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.

 

[Wiggins]

Get yourself either an Asus with a 650i or 680i chipset, an E6600, get some more Crucial DDR800 and grab an 8800GTX.

The Asus boards have been paramount in forums as overclocking beasts but dont have much room for big choices in cooling due to the capacitors being so close but Titan are good for it.

You can keep the HD's in raid also as the P5N-E comes with 2 IDE Ports/6 Sata and the JMicron Controller has no where near as many problems as many other boards have had.

There are rumours that the new ATI cards are going to be a little bit more bang for buck and a bit more kick in them but as always they could just be chinese wispers.