ATI Card

Hi all,

I am going to be ordering a new system fairly soon (in the next few weeks) and I have a question about how much my CPU will bottleneck the GPU. I have little understanding of how bottlenecks work, so here are my system specs:

Intel 2160 (1.8GHz with 1mb cache) OC to 3.0GHz i.e. 333*9
Gigabyte P35-DS3
Geil 667mhz 3-4-4-8 DDR2
Antec Eartwattz 500Watts PSU

My question is, considering I am aiming for a budget system with good performance, should i get:

3850 256mb @ 249 AUD
3850 512mb @ 299 AUD
3870 512mb @ 360 AUD

Also how effective is CrossFire with these GPU's? And what after market heatsink should i get to OC these cards? Everywhere I look lists only nvidia heatsinks.

what resolution are you running or plan to run off of whatever video card you are going to get?

what games do you play and what res do you game with?

Screen Resolution: 1280*1024 on a 17" LCD, I may consider upgrading to a 19" at a later date.

Games I play now are mainly Starcraft and CSS. But when i get the new system I am hoping to play Supreme Commander, COD 4, Crysis and whatever new RTS come out soon (I can barely wait for Starcraft 2 to come out).

This is a link to the graphics card I am considering to purchase:

http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=82&bid=5&sid=28142

8800GT for $305 AUD

Or is this card too 'good' for my system.

CalicoDreams

CalicoDreams said:

Screen Resolution: 1280*1024 on a 17" LCD, I may consider upgrading to a 19" at a later date.

Games I play now are mainly Starcraft and CSS. But when i get the new system I am hoping to play Supreme Commander, COD 4, Crysis and whatever new RTS come out soon (I can barely wait for Starcraft 2 to come out).

This is a link to the graphics card I am considering to purchase:

http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=82&bid=5&sid=28142

8800GT for $305 AUD

Or is this card too 'good' for my system.

CalicoDreams

Click to expand...

The 8800GT is a good card and so is the 3870-- you will need this kind of power to play future games and Crysis/

I think any of the 512meg cards you named would be perfect. Especially for Crysis (from what I hear). You said 'budget' clearly, so perhaps the 3850's.

You may see some bottlenecking on Supreme Commander. My C2D OC'd still chokes a bit on that game when you've got 500 units moving in to attack. (Also note that SC is very sensitve to overclocks in gpu's. It's the only game I back off to stock when playing.)

Good Luck!