[Tidus]

Question 1

- Exceeds normal overclocking speeds up to 10%.
- Custom made cooling solutions with systematic noise reduction.
- 3 Year Warranty exclusive to the iChiLL line only.

Extra one: Gold plated TV out and DVI connector that allows better signal quality and less oxidization.

Question 2

When I look for a new graphics card I consider my current system performance if I'm upgrading the card, there's no point getting the best card if my CPU doesn't have the power to complement it. If I'm building a new PC then I will check current prices and future release schedules, why buy a new card just before the next generation of cards comes along and pushes the prices down. If the cards I'm after are to expensive I'll just buy a cheap medium range card with the parts for my new pc and wait for my desired card to become affordable, price / performance (Bang4Buck) is the most important aspect for consideration, you can only get what you can afford and most people will only pay a high price for a card that delivers proportionate performance.

Performance

The first aspect of the card I look at is the performance, I start by looking at the benchmarks to see which cards can play the games I want to play at the resolutions I want to play them. 60+ fps for games at 1920x1200 would be a good benchmark for me as requirements only get higher, 512MB's of ram is a minimum when considering HD gaming, you really want 1GB+ if you plan on using AA on HD displays. While the number of frames the card can deliver is important so is the quality, some cards suffer from bad flicker and various other problems due to driver problems and overheating.

Performance across games is an important test, if a cards performance is inconsistent offering good performance on some games and less on others I'd be put of, AMD's 3870 X2 card is good on some games and bad on others.

I don't really pay much attention to the technical details of a card like how many transistors it has, how many pipelines / texture units or memory type, trusted benchmarks are a lot more useful, showing you how well the hardware actually performs.

SLI and Crossfire don't interest me as the performance increase is limited and varys depending on the game played, some games even suffer with multiple cards due to bad scaling problems. Add the extra power usage of multiple cards idling in your machine and you can hardly see any benefit.

A good overclocking rate is important aswell so you can squeeze out those extra frames when the card starts to struggle, when buying a card already overclocked it's worth looking at how cool it runs to see how much more can be gained from it.

A high performance card should have at least 2 DVI connectors, having a HDMI connector is handy aswell.

Drivers & Control Panels (Nvidia Forceware vs AMD Catalyst Control Center)

How often are the drivers updated and do the updates make any improvements, I was considering buying AMD's 3870 X2 card but after looking at the benchmarks in Unreal Tournament 3 with the drivers not supporting antialiasing in Direct X 10 I was put of, even more so when I read an updated benchmark for the card with a driver update and patches that were said to fix the problem but made no difference at all.

Linux drivers are also important with Ubuntu gaining popularity more people will need good drivers, this is another area where Nvidia outclass AMD.

Comparing control panel software can be useful if there's no clear divide between card performance, setting up the correct colour settings for your desktop and video can be time consuming so a well designed control panel is very handy. Driver profile support for switching between colour / video & 3D settings is very useful and is better implemented by AMD than Nvidia. While Nvidia's Forceware software uses far less memory than AMD's Catalyst software it is more lacking in features (compared using vista).

HD movie and audio features like decoding Blu-Ray movies using dedicated hardware to take the load off my CPU, de-interlacing and colour correction to enhance my DVDs and HDMI Pass through are also important, all high range cards should decode HD content now anyway.

Power Usage – when I've found a good range of cards that meet my performance requirements I look at how much power the card consumes. Cards that consume lots of power when idle are written off, I'm more forgiving of high power usage whilst playing a game but not when idle, power saving features are always a plus.

Cooling - I try to keep my PC running cool so after adding a card I don't want to see my case temperature rapidly rise, so the cooling solution should be able to keep the card cool, if the card runs hot when idle it doesn't give much confidence for overclocking. Dual slot cards that blow the hot air out of the case usually work well, while water cooling is the most effective option it's expensive and water and electronic equipment aren't a good match.

Noise - The less noise is always better it isn't too important when playing games as the volume will cover it up but excessive noise is a pain, if the card is loud when idle then I won't buy it, I'd expect the idle noise level to be close to my CPU noise level.

Looks / Design – Looks aren't important to me when looking at cards, the card faces the bottom of the case so who cares about a picture on top of the cooler when you won't be able to see it, I don't have a window on my case either so it's useless to me. A card should have a solid well built design not a pretty one.

Size – Cards are getting bigger and bigger, a smaller version of a card that achieves the same level of cooling as a bulkier version is a plus.

Packaging and Bundled Extras – While giving away a lot of free stuff with a card is good I don't really want any of it so I tend to go for a card with less free stuff and a lower price. Free games are hit and miss, people have different tastes in games so giving away a free game can be pretty pointless, when reading reviews from retailers selling graphics cards you always see complaints about people not receiving the free game aswell and you can't be sure if the card maker or the store you brought it from is at fault. HDMI / DVI / VGA converters are good extras to receive, giving away a free good quality HDMI cable would be welcome. In the end a well packaged card with no extras and a lower price than it's competitors is better than a card with a lot of free extras and a high price as I can buy all the extras I need with the money I save.

A good warranty is needed aswell, if the warranty for an overclocked card only lasts for a year then it doesn't say much for its quality, a 3 year warranty would be good.

So what card would I go for?, for a high performance system a 9800 GTX or a 9800 GX2 (when the price goes down) and a HD AMD card for a HTPC.