My new Rig, Xmas and reward money come together to make something buetiful Options

[ORCACommander]

Hey all I got myself a new computer and built it by myself from scratch.
This is all of what I bought http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWi...Number=13934067
I got a mouse keyboard and monitor from an old hp pavillion my mom had. Interested in pics? here they are http://s36.photobucket.com/albums/e35/amas...mputer%20Build/

My most taxing games atm are UT III and Company of Heroes. I have not tested UT III ingame yet but COH at highest settings with 4x AA never drops below 45 FPS

I have OCed the proc to 3.2 gigs and the gfx is 700/1728/1000

[The DvD]

Roani, i stil think the GTX295 might be a pretty bad investment, especially for future games. On ultra-high settings it is already losing to the 6 month-older Radeon 4870X2. The smaller amount of video memory and nVidia's inferior memory management seems to blame. Also, history has shown that dual GPU solutions tend to be outperformed by newer and usually cheaper single GPU solutions as time passes and newer games are released. I think your best option at the moment is a Radeon 4870 with 1 GB. Or if you can find a good deal on a GTX280, that would be fine too. Their price has fallen significantly since the introduction of the slightly faster GTX285.

[Sir Modsalot]

On ultra-high settings it is already losing to the 6 month-older Radeon 4870X2. The smaller amount of video memory and nVidia's inferior memory management seems to blame.

Only in Fallout 3 and high-res 3DMark Vantage tests have I seen the GTX295 lose to the Radeon 4870X2. I might also mention that the frame buffer on the 4870X2 can only be accessed by one GPU at a time, so it's simply mirrored between them. This means you can only effectively use 1GB of the X2's frame buffer. nVidia doesn't have inferior memory management, they simply realize that GDDR3 still has more than enough power to handle any of today's apps/games. Maybe in the new GTX3** series nVidia will move to GDDR5 but until they do, GDDR3 will do just fine. Also remember that driver updates will always mean a 2-5 frame per second difference in some games; I have a rule of thumb that official video card reviews involve testing with drivers that are at least 2 versions older than the newest ones available at the time the review is actually published, which means anywhere from a 3-10 frame per second margin of error in the reviews versus picking up a card and immediately updating it to the newest driver set.

This post has been edited by Sir Modsalot: Feb 6 2009, 08:31 PM

[The DvD]

nVidia doesn't have inferior memory management, they simply realize that GDDR3 still has more than enough power to handle any of today's apps/games.

They do. The memory type has nothing to do with the memory management. That's a driver thing. At this moment, nVidia's drivers just need a bit more video memory to draw the same scenes as ATi's drivers. There's also a difference with swapping, i believe. Anyway, it's not really important.. Both options are useless for Roani.

Oh, and another problem with the GTX295 is that it is in fact SLI, and SLI and multi monitor doesn't work in XP (probably because of the same reason why DX10 won't work in XP).
A friend of me has this problem. So, I might say something not completely true, if so, correct me.

SLI works just fine in XP, however nVidia might not pay much attention to their XP drivers anymore, since the benchmarks sites all use Vista. So for the newest games, SLi support might come later on XP compared to Vista.