Switch from ATI to Nvidia?

[Dashik]

Ok so I need to upgrade my system to allow me to play Armed Assault and FSX and some upcoming new games at decent ish rates on my Dell 2407 at 1900 x 1200. FSX is the Priority and I know its getting a performance patch shortly.

Currently running 2 x ATI X1900XT in Crossfire on an Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe with an AMD Opterion 170 @ 2.65Ghz, 4Gb Crucial Ram.


so I have 2 options.


1. Get an Intel C2D E6600 and new motherboard, 2Gb ram and keep the ATI cards.

2. As option 1 but got for an Nvidia 768MB EVGA 8800GTX KO Superclocked PCI-E 2000MHz GPU 626MHz 128Streams Dual DVI-I/HDTV ACS3 Arctic Cooling or similar.


If I go with option 1 then I'll get an Asus P5WDG2 WS Professional i975X and Ram to suit and wait to see how ATI's new card does.


However i'm thinking that it might be worth going the Nvida route for a change and If I do that then its a little more complex.

I have 2 x WD150 Raptors and 2 WD500GB Hdd's and need/would like to keep the Raptors raided.

I plan on running Vista Ultimate (probably 32 bit for ease of driver availability).

So for overclocking and getting water cooling later in the year (air cooled to start) what board/ram would suit the Nvidia 8800 and the E6600?

Thanks guys.

I'll post this in the CPU section as well.

 

[spb251272]

Nforce 680i

Any of the 680i motherboards would be good with that setup

 

[w3bbo]

Agreed - 680i. Some 650i boards are also worth a look for the budget conscious.

 

[mcc49]

if you arent going to run SLI, I would lean towards the 965P chipset

 

[Dashik]

Settled on the following,

Arctic Cooling (AC-FRZ-7P) Freezer 7 Pro Socket 775 CPU Cooler 105994 Invoiced
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4ghz) Socket 775 FSB1066 4MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe SKT 775 dual-core Core2Duo Conroe ready Crossfire 8channel audio ATX
Corsair 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-6400 (TWIN2X2048-6400C4D) DOMINATOR


Arrives Tommorrow

 

[masslac]

if you arent going to run SLI, I would lean towards the 965P chipset

Same.