Sad :(

[gwendes]

We've got three SLIs in teaching computers here... not sure why...

2 x 7900GT
1 x 8800GTX

LOL!

[richard]

Cost of upgrading?

Quad core chips for £160, dual core fast chips for £40, mobos for £35, Good graphics cards for £80 and 2 gigs of ram for £60?

Never been cheaper, you can build an xbox 360 beating rig for much less than £200 including a good HD.

Add to that case, psu, monitor, keyboard, harddrive, and operating system then it gets expensive. As at present I have no desktop pc, only my laptop and my Mac Mini.

[ZeroHour]

Good graphics cards for £80

What is termed good for £80 that runs crysis?

[gwendes]

Good graphics cards for £80

What is termed good for £80 that runs crysis?

8600GT?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131121

[ICT_GUY]

Good graphics cards for £80

What is termed good for £80 that runs crysis?

Well I know this guy down the pup that says for £80 he can get you a pair of 8800GTs

But point taken, I have a 7900GS which is a year old, Hellgate London sucks on it, just so slow on decent quality settings. A 8600GT is about the same sort of speed for £80

This card will run battlefield 2141 at 1600 x 1200 (20 inch high res tft) on mid quality settings without fuss. Point being there are a lot of games out at the moment that the programers have not optimised for speed. If you can do amazing things on a xbox360 with 512mb ram and a 3 year old graphics card, getting things running smooth on a PC should be easy.

[ZeroHour]

The 360 graphics card is as well not a "normal" card. It does have extra hardware for stuff as well.
The 8800GT is a nice card but its a retail of around £200 for it at most non "off the back of a lorry" retailers

[Geoff]

I'll stick to my Quad SLI 7950GX2's I think Little warm, but they fly.

[apoth0r]

Nobody has mentioned the awesome value for money ATI bring to the table, £180 for a damn decent graphics card, that is overclockable.

[PeterW]

The 8800GT is a nice card but its a retail of around £200 for it at most non "off the back of a lorry" retailers

Due to the demand and lack of stock most resellers are milking the price, realistically a 8800GT 512MB should be £150-£170 tops, also the 256MB version is looking good as well should be about £120-£140.

[ICT_GUY]

Nobody has mentioned the awesome value for money ATI bring to the table, £180 for a damn decent graphics card, that is overclockable.

I would never buy another ATI card.

One word, Crossfire 8O

[ZeroHour]

Nobody has mentioned the awesome value for money ATI bring to the table, £180 for a damn decent graphics card, that is overclockable.

Evil ATI, I have to say I will never buy a ATI card probably for various reasons (drivers are crap for one)

[Geoff]

Linux ATI drivers are (now) great though.

[MK-2]

Just play far cry instead, it's pretty much the same game, same settings, same gfx. :P

[localzuk]

I ran an ATI X550 for a short while, found it was simply appauling, and now have a 8600GT instead - I couldn't justify the jump from £80 to £135 for the 8800GT, but one day!!

[torledo]

I ran an ATI X550 for a short while, found it was simply appauling, and now have a 8600GT instead - I couldn't justify the jump from £80 to £135 for the 8800GT, but one day!!

http://www.techspot.com/review/66-ra...force-8600gts/

I found an interesting article comparing the 8600GT with the radeon 2600
and the older ATI X1950 pro. I would plump for the X1950 over the other two for the same reasons listed in the article. Sure, more DX10 games will be released but a lot of what is being accomplished with DX10 can still be done with DX9 - so a lot of what the DX10 offers is marketing hype. The perfect way to sell Vista don't you think ? A feature that Microsoft won't make available in the more popular XP even though they could, therefore if you want to play the latest DX10 games you have no choice but to upgrade to Vista. Genius!!

Also Crysis can be run in DX9 mode and should be perfectly playable using the X1950.

I think if you are looking to buy a really good grafx card better to plump for the 8800GTX than the cheaper 8600GT.

And has someone has already said, look what results you can get from a three year old xbox with 512MB ram. Compared to the continuing need to upgrade hard disk, memory, cpu, chipset in addition to the latest grafx cards for the pc gamer. It doesn't really compare value ways. i don't have the money to upgrade my computer and/or components every 12 months
even if I did I'd rather spend it on getting a 24inch imac and an xbox. And get a good 3 years min. use out of the imac. And leave the first person shooters to the xbox. And the imac is much more elegant and deceptively powerful compared to any PC.