Would appreciate your opinion.

[bagman]

Hi there

I'm currently running a 7950GX2 with AMD FX-60, 2gb of RAM and XP Pro.
Using a 20" LCD at 1600 x 1200.

Until I get around to a CPU upgrade I was thinking of moving to a single
8XXX series card.

Any advice in that respect ? Will I notice much of a difference going from my 7950GX2 ?


cheers

 

[bagman]

Hey, that's great guys.
Thanks so much for all your advice.

All taken on board. Appreciated

cheers

 

[bagman]

Hi guys

Well looks like the decision has been made for me, in some respects.

My main hard drive died on me today, so looks like a new hd and XP install will be needed.
I thought, if I'm going to have to go that route might as well bite the bullet and do the upgrade now.

This is what I'm thinking:

ASUS Striker II Extreme NF 790I LGA775 board
Corsair Twin 2x 4096mb 240-pin DDR2 XMS2-6400 RAM
INTEL Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16ghz CPU
ANTEC 650w Truepower Trio power supply
2 x 8800GTS cards.

What do you think ???

Any particular brand of graphics card better than the other ?

Any recommendations on a new hard drive.
Was looking at the Samsung Spinpoint F1 750gb which seems to get good reviews.

Appreciate all your input.

cheers

 

[bagman]

I would highly recommend *not* going SLI.

Now in particular is a bad time with ATI and NV preparing their "new" cards. Which will out perform the current ones.

I would recommend if you need to get a GPU now, a single 8800GTS. Save the rest of the money and just sell it and grab the latest range of cards a month or so after releases, when prices should be a little more stable.

I hear you.
Substitute an ASUS P5E X38 motherboard for the Striker Extreme ??

 

[bagman]

Guys

If you read my updated post, I am going to upgrade CPU/MOB now due to my main hard drive crashing on me.

Any advice you can offer on the components I'm thinking of using would be appreciated.

cheers and thank you again for replying

 

[bagman]

Hi there
Thought I would update what's happened with my setup.
Have kept the 7950GX2 for now and have updated to the following:
Intel C2D E8500
ASUS P5N-D motherboard
Crucial (1gb x 2) Ballistix DDR2-800 PC2-6400
Silverstone 1200W PSU
Zalman CNPS9700NT CPU cooler

A friend lent me a BFG9800GTX OCX card to try but unfortunately either the mob was not compatible or the card was a defect....had major PC lock-ups when using it.
With the 7950GX2 back in, no problems.
I'm thinking it was a defective card.
Will await the new models next month to see which way I go with the GPU.

Mind you, those "old" 8800GTS cards that were released last Dec still look good in SLI.

cheers

 

[bagman]

Nice, and how do you like the change?

non game related stuff is running much smoother with the faster CPU.
Havn't noticed that much of a difference game wise (e.g Crysis extra 2fps) so will be interested to see how things improve when I get a n ew card.

Of course not all games have been loaded yet due to the reformat, so only time will tell.

So far I'm impressed

cheers