I'm out of touch

[xgtdec]

HI Guys

I just realised that i aint upgraded in what must be in hardware time a couple of ice ages and with christmas coming up i said id get rid of the ol 8800's...they have served me very well in their time and i cant really have any complaints about them but time moves on and if i was to pick one part of the rig to upgrade it would be the GPU, but what to buy?? it seems that since i last looked at graphics cards they have come a long long way and now have up to 2 gigs of power and all of a sudden SLI aint as great as its made out depending on where ya read it from....so in short i am looking for a bit of advice on my next cards, if its to be sli the budget would be €200 each card, if not then naturally €400 for one card.....any advice or recomendations for the upgrade are very much appreciated, theres even a cool prize for whichever OC members ideas i go with :)

[Amtrak]

I'm not sure about availability or exact pricing over there, but if you were to upgrade at this very moment on that budget, I'd go either a Radeon 5870 (~$400) or Radeon 5970 (~$600). Unless prices are way inflated over there, the latter card should come in right near the upper limit of your budget.

Either card will offer more than ample performance to play all the latest titles and have the benefit of supporting DirectX 11, which I think would be a good idea to invest in with that budget and if you don't often upgrade cards.

If you can, my personal recommendation would be to wait until nVidia releases their new DirectX 11 cards. See how they compare to ATI's best, and also let the new competition drive down prices a bit.

Edit: Realized this was the nVidia forum, so if you're after only nVidia cards, I'd wait until they release their DirectX 11 cards before deciding, for the reasons mentioned above. If you need new cards this instant, you can SLI a couple GTX 260 Core 216's for about $400 total. If you want a single card, the most powerful current offering from nVidia is the GTX 295, which I think go for around $550 now; it's technically two GPU's (two underclocked GTX 275's) in SLI sharing a single PCB. Two GTX 285's would be the fastest dual-card setup, but I think it'd be pretty hard to find each card under your per-card budget.

[xgtdec]

Some good ideas there Amtrak, and if i had to twist your arm would ya go with the single or double?

[Amtrak]

Personally, I prefer going the single GPU route so as to avoid any of the multi-card problems/issues altogether (which also means I don't go with the multi-GPU cards, since they are still technically Crossfire/SLI and have the same issues associated with Crossfire/SLI; the 5970 is a multi-GPU card, BTW). Everybody's different, though. I don't demand the absolute greatest possible framerate at max settings that money can buy, so I'm perfectly comfortable with my current setup and will be for at least another year or two.

[xgtdec]

Gotcha, i was looking at these (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/896MB-XFX-GTX-260-Black-PCI-E-20-2300GHz-GDDR3-GPU-666MHz-216-Cores-2xDL-DVI-I-HDTV-plus-FarCry2#ProductFeatures) and i kinda reckon that they would be a good bump up from the 8800 and should do me for a while...can ya see a down side?

[Amtrak]

No, I don't really see any problem going with those. I don't know what sites are good for purchasing in the UK, but those seem like a good choice from that particular site. For the price of those, though, I would have told you that you might as well step up to a stock GTX 275 that you can overclock yourself, but the cheapest one they have in stock is an overclocked £190 version.

[xgtdec]

I think i could make the stretch to the gtx 275, would you have a link to the Oc'd one you were looking at, i think i would be happy with 2 275's....and that should do me for the for seeable future

[Amtrak]

This (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/896MB-XFX-GTX-275-XXX-55nm-2360MHz-GDDR3-GPU-670-MHz-Shader-1404-MHz-240-Cores-plus-Batman) is the one I was referring to.

I'm going by the higher of the two prices, since I honestly have no idea what the VAT thingy is. The overclock on them is fairly small, which would make it a far better value if you could find a much cheaper 275 out there. That site lists a couple in the £160-170 range, which would be a lot better value if not for the availability issues.

[xgtdec]

Yeah i think its a real case of just biting the bullet and just making a choice, i think if you look too hard into buying a card your gonna spend years researching and never actually buy one...i think ill go for 2 of the gtx 275 in the link and that should be fine for me, i just want my games to look nice on a 24" monitor, i dont need to squeeze every last fps out of them.....i mean 2 x gtx 275 will let me play games at full wont it?, if it does with out getting too anal about fps etc then they are for me!! :)

[Boondawg]

I'm in the same shape you are, and looking at replacing 2 simular cards that you are, in close to the same budget range (around $300). I was alsao wondering weather to go with a single upper-end card, or 2 mid-range cards in SLI, as I have had great luck & performance with SLI.

The rule USED to be that one $400 highish-end card would always beat out 2-$200 midish-range cards in SLI. I guess that is still true.

Here is where my problem differs from yours: I just plugged a 42" monitor into my system, and am running at high-rezzes. As soon as I plugged it into my 2-8800 Superclocked's, the drain on the dual-cards memory (i'm guessing it is the onboard memory that is taking the hit from the 42 incher at high-rezzes, anyway) was noticable AT ONCE.

So, with an LCD monitor (a Westinghouse LVM-42w2) this big, at high-resolutions, I wonder what would be the best $300 solution for my particular problem?