The (new) Official PC building thread!

Well the 9800GX2 sucks.

In Crysis on Medium at 1280x1024

8800GT:56
9800GX2:59

It does better at higher res though.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1331/9/page_9_benchmarks_crysis/index.html

 

boozer,
Here's this link for your cold cathodes... linky

....gm

 

We're still benching with Crysis?
tut tut...

I'd be interested to see how a pair of 9600GTs fare up against the 9800GX2...

Oh, and I spotted this Super Special....
wow!
http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials...TS+512MB+PCI-E+&utm_campaign=newsletter170308

 

get a SlapShot Hanson brothers Charlestown CHIEFS jersey or Youngblood movie jersey, put some skates on and watch the movie. There ya go! 8)

 

Er, what?

 

Propaganda or what azubar?

they are amazing cards, with an amazing price and rightly have the king of cards performance.

WHAT FOOL BUYS A DUAL GPU CARD FOR THAT LOW RES?????

most xfire/sli setups are for 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.

you would be an idiot to buy even a 512GTS for 1280x1024.
honestly, all i have herd form you ove rthe past months have been nvidia bashing...even sam like them now (and right fully so)

last gen they were kak, but this gen theres no stopping them, and now with the rebadged 8 series as 9 series, im sure they will be a hit.

its not their fault there is no need to properly do a 7-8 series style jump, because ati have nothing (until the 3870x2) to challenge them (AMD fault for not giving money) and if they did they would be competing against themselves.

until AMd give the green light for the cash (which they wont seeing as they are in debt), we shall have another war on our hands, until then, nvidia will most likely not be beatenon performance.

 

btw sam:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-017-PV&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=927

Point of View GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB
£162.14 inc VAT

____


http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-127-LT&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=927

Leadtek GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB
£164.49 inc VAT

 

Point of View and Leadtek are both crap brands, so you may as well have the OEM, and since the leadtek at OcUK is a rather mediocre £1.90 cheaper than Aria, a company with a million times better customer service...

I'm going to put out a statistical analysis on the 9800GX2, I think it's a heap of crap as well as Abuzar, but I'll do a bit of number crunching to confirm that.
As much as you'd love to stick up for nvidia shaff, just because a card outperforms everything else doesn't actually make it that good. You have to remember that the aging giant 8800GTX isn't very far ahead of the cheaper cards like the HD3870 and 8800GT, and given that fact, for a card to be priced at the same level as the GTX, it will have to SIGNIFICANTLY outperform it or it too falls in the waste of money category. What's more, with the promising numbers from the 9600GT SLI pair, you have to wonder whether you're better off doing the job yourself.
The tweaktown review is a very poor benchmark because it doesn't really compare the card to anything useful, but I'll do my best...

Omitting:
Cinebench: Synthetic bench
HL2 Episode Two: Frame rate too high
Quake Wars: CPU limited frame rate

Comparing 8800GT OC vs 9800GX2 - so what do you get for your additional 350 dollars?

PT Boats: 14.8% faster
World In Conflict: 12.5% faster (Vista), 10.3% faster (XP)
Crysis: 12.4% faster
UT3: 10.1% faster (Vista), 57.5% faster (XP)

High Quality Vista tests: 18.9% faster

nvidia fails.

A proper benchmark may sit the 9800GX2 in a slightly better light (World In Conflict and PT Boats are the only two really valid tests in that list), but even so, you're not going to get SLI-style performance out of this.


Oh, and if I'm a fool for buying a card like mine for 1280x1024, how come Supreme Commander:Forged Alliance, Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six Vegas and Crysis are all unplayable at that res?

