best sub 230 caRD?

[AtomicFuse]

^ Oh right could you give a link to what you thinks best?

[jackvdbuk]

im not sure yet, the powercolor has a higher clock, or maybe ill get the one u get . but i i gotta save for a couple of weeks but itll be worth it!

[AtomicFuse]

urm are you my clone? im saving for a couple of weeks too lol
Certainly the powercolor looks a good buy can be overclocked a little more as well with the stock cooler

[sawyen]

I have the powercolour 512MB variant..

Cant complain, it works for all of my games with everything on at max.. except TRL which is plain silly..

FEAR runs 1440x900 4XAA 16XHQ AF and I'm getting high 50s.. have to turn off adaptive aa tho..

I have a 7800GT and it struggled with 2XAA in FEAR.. kinda contrast really..

[AtomicFuse]

whoa thats brill, ive been rather sadly looking at 7900GT and X1800Xt comparisons all day and some times the 7900 is better and sometimes the X1800 but most of the forums i looked on tend to favour the radeon! and i wish fear wasn't so scary :'(

[jackvdbuk]

is that at stock sawyen? in custompc mag it says at 1280x960 4xAA and 8xAF the frames are between 25-47 :S thats really great... atomic, which one ya getting?

[AtomicFuse]

yeh sawyen that seems a bit high!!!!! powercolor for me though @ scan!

[[DW]Cougho]

is that at stock sawyen? in custompc mag it says at 1280x960 4xAA and 8xAF the frames are between 25-47 :S thats really great... atomic, which one ya getting?

well i think thats inaccurate myself.

I play FEAR maxed out 1280x1024 and its silky, and im not one of those people who will put up with occasional blips in fps. if it isnt 80% at 60fps and a minimum of like 40fps i dont want to know. So id be inclided to believe sawyen.

[sawyen]

For some reason, all the review sites are testing FEAR with 1GB of memory.. its pretty obvious FEAR benefits alot from the extra memory.. You'll likely get alot less dip in frames if u have 2GB of memory..

The 7800GT I have seems to struggle even with 2GB of memory.. so that said, I feel my X1800XT is totally money well spent..

Ohh, my X1800XT's running slightly higher than ATI's stock at 650/1550 rather than 625/1500..

[FrontSideBus]

If you have 2 Hard discs you can get away with 1GB of ramby sticking the page file on the second HDD.

[sawyen]

umm.. not really no, its still no where as fast as random access mem..

[[DW]Cougho]

umm.. not really no, its still no where as fast as random access mem..

true but it does help ALOT. Allows me to use maxed details on my system despite only 1gb of memory. Where as when i had only 1 HDD i had to drop textures to medium otherwise it was choppy as hell.

2gb would still be quite a bit better, but page file on 1 HDD does help alot.

[[DW]Cougho]

my god this 7900gt is really quite something. Just done what i thought was the 1.4v mod, but seems to be the 1.5v mod (precision ftw ) and the card can now clock to 696 on the core!

I think im gonna run it at 652/1600 day in day out. Temps havent half changed though, from 44c load i now can hit 58c load (fan speed the same, around 60%). Im not a bencher by any means so i just done 1 run of my day in day out setting on 03, 20.2k, im happy with that.

[AtomicFuse]

Yeh the overclocking on the 7900GT is immense!!! You can get it 80% faster than stock! Why don't they just do that in the factory!!

[AtomicFuse]

^ Urm ok so my new mobo arrived today! And despite my massive case it wont fit! So now i'm looking for a new case lol But i did add my extra 512mb ram and the hiper psu is amazing!!!! really good quality whooo! so now i need a case

[[DW]Cougho]

Your mobo wont fit in your case? thats a new one. Surely both follow the ATX standard?