Perhaps TE-speak for processor?

well thats a stupid nickname

its clearly the thinky-unit.

Does that mean I have a dual-brained thinky-unit..?

http://www.xfire.com/profile/iamtehbard/

You can get that for about 900-1000$ now.

Stock model is VGC-RB50.

CS:S on max res and full graphics options around 60 fps.

i have a quad-brained thinky-unit

oh my god this this htis

Check out woot right now. I'm pretty sure you could fix up that computer and make it pretty decent.

Mines better.

Mines even better.

Well you have a job.

DirectX 10 including quality of visuals only makes sense if you get a card that can handle it. And there's only a select few games that you'd notice a difference on. Stop being stupid.

Also I "heard" (from someone who bought from them) that they didn't honor their warranty for replacing ****--their video card died a month after they got the comp (no overclocking...well who the hell overclocks anything they don't build themselves anyways?) and they were like "lol so?"

But regardless, don't buy into DX10 yet. Just stupid, especially when you can always upgrade later if you REALLY REALLY need to.

Plus, joncy that's hawt.

It's worth pointing out that a DX10 capable card could be a better buy since it's faster anyway.

But also way more expemsive.

Very true, thanks for pointing that out, and its perofrmance in DX10 games like HL2: Ep2 will be faster
because it can handle all the shader effects twice as fast, I guess some people haven't been on Tom's hardware yet.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=712&model2=854&chart=275

The 8600gts is still faster than my 7900gs and the vast majority of the Geforce 7 Series. It's also $20 CHEAPER (and with DX10)



No. They range in prices as low as $60 to as high as $600. I can buy an 8600 cheaper than a lot of the 7 series.


Why would someone want to buy a slower, DX9 card for more money when they can have DX10 card thats faster and cheaper? It boggles the mind.

It'd be better to say don't get DX 10 for the sake of DX 10, because the 8800 series is really needed to get the most out of today's DX9 games. But yeah, if you want to play game using the DX 10 path you'd have a really high end card anyway. Buying an 8600 with the idea of using it for DX 10 is just stupid. You won't and never will.



A X1950pro is a better deal than both of those cards at that price range.

Well, if you get a higher end (2900XTX, 8800GTS or 8800GTX) then this is true--but the lower end ones the X1950XT would rape.


How is it it's been years since your last tech post that anyone looked at yet you still don't know anything? Explain this to me.

1) TOMS HARDWARE IS A POS SITE.
2) DX10 doesn't render everything "twice as fast", and the 8600 is a stupid buy since you can get an x1950xt for less which will perform better.
3) The 7900GS is a POS. If you're gonna compare, compare to the 7950GT or something like that, not the budget card of the last generation. Plus, nVidia isn't the only card company out there.
4) Why do you still maintain you're right when you're so damn wrong.


True, I should've said for the sake of DX10. What I meant is it doesn't really fit his budget, and he shouldn't buy into it because retard mcgee says he should.

I've always heard this and I used to believe it. I'm not too sure anymore. They seem to have very controlled tests, so what's bad about them?

The 8800 is a damn good DX9 card.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is not a DX10 game. It is a DX9 game. Which means the 8800 is a damn good card for Half-Life 2: Episode 2.

They're definitely not as bad as they used to be, but they still have a bit of fanboyism and exaggerate tests. They used to FAKE results straight up--back in the 9* and 5*00 days. They said something like a 5600 was faster than a 9600 (when even the 5700 was slower).

Tom's Hardware started running Intel ads a few years ago. They gave Intel a couple of good editorals afterwards and people have been nerd raging about them ever since.

Well there's the fact that they completely disregarded price in the intel v amd race. Yes, a 2.4c was faster than a 2400+ given best conditions--but the 2400+ could be overclocked like mad, and the 2.4c cost 2-3x as much.

The 2.4c was a legendary over clocker in it's own right, but the price doesn't make up for it.

can i get a HELL YEAH

The 2400+ barton got better speeds, but less press because at the time AMD was smaller and the barton version didn't last long. All the earlier versions of the 2400+ (tbred) were unlocked also, and once again could be pushed like crazy.

$75.....................single lga 775, 1066 Mhz fsb, dual two slot 800 Mhz ddr2 channels, dual 16x pcie, dual / quad sata-300, single usb 2.0, single / dual gigabit ethernet, stereo out, microphone in main-board
$115.....................intel core 2 duo e6400 conroe 2.13Ghz 2MB shared l2 cache lga 775
$30.....................1GB ddr2-800 pc2-6400 sdram dimm channel one one
$30.....................1GB ddr2-800 pc2-6400 sdram dimm channel one two
$30.....................1GB ddr2-800 pc2-6400 sdram dimm channel two one
$30.....................1GB ddr2-800 pc2-6400 sdram dimm channel two two
$15.....................nvidia geforce 6600gt 256MB 16x pcie one
$15.....................nvidia geforce 6600gt 256MB 16x pcie two
$50.....................seagate 160GB / 200GB / 250GB 7200 rpm 8MB cache sata-300 hdd raid-0 one
$50.....................seagate 160GB / 200GB / 250GB 7200 rpm 8MB cache sata-300 hdd raid-0 two
($50.....................seagate 160GB / 200GB / 250GB 7200 rpm 8MB cache sata-300 hdd raid-1 raid-0 one)
($50.....................seagate 160GB / 200GB / 250GB 7200 rpm 8MB cache sata-300 hdd raid-1 raid-0 two)
$440.....................total
($540.....................total)

440 and 540 total?

$440 plus parenthetical entries totals $540

might want to see if amd has something cheaper than the intel i listed, it may be overvalued at the moment

HELEL YEA

really?:)

confer ebay item 320170754514

as of today:

$15.....................6600 gt
$50.....................7600 gt
$60.....................7800 gt
$100.....................7900 gt
$155.....................7950 gt

just swap your sli pair for each successive card reaching $15. Your dual 16x pci express main-board will serve you in this pursuit well long

Don't forget guys, DX10 cards can't take advantage of DX10.1 features in Vista SP1, you'll need a NEW card for those lawlz.

On a more serious note, yeah I'm fairly sure Source doesn't have DX10 support yet (I didn't hear anything about it at least... I haven't tried playing the Orange Box games on Vista though. Games are just too slow for me... my CPU is bottlenecked enough trying to play them on XP as it is) but I do remember hearing that it would be built in.

The big thing for Source with the updates in the Orange Box (which will be backported to the other Source engine games soon) was multithreading to take advantage of multi-core boxes. I saw a cvar or something in TF2 which shows listen servers can run a server on one core and do the normal client stuff in other cores... I know from dev commentary their particle system can use as many cores as needed (and in fact I think the whole engine can... not too sure about this though).

you are full of terrible ideas



Direct3D 10.1 adds two functionally useless features and repackages the whole kit-and-kaboodle in the most frustratingly poor API Microsoft has invented since Managed C++ 1.0. Nobody is ever going to use DirectX 10.1.


Havok supports spanning simulations across multiple threads and basic multithreading is trivial (loop-level multithreading with OpenMP, putting renderer on a second thread and all games have done resource management in a worker thread since 1997). It's a nice change but all it means is that Valve renewed their Havok license.

Backporting FSAA and motion blurring into HL2 and HL:Source is much more interesting.

Sweet, I was wondering if the new Ep. 2 improvements were gonna be applied to HL2 and Ep.1.

The Shadow improvements are worthless.

i agree with imsoshort. penumbras are an affront to my god.

i worship the god of point light sources FYI