 

i am an ati fan (ish) but there is no denying the 8 serires are most superior.

what res were those benches taken?

i didnt say you were a fool for buying an HD 3870 for that res (although u ahev a 30" monitor) and apart from COh and crysis, nothing will tax it on that res). this is an enthusiast part of the forums, and if we were in the budget area i would say the 3870 (9600GT) (8800GT) (GTS) (3870x2) in each of their price brakets are simply amazing, but discounting the price, it is the fastest card in the world, and nothing can be said against that. i did not say i would endorse someone buying it, unless they are made of money and upgrade their compnents every few months, casu its rediculuosly priced, and the 3870x2 or the GTX every time for me.

with the XFX GTX being £220, (amazing) i would choose that.

for a two year old card, anyone that bought it then has probably had the best (and for this year aswell) investment in an internal component ever. for a card to last thi s long being only taxed by crysis, is a-bloody-mazing.

and please try to understand the 3870 is comparab;le to the 9600Gt, NOT the 8800GT which is a head (by price aswell) by quite a bit, the GTS also beats it at higher res (1920 +) and gets close to the GTX, that is untill AA and AF are applied, the GTX pulls away fast. (due to the 256 bit interface vs the 384 of the GTX). the 3870 is not near the GTx, ESP when you add AA etc.

you would buy the 3870 for a certain res, and the GTX for another, (unless you want crysis)

when comparing both at lower res, then games are usually CPU limited.

and once again, having owned two leadteks (8600GTS and the 8600GT) i have been very satisfied. i have never needed RMA them, they have a good waranty though, and they usualy come w.o reference coolers, normally zalman.

i would never have OEM over that.

 

You live in the UK, ATI cards are cheap. Unless you're shelling out £180 on a proper brand name 8800GTS G92, there's no reason to have anything but an HD3870, you can get a good brand one for so much less than an 8800GT, the latter isn't worth bothering with. In the US it's different, but here, spending £40 just to have a 10% frame rate boost, and be fobbed off with the crummy 8800GT stock cooler? nah.

They are average scores across all three resolutions used. That represents a rough average of the 1680x1050 region, which is what most gamers will use.

Let's max the detail settings on all the games on my desktop. Of these there are quite a few games that will lag at 1280x1024. Crysis, DiRT, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, Need for Sped Pro Street and Rainbow Six Vegas. Assassin's Creed which is so hotly rated round here will also cause issues at 1280x1024 if you try and max the detail. That's a lot of games that don't run properly.

It's amazing that the 8800GTX, which is no faster than the new GTS across the board, still carries a £60 premium.

No, it just means the industry has stalled. It's not something I'm happy about either, but what can we do? I'm glad I didn't buy an 8800GTX. It was only in the last few months that I really needed to upgrade my X1900XT, and I got a similar level of performance to the 8800GTX for well under half what I would have paid for a GTX.

Many people argue that the HD3870 is beaten by the 8800GT, so I can understand where that comes from, but the 9600? Even the HD3850 has that beat.

I bought the HD3870 for 2560x1600, and that's what I use it at. All I did was tweak the detail levels. I usually prefer seeing detail levels that the game designers have chosen to reduce the game's impact on the frame rate, not the detail level nvidia chose to boost the frame rates of their cards in benchmarks, i.e. removing some of the textures they hoped people wouldn't notice. There's no denying nvidia make the fastest cards out there today, but considering how they achieved that, it's a bit of a hollow victory.

The only two Leadtek cards my friends have had have both had appalling coolers that were chosen because they were even cheaper than the reference ones. Any company that has that approach is asking for trouble. I don't like some of sapphire's coolers either, but they're chosen for a reason, to be single slot. As the 8800GT proved, single slot coolers for cards that produce that much heat are never good, so I can't really blame Sapphire for making a mediocre cooler. After all, it cools the card well enough, it's just noisy as heck.

This was quite a big rant, but hey. nVidia are in the lead for sales because everybody is being mugged. People in the Uk who spend £40-£50 extra getting a performance difference they'll never see is the work of nvidia's marketing. It wins people over to products that aren't worth paying the extra money for. Sad to say, it works, it's worked on a lot of the people I know, and it seems to have worked on you too.
I have nothing against somebody owning an nvidia product, I've owned one myself and was perfectly satisfied with it, but right now the pricing structure in the UK is such that, well, you're being exploited.

 

Read my post again. I didn't even mention the HD3870X2 once. I have nothing against it, nor do I think it's very good value. It does, however, sit just beneath the 9800GX2, but quite significantly beneath it in price.
I see you've chosen a useful benchmark of Crysis to compare it, one of the recent games that doesn't properly support crossfire. You've got to work on picking relevant benchmarks!

Not really, unless you count the graphical quality boosts the HD3870 offers but realistically, until DX10.1 comes out (if it ever does), those aren't really much to consider.

