DBD said:
I wasn't saying the build was bad or the video card wasn't good, But I think you were misleading him a little. Come on guys, Just imagine if he bought the build you recommend and tried to play FEAR or Oblivion at MAX settings or any of the new DX10 games in a year.....
Ok, so let's give him a subjective evaluation of the card's performance. Between 0 and 10, 0 being the absolute worse and 10 being the absolute best, what would you rate an X1950Pro?
I'd say an 8.
Lol, you see a difference when a portion of the screen is severely zoomed-in. In practice, unless you spend half of the time staring closely at the screen, you won't really notice a difference in-game. There may be some exceptions to this (large extensions of regular textures, like water surfaces), but lowering the AF won't reduce the overall game experience.
Sata costs about the same as IDE, how is this a luxury? Why would you want old technology? sata and DX10 are the future.
I was referring specifically to SATA optical drives. I said it is a luxury because in my experience SATA DVD drives are more expensive than their IDE counterpart. I have to admit, however that the Lite-On drive you suggested is at a killer price. There aren't many cheap SATA optical drives like that, but one is enough. I shall correct my build.
When it comes to optical drives, the SATA interface will not bring any performance gains, since CD/DVD drives are inherently too slow to benefit from the increased bandwidth. However, if SATA optical drives end up costing the same as IDE ones, I see no reason for sticking with IDE. In this case, you're right.
The monitor you picked out is a LCD with 1280x1024 native resolution, With a LCD monitor you must use the native resolution or else the picture will be blurry. If you want to run new games at MAX settings with that resolution you will need a better graphics card than the x1950pro.
I have a X1900XT 512mb and it struggles to play new games like FEAR, Oblivion, Etc. at max settings. The X1950pro 256mb is lower quality, So I know for a fact, It will struggle even more than my video card. Sure it will play them But, When 10 guys are shooting at you with grenades exploding, smoke billowing and whatnot, the X1950pro would drop down to 15-20 frames per second. (choppy and glitches).
Well, here I'm confused. I have an XFX 7600GT, and just this morning I ran a couple of FEAR benchmarks with MAX settings:
You can see the graphics are all the way to the max, and that I'm running the game at a
1280x960 screen resolution:
Here are the results:
It may not be the best of the best, but it's playable.... with my
7600GT!! If your X1950XT can't beat this by at least 40%, then there's something seriously wrong with your rig.
I play at 1024x760; at that resolution, the average framerate is 50 FPS, with the min being 27 and the max being 117, which is very acceptable. An X1950Pro should be able to match this performance at 1280x960.
Like I said, the build you picked will play new games at medium to high settings, Not MAX settings.
I disagree. I'd say High to Max settings (for current games).
If he buys the X1950pro for $200 now and upgrades to a new $200 DX10 card later, That's $400 bucks, Then he would end up wasting $200 and have a X1950pro paper weight. Don't you think it would be better to just buy the 8800gts for $400 now?
No, because the $200 card he buys in a year will probably beat the 8800GTS, or at least be as powerful. You forget the rate at which computer technology advances.
Poon, If you have a computer now, You can re-use the hard drives CD/DVD drives and case to save some money ($100-$200) Then you can upgrade them later without wasting any cash or re-buying new parts.
Here I concur with you. CD/DVD drives, cases, keyboards, mouses, monitors and even some hard drives are parts that don't become obsolete quickly. You can recycle them when upgrading.
