Jonathan's Hardware Thread 4.0 (Q3 2004)

[Peijen]

BenQ, Samsung, and Viewsonic are coming out with 12ms 19" LCD soon if they are not already out. Samsung also claim LCD price will fall about 15-20% in the near feature.

19" LCD runs about 500-600 right now, so you are probably looking at 400-500 for the older model, not sure how the 12ms model will be priced.

Also nVidia is coming out with nForce 4 around Augest/September if you are looking to buy AMD in the far future (late this year/next year). 8 SATA, 3 IDE, 10 USB, Gb ethernet, soundstrom 2.0, raid, and hardware firewall. From what I can gather a 'plain' MB should be cheaper to make since the manufacture doesn't have to buy extra component for onboard sata/raid/sound/ethernet controller.

I would also recommand PCI-E if possible

[Jonathan]

http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQyLDU=

The $400 GeForce 6800 GT beats the $500 X800 XT-PE at Doom 3. Both deliver playable framerates at 1600x1200.

The $400 X800 Pro performs 30% worse than the $400 GeForce 6800 GT and is not worth buying if you want a Doom 3 video card, as it really isn't playable at 1600x1200.

No test results with nVidia's $300 card yet.

Nobody has launched a second generation DX9 card under $300 yet, either.

The first generation cards perform pretty well at 1024x768.

[Jason]

What's a good example of a 6800 card?

[Dave]

I would be happy with acceptable framerates in any FPS at just 1024x768. Any slowdown at anytime just annoys me. especially if I die because the ocmputer takes a little bit to render shit

[Jonathan]

All the second generation DX9 cards available now are reference designs and so don't have appreciable differences. You'll have to wait a little while longer if you want a non-reference design.

Supplies are limited on both the ATI and nVidia side, so it's tough to find a good deal. In particular, nVidia's $400 card is hard to find for $400, and not really available for less than that.

Newegg has an eVGA 6800 for $287. I may buy that myself. I'm going to wait and see how it stacks up against the X800 Pro, though. I would like to be able to play some new games at 1600x1200, no AA, a little anisotropic filtering.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 202&depa=0

[Jason]

Is eVGA a good company? never heard of it before.

[Jonathan]

I think they've been cranking out nVidia reference boards for a while.

[Jonathan]

What, hey, nVidia's mainstream card line has come out. It's called the 6600 (and 6600 GT) and it's clocked pretty fast.

http://techreport.com/etc/2004q3/geforc ... dex.x?pg=1

Definitely worth looking into if you want a DX9 card.

[Jonathan]

I wound up purchasing Gainward's 128 MB 6800. I've been pretty pleased with it.

To answer Peijen's question, with the introduction of D3 and HL2 there finally is a performance difference between 128MB and 256MB video cards. Of course, you can always crank down the texture quality to make up the difference.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/cou ... /page5.asp

[Jonathan]

Small update: after months of use, I am running all games on the Gainward 6800 at 1280x1024. The minimum framerates at 1600x1200 were too slow. I'll need to get a new video card before I upgrade to a 1600x1200 LCD.