Gratuitous video card buying advice

[Dillon 1st MRB]

Buying video cards is one of the most difficult prospects out there for the average gamer. Seperating the "fanboi" from the informed consumer is pretty tough, but I'm going to start offering some gratuitous advice on video cards.

Right now, if you are in the market for a new gpu, my advice is to *HOLD*. Do not buy a video card for a couple of weeks. AMD has just come out with a very nice mid-range product that is on par (or possibly a bit ahead or behind) nvidia's latest factory overclocked cards. The issue at hand here is the pricing of these cards is in quite a state of flux. You have several cards within $100 of each other that are all pretty good cards. Right now, the AMD 6850, Nvidia GTX460 (1 GB), AMD 6870, Nvidia GTX 470, and the AMD 5850 are all withing $100 of each other. However, Nvidia just slashed prices on their GTX 460's, but rumors are that AMD will be cutting prices as well.

Also, AMD has pulled a bad trick on us all.... the x8xx-naming now designates their midrange. They've done away with the x7xx's (5770, 4770, etc) and are now calling the 6850 and 6870 the midrange. The 5850 and 5870 are still their strongest/fastest cards. Confused enough? Yeah, I'm not a fan.

Here is a breakdown by performance with their current prices.

GTX 460 768 MB $169

Radeon 6850 $179

GTX 460 1GB (625 MHz) $199

GTX 460 1GB (810 MHz) $215

GTX 460 1GB (850 MHz) $229

Radeon 6870 $239

Radeon 5850 $259

GTX 470 $259

The hard part here is that the Radeon 5850 can be had for as little as $199 while the GTX 470 can be had for $239.

Please look at this as a good time for consumers. If you have specific games you are curious about the performance of, I can hit up some reputable sites for you and find out. Just don't ask for the best overall card, because its just too tough of a question.

Prices should have a bit more flux in them in the next two weeks, but if this is your price bracket, wait a bit and you'll get a great deal on a great card.

[Dillon 1st MRB]

I have a sad feeling my Christmas bonus is going straight to newegg.

I always thought this was a happy feeling..... my bonus check = Santa!

[Jasko]

Janke, i think you should only buy 6 gigs of ram and invest in an ssd. I don't think buying more ram is a real way of future proofing anyways, as you know speed is everything in performance machines and your ram will eventually become slower compared to new products coming out. Still your decision though,

[Ford 1st MRB]

Janke, i think you should only buy 6 gigs of ram and invest in an ssd. I don't think buying more ram is a real way of future proofing anyways, as you know speed is everything in performance machines and your ram will eventually become slower compared to new products coming out. Still your decision though,

Meh...

The only way you get a benefit from an SSD at this point is to fork over the money for the faster read/write/transfer speed drives, which aren't cheap. True you won't utilize the 12 gigs of ram unless you are doing 3D rendering or the like, but the money for a decent SSD vs, the money for 6 extra gigs of RAM isn't comparable.

Mind you, I want to get an 8GB SSD drive, just for Windows 7. Boot up time of around 7 seconds from power button to desktop, but I dream... sigh.

Jasko has a point though, 12 gigs of RAM is, as you put it Janke, only for bragging rights. You should get 6 gigs of beastly ram, crank up the voltage on it, and use the money you save to send an African child dinner for a year.

Although THIS would be a nice entry point into the SSD world

[Janke 1st MRB]

I could feed African children, or I could buy more shit. As well, I think Win7 takes up 16-20GB of space, so an 8GB SSD is too small. Personally, I've contemplated the SSD idea, but I think a single 1TB HDD would do me fine, I can deal with a few extra seconds of boot time. That, and I'm lazy, and a lot of my games save shit in the My Documents folder, and I don't know if there are issues with moving that folder to a different drive, and I don't want to troubleshoot issues if there are any. I suppose being lazy is a terrible excuse, and it would be great to get a 60GB SSD and install Ubuntu and Win7 on it.

Then again, this is pretty much all useless ramble as I'm not likely to build this computer any time soon. Though I do have the money, I have better things to spend it on.

[Ford 1st MRB]

Yeah, I realized the size of Win 7 is closer to 30GB once fully updated, fail.

[Dillon 1st MRB]

Yeah, I realized the size of Win 7 is closer to 30GB once fully updated, fail.

Corsair Force 60GB- $124

Just throwing it out there..... I think you should get it. Then tell me how good it is.

[Jasko]

If you buy an SSD though, avoid SLC architecture. None of the previously mentioned products were SLC, but just a warning.