Opinions on upgrade

[ozy]

Hi There,

After purchasing the much anticipated Oblivion, I was quite dissapointed by how it ran in outdoor areas, so much so it has spurred me to go for a (long overdue) upgrade to my system. I was thinking of going for this setup:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+
Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-131-AS)
Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3500LL Pro TwinX (2x1GB) CAS2 (MY-093-CS)
ATI Radeon X1900 ***Crossfire Edition*** 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-045-CO)
Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT-X 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (3055) (GX-046-CO)
Xerox XA7-19i 8ms 19" LCD Monitor

The intended budget was £2,000, and at the moment, with these components, i'm within that (don't worry about other stuff like PSU, HDD etc, I have those covered).

Basically, my aim is to get a system that can run oblivion at 1280x1024 with full settings and next to no slowdown in outdoor areas.

Whilst I hope this will be achievable with the above components, I was wondering if it might be worth going for a 20.1" widescreen TFT. I'm just worried that even with this high spec system, the very high native res of a monitor like this might cause noticable framerate drops in oblivion, and future games coming out in the next year or so.

Any opinions on this would be welcome.

Cheers

Chris (ozy)

 

[ozy]

Thanks for the responses guys,

I was scouting round for widescreen TFTs, and this one caught my eye.

NEC MultiSync® LCD20WGX2 20.1" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Black/Silver (MO-009-NE)

Having said that, running games fluently at the 1680 x 1050 native res seems like a stern task for any system to me! Even with one with multiple graphics cards. Can anyone vouch for how games run at such high resolutions as these?

On a side note, how well do widescreen monitors scale through the lower resolutions?

 

[ozy]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Isotope: What can I say, i've been saving for a quite a while for something like this, I was just waiting for the right game to come along to make me go out and actually spend some money. Maybe I have more money than sense, but I figured I may as well get a really good system while i'm in the position to do so.

On a side note, I was thinking of getting a single master X1900 XT instead of two. Mainly from a noise point of view.

With the single card on this system, does anyone have any idea what sort of framerate i'd expect from oblivion at 1680 x 1050 res?