Upgrade questions

[archcommus]

I want quiet since this PC will be in my dorm room and all, but I don't need to spend a decent sum of money to make it as quiet as possible. Plus, I love my current case. If I turn down the speeds of the front two 80mm case fans, and use the stock HSF combo and keep my current PSU, I'm sure it'll be quiet enough (I already have an ultra-quiet NEC DVD burner and a Seagate HDD).

Looks likes everything's good then. Do we all agree the X800 XL is better to go with than a 6800GT for an entire $100 more?

Still need to pick a chipset/mobo, though, if you think the ATI chipset may be better than the nForce 4.

 

[pyrosity]

SM 3.0 obviously won't be showing benefits until it's used for more than just little optimizations in code (is used from the ground up in coding).

The Unreal 3 engine is coming near the beginning of 2006 and if you read up on some detailed reviews of the recent Splinter Cell release for PC, you'll notice that Ubi opted to not provide a fallback SM 2.0 mode for ATi cards (or nVidia cards, but their new cards support 3.0, as the game does). Chances are that Epic will, for their new games that they're making, code fallback 2.0 paths as their games aure huge sellers and all, but there's always the chance that current ATi owners that haven't upgraded with r5xx cards will get the shaft and not get much eye candy allowed.

The x800 XL is an amazing part, however, and as long as games are still made using SM 2.0, that card will be able to power through them for a good while.

Good luck with the rest of your purchasing archcommus.

 

[archcommus]

Originally posted by: pyrosity
SM 3.0 obviously won't be showing benefits until it's used for more than just little optimizations in code (is used from the ground up in coding).

The Unreal 3 engine is coming near the beginning of 2006 and if you read up on some detailed reviews of the recent Splinter Cell release for PC, you'll notice that Ubi opted to not provide a fallback SM 2.0 mode for ATi cards (or nVidia cards, but their new cards support 3.0, as the game does). Chances are that Epic will, for their new games that they're making, code fallback 2.0 paths as their games aure huge sellers and all, but there's always the chance that current ATi owners that haven't upgraded with r5xx cards will get the shaft and not get much eye candy allowed.

The x800 XL is an amazing part, however, and as long as games are still made using SM 2.0, that card will be able to power through them for a good while.

Good luck with the rest of your purchasing archcommus.

Thank you for the insight.

My concerns are still the video card and the PSU. I really don't want to chance having a video card that doesn't supply me with all the features I want as early as early next year! So perhaps I should go with the 6800 GT? I can't decide.

The other thing is the PSU. I'm surprised no one mentioned in our past discussions about getting a new one simply to power the video card better. Mine is a Smart Power 400W, would that even cut it for the new video card? Plus I'd have to get the adapter to plug in the power for the card, correct? Maybe it'd just be easier to get a new PSU as well.