Truth, reason, and 7800 GTX 512 SLI

[v8envy]

Originally posted by: PC Surgeon
Ronin guy, NEWS FLASH!!!! MSRP IS MAKING A PROFFIT! Do you have to triple the amount of proffits to stay in business? NO! So your reasoning with charging an arm and a leg doesn't hold water. The one's who have no concept of business are the one's who have no concept of HONESTY!!!!

HELLO!!!!!

The Surgeon

Feel free to start an etail business then.

Like everything else, charging what the market will bear for a hot or new product is just part of life. It makes everyone happy. The early adopters get to be the first on the block with toys which make everyone else envious. They get the satisfaction of your envy for the price of admission. The manufacturer gets to enjoy decent margins, which pay for the R&D to provide us with these new toys. The retailer gets some extra cash which allows them to stay in business selling other stuff on which the margin barely keeps the lights lit after the cost of customer service, returns, marketing, etc.

Eventually the hothead market segment dries up, and the product of your desire moves mainstream.

If all there was to the electronics retailing was products with a sub-5% margin, I'm guessing everyone with a clue would close up shop and go mow lawns for a living.

Honesty has nothing to do with this. Dishonest behavior would be charging you for a 7800 GTX 512, and shipping an FX5200.

Back to the original thread. jam3, if you want to be the first on the block, go nuts. At some point in the very near future water cooling for these bad boys will be solved. If I were in your shoes, I'd try a single 7800 GTX 512 to start with. If you find it lacking, then get a second. If the card is sufficient (which it should be, for all the games you mentioned), you now have the budget to get the top of the line 8800 GTX 1024 or the ATI equivalent 12 months from now to kick the butts of games in 2007. You'd not only have the perfect gaming experience today, but also 1-2 years from now as well. You have to decide what matters most -- biggest, thickest, longest, hairiest gaming schlong today, or a more consistent satisfactory gaming experience over a longer period.

And I disagree with the overclocker's editorial. jam3's diarrhea-of-the-wallet doesn't harm the rest of us, it will ultimately help. His selfless donation to the e-tailer of choice and Nvidia subsidizes our paying less for our cards eventually. We just have to wait. Without people like him we wouldn't HAVE hardware like this to lust after.

 

[akugami]

If you want to spend $1400 on a video card, be my guest. It's your money spend it how you like. If someone thinks you're foolish in spending that type of money for a SLI setup (like I do) then we have a right to our opinion just like you have a right to yours. And for the record, I can easily afford a top of the line setup with an AMD X2 processor and two 7800GTX 512MB's. I still think it's a bad investment to get such a system as the bang for the buck is totally out of whack.

If you think your SLI configuration is going to be more than mid range or bottom of the high range at best in one year then you're delusional. Very likely in one years time the GPU cores will have not just higher frame rates but things like full video encoding and decoding, stuff like physics acceleration and who knows what other improvements.

For modern good LCD's like the 2001FPW (and presumably it's the same on a 2004FPW), if you notice ghosting in games, then I highly doubt you're actually playing the games because I don't notice any when I'm playing games. The ghosting is so slight that unless you're specifically looking for it, you won't notice it. I can tell you that in a MMORPG like EQ2 when I still played it I didn't notice any ghosting. Playing a game like HL2 or CoD2 I don't notice any ghosting. Even playing AoE3 where gameplay is not as frenetic as a FPS can be I don't notice any ghosting. Sure, there are features that a good CRT will beat a good LCD in but there are lots of advantages to LCD's as well.

As for the guy who suggested Nintendo was irrelevent or unimportant, we all wouldn't be playing games without Nintendo. They've brought many innovations and improvements to gaming, not to mention saving the faltering games industry. If a company like that doesn't deserve your support then none do. Just continue with the usual penis measuring contest.

 

[DeathReborn]

Originally posted by: jam3
Every darn thread on here contains someone moaning about the cost of this new card and how ridiculous and unreasonable it is to pay $1400 for these puppies in SLI.

Well thats exactly what I intend to do as soon as water blocks are out for them (and hopefully the price is more around $650 so $1300 for SLI). I run a Dell 2100FP and like to play everything at 1600x1200. And I do play a ton of games, lets see what I want to play at 16x12 with everything turned to max.

Battlefield 2
Call of Duty 2
Civilization 4
Quake 4
Black and White 2
X3 Reunion
ROME TW: Barbarian Invasion
Dawn of War: Winter Assault
World of Warcraft (yeah not a big deal graphically but I play alot)
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (shelved it until I have a better rig).

I also like configuring hardware and doing some overclocking so, I am really happy I waited for this card and yes I am getting two of em. I budget for a refresh on my main machine on a 2 year cycle, I have a seperate account and save according in my monthly budget, I roll over the money into bonds and usually manage a 20-25% increase in available funds over two years ( I shoot for around $3500). Since I started doing this I have never spent the full account, this year I am blowing the whole thing , but this rig should carry me well into q4 07/q1 08 when quad cores will hopefully be available.

I work for a living, make a good wage, and I manage my money and my time well. I come to these forums for insight on hardware and I can say that all of you crying foul on price need to evaluate your own priorities and stop making judgement how other people manage their own.

Don't expect Civ4 to perform well at 16x12 with all settings maxed unless you have something like 3GB RAM. 1GB & 2GB reach their limits quite quickly with that game. A 68xx or 8xx Series card is more than capable of playing Civ4 at 16x12 with max settings pr4ovided you have the RAM to keep up.

