Have you already bought both the 4870s? it would be a better idea to buy an HD4870X2 - that's only £229 at Scan now, and can be run off a 520W Corsair HX, or a 650W TX if you don't need modular.
Again, the 550W VX would be fine for an X2, but not ideal for two 4870s, as you should really have four PCIe power connectors for that.
Ah yes, I see. The new Corsair page where you put in your specs in order to get a PSU evaluation is very, very helpful and doesn't over-evaluate and say "You're running an X1900? FFFF that's some serious business there mate, definitely...No Hard Drives? Christ...I think you'll need a 1000w HX to power that mate... :/" heheh. Thanks for the help, now if I wait for the 5800 Series I won't have to ask around anywhere. I actually think I might wait for the 5800's, seeing as how Arma II has just been released and Modern Warfare 2 is coming out, it would be wise. I'm seeing how all these games now are saying to use a Quad-Core or an i7, is it worth upgrading from a Duo-Core to a Quad/i7? I'd have to replace the mobo for an i7, and the ram, and i7 mobos (good ones) are like £140ish.
I have to say, I tried it out a few days ago and was pleasantly surprised, especially when i was able to get the 400W CX to come up for a system that was powerful, but still only needed a 400W CX. You do of course realise that an old X1900 actually uses more power than an HD4850 right? lol The 5800 series probably won't be widely available until shortly before christmas, but if your current GPU suits you fine now, then no problem... Quad core is a recommended buy for any reasonable game system these days, they are starting to become effective. The i7s are very expensive and power hungry, and while useful for some games, very few actually need that sort of power, a normal Core 2 Quad will do fine.
Can't wait for the first DX11 cards Hope they boast the same jump in performance that the first DX10 cards did (well, with nVidia at least).
On paper they specifications are very impressive indeed, so we'll see what happens. I certainly hope that's the case, we need to try and catch up with lazy game developers. I want to run Cryostasis at 1680x1050 on high for less than £1000!
Well, Currently I'm running a Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz and a HD3850 512MB. It plays everything fine except for newer games. I'm dipping down to 50 with Team Fortress 2 and newer-gen games, and I'm getting frustrated. I'm somewhat of a perfectionist and I like to have a minimum of 60 frames per second on every game at resonable settings... Yeah that part about the X1900, when I was typing that up I was thinking " I bet it probably uses more power than a newer card, oh I can't think of anything else, whatever" .
Likewise, I much prefer games with a minimum of 60fps. TF2 doesn't scale very well with graphics hardware, so you'll need a beefy PC to keep a minimum of 60fps.
I'm starting to get annoyed. I decided to try and play Stalker today, and I ended up finding out I have to put on DIRECT X 8 STATIC LIGHTING mode for it to not completely lag and destroy my PC. What the f*... Wow... So I can play Bioshock on max and Half life 2 with 2xAA but I can't play STALKER? Bah
Don't worry about it, Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky are even less optimised than Crysis and Warhead... They both lag worse than Crysis at max settings with my GTX260 (20fps), and they don't even look that good
STALKER is much more demanding than either HL2 or Bioshock. I played all of these games on my old X1900XT, which is probably about 60% as powerful as your HD3850. I could play Bioshock at 1920x1200, Half Life 2 at 2560x1600 (no AA though), but STALKER had to be at 1680x1050 and with static lighting mode. Object dynamic would work OK-ish but a bit laggy, Full HDR was impossible. It took the HD4870X2 to be able to play the game at 2560x1600 with full HDR, and even then I only got 40-50fps. The sad thing is, Shadow of Chernobyl is a walk in the park compared to Clear Sky. With one HD4870X2 you can max the original with around 35fps including AA. With two 4870X2s (and fortunately Clear Sky has excellent CF scaling), you can only get about 7-8fps maxing Clear Sky with the settings maxed.
That's insane! Quad-SLi and 4-5FPS? My guesses are to max it you just need a DX11 card. But boy, when you're able to max it, it will look f**ing awesome. I hope
Sounds about right, because Quad SLi scaling for Clear Sky is pretty poor compared to Crossfire. I don't think we'll be seeing Clear Sky playable maxed out at 2560 with AA until we can get four GPUs from the 2010/2011 generation. It is quite an impressive looking game compared to the original, but who cares if you can't run it? Whilst being a member of the 'devil 5' it's not actually got the top spot. That honour, at the moment, lies with Cryostasis.
Is happy he has a teeny tiny monitor Hah! 20 fps with no aa! Actually I seem to remember I didn't have lighting distance to full... Oh well. But still, I can safely say Crysis looks twice as good (in my eyes).
Crysis certainly looks better than the original STALKER. Also, I can replicate a small monitor on my big one in several ways...
Windowed mode, anyone? . I downloaded the Stalker Complete 2009 pack for Shadow of Chernobyl, it supposedly gives it a visual look of Clear Sky but still runs at the performance cost the first Stalker game offers up. So far, it looks nice with Static Lighting. But one thing, I'm stuck at the beginning where you have to go through the railroad embarkment and steal the military documents, I killed the guys at the tunnel (Because I'm so ubar and I didn't want to give them 40% of my monies) and I went through, oh noes! I though, a Green Radiation Signal! It's yellow now...Huh? So I ran back out and it was still there! I drank some vodka, it went away, and then came back! I googled it, apparently it's a bug, then I closed it and played bioshock, the best game ever made.
Windowed mode runs at 2D idle clock speeds, so lags badly, and doesn't support multiple graphics cards.
