The Official Budget-Conscious Dream Machine!

@Estuansis i agree with you...thats what most people do...

@REAM lol...i'm like that...i save enough for a specific stuff, but then i saw something i really like, i buy it, then i dont have money left to buy what i need...lol...

hmm...i think i should buy case, power, and hdd first...

 

No matter how much I had to spend on a graphics card right now, I'd buy an HD3870.

 

yeah the HD3870 looks good for me although it's not faster...but damn to slot card...how you gonna crossfire that thing...it will be tight...

 

You won't, because Crossfire's pretty much useless...

 

why? i'm extremely interested in double gpu...because its better...isn't it?

 

It will give you better frame rates in SOME games. However, with crossfire that isn't very many, and the extra performance gained is never double, often nowhere near it.

 

Yeah. If you're going to be using dual GPUs, you want to use Nvidia cards. SLI is supported in almost every new game out, unlike crossfire.

8800GTs in SLI are the hot ticket.

 

Well, while SLI is better than Crossfire, I don't recommend either, for the same reasons as previously, they're just less severe. There is still a wealth of new games that come out and don't support SLI.

 

i think i know what you mean...

its basically the same meaning as most games/programs that doesn't support quad core...

some games perform worst when you have SLI...i wonder why...is it because the cards problem all the game itself...

 

ill have you no that in alot of games crossfire doesn need to be optimised for. the drivers do that for it. and 2D3850s are just about i 8800GTX for a lot less price:

 

In a lot of those games crossfire ain't doin so hot.

 

I think the point is as its to do with the drivers, a later driver will probably incude better routines for games. it isnt all about the hardware.

 

which is wh y i added them to show it dont work in all games, but then niehter does SLI, but the worht of these cards.

they are so cheap, yet some times beat the GTX and in one case beating the ultra!

if there ever was a budget machine needing a (or more) GPU(s), this would be it.

 

Yeah that makes sense. What I like most about them is people saying they give higher image Quality.

 

but it still performs better in crossfire just not that much in most games...what about HD3870...

oh i have 2x 512 ram...and i want to get more...should i buy 1gb sitck or 2x 512mb stick for duo memory?

 

Being based on the same architecture, the trend should be pretty much identical for the HD3870, but its performance (as a single card) will be around 10-15% below that of the 8800GT.
Then obviously don't forget the better image quality that the HD3850/70 provide, and the fact that they support DX10.1 while the 8800s don't.
Also note that the full version of Crysis performs about 10% slower than the demo.

 

lol sam my mate is buying this system from novatech, i priced it up part for part its not overpriced by far but it is overkill and im sure wouldnt handle crysis on full lol.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?PC-1117

 

yeah this is weird...new technology but slower...how does that work...is AMD on a bankrupt?...

 

£900 of graphics cards. Not bad, but now consider that in certain games (Flight simulator X is one example), a pc with a single £170 8800GT will perform within 10% of that PC. Think hard about that.
Overall that PC probably 'only' costs about £200 more than the parts are worth. However, realise that a 750W PSU would be plenty adequate (there's £100 saved), and that a single 8800GTX will perform pretty much the same as the trio in a large number of games, then there's the fact that despite the whole immense cost of the PC, the RAM in it is only worth £35.

@GTR: not really, but the R600 architecture ATi spent so long on turned out to be a complete disaster, so they've had to try and make up for lost ground. The HD3800 cards are still R600s underneath, but heavily modified so they're no longer completely abysmal. They're priced aggressively low (the most powerful ATI graphics card is now only £160... it's usually more than twice that much) so they can at least compete with nvidia's offerings. However, the way that ATi make their graphics cards and design them I still usually prefer over the way nvidia does things, despite the hopeless performance gap between the top offerings of the two rivals. It stands to reason that the HD3870, whilst 'upper-midrange' pricewise, provides the best image quality of any graphics card you can buy today.
Think of the ATI's current market position as kind of like Intel's, when they made the Pentium D 900 series. They were still way behind AMD, but they'd tried to make good of a terrible mistake, and they came out with something that was acceptable, for it's low price.
The only difference is that the HD3800 is really in fact the better product, it just isn't quite as fast.

 

lol i laughed at him when he said he was buying it said gimme 1200 ill build you something just as good