The good ole' is it worth upgrading malarky

[carrot1401]

4850 512mb to gtx 260 216sp on a 20" (1680x1050) screen, much of a boost?
And also, is it really true you can have a 2nd nvidia card for physx on a crossfire board?

EDIT: And what 2nd card is required for decent physx?

 

[carrot1401]

You can only add an nvidia card to an ATI GPU for physx on XP, not vista

Ok, but what if in the future I had a gtx 260 and wanted to add a physx card to that, would it work on vista on a crossfire motherboard?

 

[carrot1401]

Yer should be able to do the jump between cards for about £40-£50 depending on what I sell the 4850 for, will prob get Win7 in the future and leave physx for now. Main games I play are Far Cry 2, Crysis TF2, L4D, Company Of Heroes and at the moment, Flock!

 

[carrot1401]

Hehe cool, will look forward to it then, first Nvidia card since a 7300gt :-S

 

[carrot1401]

At 1680x1050 there will be no need for a Physx card because the 260 is powerful enough to handle both graphics and Physx.

My most recent upgrade has been from an highly overclocked 4850 to a GTX260. The 4850 was good enough to play any game, but the 260 allows all the bells and whistles and maintains much more consistent frame rates. I think the upgrade is well worth it, even on a 1680 monitor.

Thanks for that thought its time I dived into Nvidia again

 

[carrot1401]

Got another option, crossfire 4850's. Got one, can grab another as I have asus p5e x38 board. Maybe upgrading to 1920x1080 in future too. But would that power supply handle 2 4850's, e8400 @ 3.6ghz, 4gb ram, 1 dvd-rw drive and 1 hard drive, with 5 120mm fans? PSU Calculator has it at 297w for 1 4850 and adding another ups it to 380w. What ya think, worth it?