ATi set to blow nVidia away?

qwerty, read this [www.hardocp.com] and look at this [www.hardocp.com]

you need a terminator

//Edit: a reply to Karan's comment regardin to costs and specs.

Exactly. We come to a common ground.

Like I've said, I've got an X800XT, and I've got a A64 3200+ as well as 20,000rpm of RAID setup. According to Overclockers.co.uk, if I was to upgrade only these 3 aspects of my setup to the current realistic top-spec it would cost me £1423.32, just for 4 components...

£704.94 Athlon64 FX57
£469.94 X1800XT (expected to be in stock in November, but I'll class it anyway)
£124.49 for 2 Western Digital 74gb Raptors (which would be be bargain of this bunch, saying is they'd give you the biggest speed boost)

That's nearly £1500 for what would probably give me an additional 40 fps in your average game, or the ability to run so much AA that it actually makes the game blurry rather than smooth. And I could load a track in GP4 in 5 seconds less thanks to the hard drives.

I think I'd rather buy a a top of the range 42" plasma screen and save the £100.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2005 12:16AM by gav.

_tux_ Wrote:
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> with ati you need to use a motherboard with an ati
> chipset

Well you have to use an nForce chipset with SLi of course, so that's pretty null and void

I read a review of the latest ATi chipset on a board a few weeks ago, and the only places it yielded to nV was in USB transfers and no built-in hardware firewall. They really are quite impressive, and are better overclockers, somewhat unbelievably.

I'm an nV chipset user through and through. I've used an nV motherboard since my 1800+, and they've been great. But I want ATi to do well. I want nV to have a competitor.

If ATi produce a better chipset than nV and motherboard vendors jump onboard, then why would you want nV? With each motherboard upgrade I do I evaluate the best there is, and purchase on that basis. I don't care if it's nV, ATi, Intel, SiS or VIA based. I don't use the nV hardware firewall (and their LAN drivers are are pretty poor anyway), though I appreciate the faster USB2 transfers for external hard drives.

What ATi are doing are no different to nV at all, and their debut in chipsets has been a lot more impressive than nVs was. If my next board was to be an ATi Crossfire one I could essentially get a 40% performance increase at the same time. How is that a bad thing?

Im gonna see a 1800xt in action in about 2-3 weeks. We had one pre-ordered in the place i work, and its going on our showoff system :D



AMD64 3400+ (running at 2,66ghz atm )DDR400 1gb(running at 433) Asus K8N-E Deluxe mobo, 6800ultra, Tagan tg-480w, Audigy 2Zs, Logitech Z-5500 speakers
Using X-aser Lanfire case with 5 fans inside cathodelights etc included aswell :P

You realised that the earliest you'll see them in the retail outlets is November the 11th?

Unless you fall under "press sample", which you might well do, then you'll not be having one by 2-3 weeks, certainly not permanently.

I had a sneaking suspicion that since the motherboard is socket 754 it would be AGP, but actually it is PCI E after all, I was about to take the piss :p

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She says brief things, her love’s a pony
My love’s subliminal

On a similar performance note, and since the CPU is usually the bottleneck in games now, I thought I'd mention that AMD Opterons are now starting to look like a stunning value chip. They've recently been released in a 939 flavour that doesn't require ECC registered RAM, and they overclock like nothing else.

They have the same 1mb of L2 cache that the 3700+ has, but have a lower clockspeed. If you're not afraid to overclock things, these things are giving some serious bang-for-you buck, and there are reports that they are even reaching over 3ghz on stock cooling!

CPUCity is the only place that is currently selling them, but on pre-order, as they're selling like hotcakes. Scan is apparently getting stock this week, and Komplett "soon". The 146 is giving the best value, but the 144 is might impressive too... me gonna order a 146 within the week I think.

Something that outperforms an FX-57, yet costs around £150? I think so darling.

Non ECC? W00t!

Those will be blindingly fast! Will they need a bios flash?

-----------------

She says brief things, her love’s a pony
My love’s subliminal

Probably a recent BIOS, but nothing too major. Chances are anything from the last 4 or 6 months will work fine... that's a total guess on my part, but as it's the same core as the FX-57, it should pick it up ok, even if it doesn't report it 100% correctly.

Do a search for Opteron 939, and you'll see plenty of discussion on the OCUK and Hexus forums.

Cool. Yeah I usually post / keep an eye on the CPU forum at OCUK, but I havent bothered of recent tbh

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She says brief things, her love’s a pony
My love’s subliminal

o i'd love to get that card. anything's better than my GeForce FX 5200 (altho not that bad, far cry should look way better, and doom3 only works somewhat well with the lowest gfx settings)

gav Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You realised that the earliest you'll see them in
> the retail outlets is November the 11th?
>
> Unless you fall under "press sample", which you
> might well do, then you'll not be having one by
> 2-3 weeks, certainly not permanently.
>
> __________


dunno realy. Thats what the boss said. 2-3 weeks. No idea what the actual date is.
Anyway, doesnt matter realy



AMD64 3400+ (running at 2,66ghz atm )DDR400 1gb(running at 433) Asus K8N-E Deluxe mobo, 6800ultra, Tagan tg-480w, Audigy 2Zs, Logitech Z-5500 speakers
Using X-aser Lanfire case with 5 fans inside cathodelights etc included aswell :P