New PC

[Bloodwych]

Teho, great decision - the new ATI cards are bound to force price cuts and repositioning of the market, so you might as well wait as you said and see how things are before christmas.

[Harrison]

That is a very good point about the new ATI cards due out soon. Worth waiting a couple of months if you can. You still have your 7800GT to use at the moment, which with your new CPU and ram should still perform OK in recent games.

Regarding the 4870, it is actually more advanced technologically than any nVidia card, but obviously not as high performing as the top end nVidia cards. But it isn't far behind, and the price is far lower. And as mentioned my 4870 has handled all games so far on maximum settings at 1280x1024 without a single issue and high framerates. So they are still brilliant for the price.

[Bloodwych]

4870 is a beast of a card with its GDDR 5. The whole ATI range, from the 3850->4890 and the new 4770 are just great value performance cards that nVidia has struggled to equal on price/performance. Some say ATI have taken a loss to gain market share recently. Their next gen cards will probably be normally priced for quite some time.

nVidia has been farting around renaming the 8800 tech for ages now, but they do the job and I prefer their drivers and control panel. Their top line cards are fast, but expensive.

I mainly use the PS3 for gaming and left my PC gaming rig at x800XT PE A64 3400+ level once I realized SM3 games like oblivion were being developed primarily for the console market.

Just recently however, I picked up an Asus Dark Night 9800GTX+ OC for £60 (inc postage) and an Asus SLI M2N Deluxe with AMD dual core CPU for £30 from ebay, so I couldn't resist upgrading it. Haven't got around to swapping out components yet, as the x800XT still runs all my games fine!!! I bought all the SM3 games on the PS3.

PC technology second hand is just sooooo cheap.

[Harrison]

That is generally true. Although some older tech can be rarer to find and prices shoot up. Take a look on ebay at the moment at the socket 939 X2 dual core CPUs. The 4800+ is still commanding over £100, and I've seen some sell close to £200. Mad when you look at better performing lower end core2duo CPUs selling new for under £60. Just shows when there is demain prices do still shoot up.

However in general yes, 2+ year old PC hardware drops in price so fast.

[Bloodwych]

Yeah it's true that - I guess it's people who just can't part with their aging motherboards, afraid of updating too many components or having to reinstall the OS, so the 939 x2's go for silly prices.

[Harrison]

Any updates on the PC build Teho? Did you get a new GPU, or are you still waiting?

[Teho]

I only just got back from that job a couple of days ago. All done with that, so not going away again for the foreseeable future. But yes, I have been looking and have placed an order for an ATI 5870 card for just under £300. It'll be a little over three weeks until I have it though, as it comes out on the 23rd.

So even though I planned to buy everything at once and get a new PC within a week, the build will still have ended up taking nearly three months by the time I have it..

Saw the test at Tom's Hardware, and noted that it isn't actually much more powerful than a 285 which I can get immediately, and only a little cheaper. But there's DirectX11 to consider. I'm not jumping on the Windows 7 bandwagon immediately, but having skipped Vista entirely I'll probably upgrade to 7 once it's been out a little while. So the 5870 was the way to go. Plus I can always get another one and a bigger PSU at a later point.

[J T]

Yeah it's true that - I guess it's people who just can't part with their aging motherboards, afraid of updating too many components or having to reinstall the OS, so the 939 x2's go for silly prices.

Yeah, I had a look a while ago for a better CPU, thinking there'd be loads of people getting rid of theirs cheaply so i could get a little boost. I was pretty shocked to see how expensive even second hand 939 X2s are.

I can't really be bothered upgrading my mobo, CPU and then maybe RAM too. And my GFX card isn't that hot.

But

I don't really play games on it at all, so am only after a bit more grunt for general ****ing about really.

[Harrison]

If you were not interested in gaming and you already have a PCI-E graphics card then it wouldn't cost that much to upgrade. You could for example upgrade to a dual core E5200, 2GB DDR2 ram and a motherboard for about £100. Or for a better dual or quad core setup getting the motherboard, CPU and Ram for under £200. At the moment Intel chips are a better option than AMD though.