Video Card Thread (Mostly Gecube x1950xt)

Shaf, how exactly was it a waste? My card cost me 190, about 95 pounds. It was only TEN DOLLARS more than the 512MB version and hell I would have gotten it just for the better cooler on this one.

 

Heh, but you don't pay tax, so as far as I'm concerned it's more like £112. Even so that's obscene though, I can't find a gig 8800GT for below 160 here.

 

Doesn't matter, that's what the FINAL cost I paid

If you were me you would have paid 95 not 112 pounds. Anyway I really love this card. Unfortunately my Crysis CD isn't working right for some reason. Oh well, I still have COD4.

 

caus $10 for 1 or 2 frames aint worth it.

 

heh, now shaff's taking my line!
Personally I'd take that just to go from ATI to nvidia nowadays...

 

hehe

the america to uk prices for the 8800gt are correct when no vat is added. hopefully more companies do this.

the only problem is the 2-3 day a week betas that come out. with only 2 a month being stable

i likes the ati drivers vs nvidia

 

It's a brave man that prefers ATI's drivers to anything with the 3870. Is forceware really that bad?

 

yes it is.

welcome to the world of single GPU bsods and vista.

i had an old x1650 ying around, used that, and no bsods, but the second i use any non non-beta forceware, i keep getting bsods.

tis a shame, as my 7800GT is a good card which plays cod 4 at full AF 4xAA and MAX settings at my monitors man res 1280x1024, with an avg of 30FPS, which before with my z1650 and 7600gs i got around 10-15.

and nvidia are releasing betas all the time, trying to fix one mistake make alot more.

i would have the catalyst over this.

esp the layout of the drivers, and OCing vs ntune and the nvidia control panel. the xp verisons were superb, these vista versions are so baren...they are crap.

 

Shaf, you're not gonna let this go are you? ok then

It's 10 dollars more for this:

Double the Ram
A MUCH better cooler
A much better overclock because of aforementioned cooler
It's Yellow

You can't talk anyway. You spent 60 bucks on a motherboard known to be pretty crappy.

 

I was going to say, that was a pretty silly idea. The P5N-E debacle aside though, you're only really discussing the drivers for vista, a friend on my LAN forum made kess than 8000 marks on Vista and over 10,000 on XP with the same hardware. I just wouldn't game on Vista knowing things like this - how do nvidia's XP drivers fare?
I have to say though, as rubbishy as Catalyst is for reliability, I really like their control center. Sure, it's cumbersome, but I've got used to it and find it a breeze to change various required settings such as forced Vsync and AA/AF.

 

when i had xp, over a year ago, the drivers were rock solid and superb.

not sure about now.

actually frames in gaming and SP1 vista, are fine for me. ask your m8 to try sp1.

tbh, i dont care about 3dmark, id doesnt give real life results.

and as for the p5n-e, for £30 its a very good, but it was DOA, and i got my money back. btw it was (if it worked) a big upgrade from my p915 chipset crap which wouldnt run a c2d, which i now have.

it would give me a big frome boost as my p4 is holding me back, where as your 1GB 8800GT wont give you 10$ worth of increaces.

btw you dont have a reference cooler? what do you have. if its dual slot and puts air out of the case, then yeah it was worth it.

 

Yeah it's dual slot and it pushes some air out of the case but not all. It still cools better though.

You're missing the important point though. It's YELLOW.

 

I'm glad you share my opinion on 3dmark, but nonetheless if you score far lower than anyone else it definitely means something's up, and even if it doesn't affect many games, it's a good measure of seeing that your PC is performing as it should. It was 3dmark that really opened my eyes to the fact that Quad cores would improve performance in games like SupCom, I never really thought they mattered.
You simply can't uptalk your idea of the P5N-E, you could have achieved the same result much more reliably with any Socket 775 board off ebay, it didn't need to be that heap.
Abuzar: z0mg! not yellow! Doesn't light up yellow though does it? That would be cool. I've given my PC a bit of a white makeover, I'll have to update my PC specs photo again.

 

Nah it doesn't light up yellow. It's still yellow though. Honestly can you say you have ever owned a Yellow video card with a PURPLE circuit board?

 

I've owned a blue graphics card with a blue circuit board lol... but to be quite frank, I don't really give a damn about the colour of the cheap plastic surrounding the cooler - Thermalright coolers look better.

 

lol

You realize I was just joking right.

 

I do, but nonetheless I'm stating that I like the industrial looks of coolers like the HR-03 and IFX-14 far more than the plastic-y jobs that come with CPUs or graphics cards. I must say, the coolers on the Rampage Formula is quite pretty. Imagine my disgust when I found out my second HD3870 looked like this:

Since it does a better job than the stock cooler though, I'm not going to argue.

 

Mine looks like this:



I taped over the vents on the bottom so the hot air either goes out of the case or to the back of the video card.

BTW remember when I said I was gonna get a Asus P5E? That's because it was costing me 120 dollars. I never managed to sell my own motherboard and the price went up to 170

 

Here are those screen shots of Crysis in all of its glory...

Settings:
All Very High @ 1680x1050 No AA/AF

Using CCC's custom config/TOD

 

Lol, you guys! Finally getting onto the 8800** series - If only you'd listened about 5 months ago!!
(Graceful climbdown Sam!)
And excellent buys the 8 series are now that the 9 series has touched down. The 9800 GTX will keep pace with a 3870X2 I read...