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Purchasing a card tonight, advice please

welshnitro

welshnitro

welshnitro

Associate
Joined
12 Sep 2006
Posts
5
There so many to choise from i'm kinda lost at which one to get my current config is,
Intel Core 2 DUO E6400
Asrock ConroeXFire-eSATA2 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Geil® Ultra DDR2 1.0GB PC5300 Dual Channel Kit (2 x 512mb) 667MHz (3-4-4-8)

Looking to spend around £145ish
Want a card purely for gaming and with the option to add another card into it in 6 months when the price drops in xfire mode which the board supports or the nvidia sli thing tho im not sure if the board supports sli, thanks for any input,
Russ
 
As it's a X-fire board then i would get the HIS ATI Radeon X1900 GT ICEQ 3 SILENT Heatpipe 256MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-057-HT) at an amazing £158.61. Thats a really good price for a hell of a lot of performance and with that cooler will be a lot quieter than a normal one too.
 
id go for the X1800XT, its cheaper and faster than the X1900GT and its right in your price range, its the most pwerful card you will get for your money :)
 
Not gona be able to add a card to it in 6 months though for Crossfire which he said he wants to do, he can't even add another one now, x1800 masters are long gone. :p

Id go for the x1900 GT as well if you want to add another card later on, the x1900 GT's don't require masters for Crossfire so any one will do. :)

Welcome to the forums btw. :)
 
Last edited:
HI there

X1900 Masters will also be long gone in approx 6-8 weeks, so unless you plan on going Crossfire in a few weeks you won't be able too.

As X1950 will be the last Master card ATI build now, all future cards will use an internal bridge. :)
 
What happened to the x1950 masters being able to be xfired with the x1900's, not the case now, or are x1950's saying ta ta in 6-8 weeks as well. :p
 
Thanks for all the reply's guys really helpful, so to sum up all the xfire master cards are out of my price range and i read the review for softwear based xfire dosent provide a great amount of extra performance, so would i be better off forking out abit extra now, for a Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-053-CO) £176
extra £30 but gives much better performance and will last me until i next do a complete overhaul of my rig, this is proble the best option right?
 
lukext said:
when i was deciding to what graphics card to get 2 weeks back, i toyed with the idea of an x1900GT (eventually got XT but hey) and found this review on in:

http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/634/

Hope it helps your decision!
Click to expand...

Hi there

Just read that review and was interested by this comment:-
We use an internal demo, which is a mix of outdoor and indoor locations recorded in the "catacombs" map. We activate the post process "cold" or "hot" filter, which considerably increases image quality. With the post process and HDR, our honest impression is that rendering quality is from another era and we rediscover the game. This post process filter leads to +/-20% performance reduction.

So in games like Farcry and Half Life. Is enabling HDR a hack? Or is it within the game options? Also whats this cold and hot process?

Is not setting up a game to look it best just a case of setting all options/config option to maximum or is there hidden extra/hacks to be made?

Games that interest me are:-
Farcry
Fear
Prey
Quake4
LOTR - Battle for Middle Earth
Serious Sam 2
Half Life 2
Age of Empires 3
Need for Speed most wanted
 
LoadsaMoney said:
Not gona be able to add a card to it in 6 months though for Crossfire which he said he wants to do, he can't even add another one now, x1800 masters are long gone. :p

Id go for the x1900 GT as well if you want to add another card later on, the x1900 GT's don't require masters for Crossfire so any one will do. :)

Welcome to the forums btw. :)
Click to expand...

yes he will, if he wants an X1800XT master card in 6 months, he can come ask me as by then i will be ready to sell mine ;)
 
Gibbo said:
Also whats this cold and hot process?
Click to expand...

In far cry if you go into the in-game video options there is something there called "rendering mode" (paraphrased). You get options of "Improved", "Paradise", "Cold", "Cartoon". It changes how the game is rendered, for instance Cartoon gives it a slightly cell shaded look. There is no "hot" option so if I had to put money on it I'd say they were refering to the "Paradise" rendering mode.
 
They are on about the HDR hack in the console i think. To get the console up press the ~ key and type in r_HDRRendering and a number between 1 and 11. 1 being the lowest and 11 being the highest. Most settle on 7 i believe so you would type in r_HDRRendering_7 . I think that's the way to do it. There is also an unnofficial 1.4 patch doing the rounds that enables this in the options menu and lets you use HDR and AA at the same time on ATI AND Nvidia cards.

For a full range of tweaks on many games see http://www.tweakguides.com/ .
 
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