So my job sponsered some different stuff for my home computer.

I got myself.

intel core2 extreme qx9650
Asus BlackPearl M.board
Asus 8800GTX
4GB Kingston HyperX ram

So hopefully this means i can play Crysis now.

What other PC games should i look in to?

ORIGINAL: Vx Chemical

So hopefully this means i can play Crysis now.

What other PC games should i look in to?

It does. The QX9650 is the 45nm refresh of my 65nm QX6850 and both are fuc.king blindingly fast. You should be able to overclock it to 4.0GHz too (if you wanted to).

The GTX will handle Crysis on High, but i' d probably recommend forcing DX9 over DX10, especially if you' re running Vista.

I think you should get CoD4, and Orange Box (if you don' t already have it). Don' t bother with Gears because it' s an awful port, ...but definitely get Supreme Commander, UT3, Medieval II, Company of Heroes, STALKER and the GRAW games if you missed them...

Im considering COD4 to play it on pc,m i have orange box.

Very nice! Is the case anything to write home about?

Very nice! Is the case anything to write home about?

boring black casing, thats hidden undernath a desk

Fooking nice.

Crysis is a must.

If you have that CPU and you don' t overclock I will have to kill you.

Alienware seem to have fuc.ked up badly with the m15x, so because i' m an impatient bastard i' ll probably just get an XPS 1730 instead. It' s big, (about the same size and weight as my Toshiba) but it has 2 x 8800m GTX' s and should play Crysis no problem. Strangely, you can' t choose a single GPU though - you have to get SLI. I' d complain, but i figure what the hell...

My desktop will be ok until the 9800 GTX is released. I' d buy a QX9770 but £900 is overkill.

Nice rig

As Agent said, Crysis is a must.. (playing it yestaerday, still loved every second of it).

If you have that CPU and you don' t overclock I will have to kill you.

'
what custom cooler should i use for that? water is out of the question

ORIGINAL: Nitro

My desktop will be ok until the 9800 GTX is released.

The 9800GTX is now out. My friend bought it. He said it' s really not a significant boost over the 8800GTXs.

what custom cooler should i use for that? water is out of the question

I would reccomend:
-Arctic Cooling MX-2 thermal compound
-Thermalright ULTIMA-90 heatsink (almost as effective as the ULTRA-120 but without the insane weight)
-Noctua NF-P12-1300 fan


You' ll be able to overclock you cpu to 4Ghz, good temps with this near silent cooler no problem.

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

Yeah the 9800GTX is out in NA at least. It' s basically an overclocked 8800GTS (G92). Performance is above the 8800GTX in most cases. The 8800GTX can beat a 9800GTX in high resolution with a ton of AA.

8800GTX 90nm
128 SP @1350Mhz
64TMUs @575Mhz
24ROPs @575Mhz
768MB @86.4 GB/s

9800GTX 65nm
128 SP @1688Mhz
64TMUs @675Mhz
16ROPs @675Mhz
512MB @70.4 GB/s


Naturally the 9800GTX consumes a lot less power being a 65nm product.

I' m more interested in the upcoming ATI HD 4870 if the rumours are correct.

Compared with the HD 3870:

480SP (up from 360)
32 TMUs (up from 16)
16 ROP (same)
140.8GB/s (up from 70.4GB/s)
Vram 1GB

Clock: 1050Mhz (maybe 900) compared to 775Mhz. Note that these cards do not have the shaders clocked sperately.

The 9800 series is a refresh but the HD4000 series are next gen cards. AMD is targetting the bottneck that the 3870 had. I' m expecting performance in the worst case scenario equal to a 8800GTX, often far surpassing it.

holy shit. I have no idea what any of that means.

me neither but it sure does look good don' t it?

...

Everyone else reacted well to it. And it looks.. rather impressive, I guess.

ORIGINAL: Rampage99

The 9800GTX is now out. My friend bought it. He said it' s really not a significant boost over the 8800GTXs.

Huh...

I wonder what they' ll call the 9xxx GTX equivalent proper then!?

My OC Ultra will (should) tide me over until the tail end of the year, and the XPS M1730 should last what, 12 months before i need to either upgrade or replace it!? The dual 8800m GTX' s should allow me to play most current games on max @ 1920 x 1200 so unless Far Cry 2 is more of a resource hog than Crysis it should be good for a while. I' m a little miffed about the m15x though - and they don' t offer the 8800m GTX in the m9750, so since i ain' t going to buy a Rock, i' m left with the M1730.

The whole ' 9' series from Nvidia are just overclocked versions of the ' 8' series. Same with AMD' s 3xxx series. Not worth the money really.

You' ll have to wait until the latter half of 2008 before you see any real performance leaps. Not much is really known about either new high end part from AMD or Nvidia. Only real solid info is that Nvidia' s is codenamed GT200, while AMD' s is R700.

just got the last part, so ill be assembling it tonight, ill order a cooler as soon as i have some cash for it.

Nitro there are already rumors floating about of the 9900. Wait until something more solid come out about that before picking up a 9800.

Yeah, ...the 9800 doesn' t seem to offer much performance gain over my already badass overclocked Ultra.

Just installed Crysis, it runs pretty good on Very High with 1280x768 resolution and 4xAA.

It might get stressed when the bullets start flying ill optimize as i play.