Well that's a little extreme, you seem to be getting a bit irate about my words. Be very careful or I'll make you a big green pointy hat with 'fanboy' written on it in capitals! I also note you used the word "best" not "fastest". I'll go make that hat now...

When you use a monitor this size, you'll see why. You can't really choose 1680x1050 without having to resize it to a small box, or it looks like standard def TV on a HD LCD, if you know what I mean, washed out and blurry. I'd soonr have a crisp image and get rid of those shadows and shaders, most games still have crummy shadows anyway - something you again only really notice at this screen resolution.

Let's take a look at those benches in detail.
COD4@1280x1024 (wait, you're not supposed to be using benchmarks at this res because they're silly!) HD3850 beats the 9600GT without AA, that's what I said. 9600GT equals HD3870 with AA, that's also what I said. (Well, it's 2% faster, big whoop)
COD4@1680x1050 (a bit more like it) Oh look, same as before.
SupCom @ 1280x1024 (Note this is not Forged Alliance, which inexplicably is about three times as demanding as the original game. I played that at 2560x1600 on my old X1900, let alone the 3870). CPU limited really, those tests aren't very relevant. 9600GT pulls away with AA/AF, but I'm probably the only person that uses AA/AF for RealTime Strategy games.
UT3@1280x1024: Same trend as before, and if you can tell the difference between 96fps and 109fps I'll be amazed.
World In Conflict: Yes, I've already seen that benchmark.

Hmm, funny that, remind me, when did I say the Leadtek cards were slower?

Okay, the hat's done, what's your address?

Hmm, funny that. a) because I didn't say that, but moreso because b) it's true!

Now I'll stick up for nvidia here. The 7 series was fine, the 7950GX2 was more impressive then than the 9800GX2 is now. Even the 6 series was fine, it was only the Geforce FX5000 series that sucked.

It's important to me, which is why it's a shame the 8800GT can't pull it off. The 8800GT at 1680x1050 is still significantly slower than the HD3870 at 1280x1024, so as far as I'm concered, that's false.

and I'm even more amazed, because my 3870 actually renders all of the game...

Still haven't ditched that 15" monitor?


Oh, and I think your post needs a bit of an edit! It's all a quote from me apparently!

 

Now, now fellas, fight nicely or I'll have to get out the triple chain Gun! ROFLMAO!!

Russ

 

You'll bring out what?
http://www.tankmuseum.co.uk/news/images/hiquality-images/challenger2(301KB).jpg
lol!

 

sammorris,
I don't think this needs an explanation! LOL



My thanks to Tripplite for the graphic!

Best Regards,
Russ

P.S. Your tank won't let me see it! Is it top secret! ROFLMAO!!

Russ

 

haha yeah, it is! lol
here's one that's being a little less secretive...
http://www.fprado.com/armorsite/Challenger2_Pics/Challenger2-Exercising.jpg

 

sammorris,

No problem, I'll just call in one of these! LOL!!

http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/4750/warthognp6.jpg

Here's it's Ammo carrier! Double LOL!!

http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/2580/ammocarrieroi8.jpg

The Thunderbolt II's 30mm GAU-8/A Gatling gun can fire 3,900 rounds a minute and can defeat an array of ground targets to include tanks. Some of their other equipment includes an inertial navigation system, electronic countermeasures, target penetration aids, self-protection systems, and AGM-65 Maverick and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles.

Can you say Bye Bye, Tank! ROFLMAO!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Man those are some strange looking computer parts.

I'm missing my NEW Intels!! Been on the Parentals Celeron 2.4GHz for the last 3 days and it's killing me!! NOT bad for beating the WWW but other than that it's got nothing to offer me since the move to C2D and Quad. lol. Talk about spoiled!!

Wish I had some more time... I'd force myself on Mort81 for a few hours. I'm about 5 hours from you Morty!! You better be nice.

...gm

 

So wait, what has this got to do with building a PC? lol

 

WELL............ hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.......

Maybe building the parents a new machine and going to Mort81's for help or advice in person. Yeh that's it!! Well it sounds good to me.

.....gm

SORRY to all for the OT posts... sometimes it just can't be helped.