 

[DPmaster]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: gtx4u

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: StevenG
One key area where LCDs fall short of top-of-the-line CRTs is refresh rates.

Wow. Just wow. Are you retarded? A CRT is like a flurorescent light bulb whereas an LCD is like an incandescent bulb. LCDs *NEVER* flicker. At 60hz they have a more stable image than a 120hz image on a CRT. The backlight *NEVER* turns off or flickers, and there are no cathode rays being fired at a screen 60, 75, or whatever rate per second.

The CRT fanatics are so uninformed and they have obviously never gamed on an LCD for any length of time using good hardware. :thumbsdown:

Why are none of the major manufacturers still making CRTs going forward? Are they all disillusioned? Do they want to just throw out the millions they put into inventing the CRT? You guys need to wake up.

I run all my games at 1720x1290 @ 85hz on my g500 how come I never notice any flickering?

The reason why CRT is not being manufactuered much anymore is because of their weight, the cost of shipping is much higher than LCDs.

You might not be able to *see* the flickering, but your brain can still detect it, causing eyestrain and headaches.

If CRT had a superior image to LCD, it would still be manufactured as there would be a heavy demand for it. Don't tell me you don't notice the difference when you walk into Best Buy or whatever now; just about all TVs/monitors now are LCD/plasma. They've got better picture quality. Period.

No they don't. If you want the best in HDTV picture quality, you go with something like a CRT direct-view HDTV. Those have the best picture quality.

That's why they're starting to phase out tradition LCD/Plasma technology and going with OLED/SED tech.

 

[Ronin]

I have 3 letters in response to that.

DLP.

DLP>LCD>Plasma>CRT.

And they aren't "phasing out" traditional LCD/Plasma. The technology is advancing, and progressing, not dwindling.

 

[the splat in the hat]

Originally posted by: jam3
Every darn thread on here contains someone moaning about the cost of this new card and how ridiculous and unreasonable it is to pay $1400 for these puppies in SLI.

Well thats exactly what I intend to do as soon as water blocks are out for them (and hopefully the price is more around $650 so $1300 for SLI). I run a Dell 2100FP and like to play everything at 1600x1200. And I do play a ton of games, lets see what I want to play at 16x12 with everything turned to max.

Battlefield 2
Call of Duty 2
Civilization 4
Quake 4
Black and White 2
X3 Reunion
ROME TW: Barbarian Invasion
Dawn of War: Winter Assault
World of Warcraft (yeah not a big deal graphically but I play alot)
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (shelved it until I have a better rig).

I also like configuring hardware and doing some overclocking so, I am really happy I waited for this card and yes I am getting two of em. I budget for a refresh on my main machine on a 2 year cycle, I have a seperate account and save according in my monthly budget, I roll over the money into bonds and usually manage a 20-25% increase in available funds over two years ( I shoot for around $3500). Since I started doing this I have never spent the full account, this year I am blowing the whole thing , but this rig should carry me well into q4 07/q1 08 when quad cores will hopefully be available.

I work for a living, make a good wage, and I manage my money and my time well. I come to these forums for insight on hardware and I can say that all of you crying foul on price need to evaluate your own priorities and stop making judgement how other people manage their own.

LOL lol LOL

You tell em , f@ck em there just jealous , l by new too and theres nothing like unwrapping a new x800xtpe from its box or a 7800gtx, mmmmm, and ppfftt to the price, petrol heads spend more on there paint that just gets worn n scratched, no no chop in, get the best you can , why not , you dells a bit scarry though, lm on AMD , ASUS, lm not got the 7800gtx in sli , l feel l will go over to sli when we get an actual 64 bit battlefield game, oh boy is that gunna rock !

 

[DPmaster]

Originally posted by: Ronin
I have 3 letters in response to that.

DLP.

DLP>LCD>Plasma>CRT.

And they aren't "phasing out" traditional LCD/Plasma. The technology is advancing, and progressing, not dwindling.

Yes I agree DLP is good technology. I still prefer LCOS over DLP though.

"Phasing out" may not be the best choice of words but traditional LCD/Plasma monitors will cease to exist (in the form they do now) in the coming years. You can say the same thing about CRTs. Yes technology is advancing...look at SED tech...they're advancing using technology based on CRTs. It's basically a combination of both TFT and CRT technology...best of both worlds. New technology to (surprise, surprise) bring the best of CRT's qualities to the LCD realm.

I've used the 2405FPW (and the 2005FPW) for gaming. They are pretty good (for LCDs anyways). I have to say the desktop display was great on both monitors. I would choose them without a doubt for web browsing, text, etc. They were pretty good for gaming too...if given the choice though, I wouldn't choose one over a nice CRT (NEC-Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2070SB comes to mind)...I'm still primarily a gamer.

I couldn't get past the blurring (I noticed this even playing less "fast-paced" games such as World of Warcraft) when playing on them. Easiest way to describe it is that it looked like textures were getting out of focus. It looked like someone moved the slider for detailed textures from high to low. I also didn't like how black wasn't really black. Here's an example of gaming on a Dell 2001FP vs a Sony G520p. You don't really notice how bad the black levels are on an LCD until you've got something to compare it to.

We've got a couple of users (Autocad designers) that have 2001FPs as their monitors. Almost all of them have said they prefer their old monitors (old Sony 21" CRTs). We got rid of those awhile back though.


edit: To stay on topic.

jam3,

If you've got the money and the desire, go for it. That's my 2 cents.