what can I say?). I plan to keep this system for another 4-5 years (maybe add a more spacious hard drive somewhere in there, but I'm sure I'd want to do the same on a console -- not that I'd have much of an option on the X-Box).
Is it a little more expensive than the consoles? Yeah. Is it far more powerful and far more flexible? Oh hell yeah.
I was pretty surprised by this (well, by the original announcement last week that effectively admitted it was dead). It was already slightly delayed, true, but they seemed to be making real progress - I wonder if ATI's recent uber-card, the 5970, had anything to do with it? (at 5 TFlops, it's a monster).
@ECAsh - Larrabee wasn't even related to the "standard" Intel graphics (GMA, etc), it was a discrete card with a LOT of x86 cores on it, like 40+ in the demo version I think. I don't know that Intel has ever shipped a discrete graphics card; not lately, anyway. This was (we presume) going to be a PCI-x card that would've competed with AMD's ATI cards, and NVidia's cards.
At least they've got experience with making many-core architectures and CPUs now - should come in handy when I get that 16-core Core i9 chip in 2012 or so !!!
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Whether you have the money to replace the rest of your system or not it isn't their fault that your hardware is quite literally obsolete. There's no point covering hardware that was phased out about 5 years ago. I mean it's not as if AGP or PCI are even recent anymore.
Trust me you're better off just saving up and buying a new system rather than wasting money on something that's just getting more and more outdated and harder to maintain.
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[www.newegg.com]
I have had good luck with Nvidia 9500s for lowend systems.
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@HeartBurnKid: Agent of R.O.A.C.H.: But how will I play 4 year old games?!
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Same story with the $200+ 9800 GX2 I got for the gaming PC last year as well. Pretty damn cheap, if you ask me.
12/14/09
Is it a little more expensive than the consoles? Yeah. Is it far more powerful and far more flexible? Oh hell yeah.
12/07/09
@ECAsh - Larrabee wasn't even related to the "standard" Intel graphics (GMA, etc), it was a discrete card with a LOT of x86 cores on it, like 40+ in the demo version I think. I don't know that Intel has ever shipped a discrete graphics card; not lately, anyway. This was (we presume) going to be a PCI-x card that would've competed with AMD's ATI cards, and NVidia's cards.
At least they've got experience with making many-core architectures and CPUs now - should come in handy when I get that 16-core Core i9 chip in 2012 or so !!!