what is xfire ? I thought it was some messager type thing for games but that last post by necros seems to indicate a video card related thing. 

that thing where you connect 2 cards together.

it's really called crossfire, but i'm lazy and tired. :P 

It seems to run quite poorly across the board necros, dont think its anything to do with your hardware.

Strangely though, if you max out all the settings, the multiplayer will run smooth as silk, yet single player runs like a dogs arse :( Must be some slightly crappy single player code in there slowing everything down. 

this is something else. i mean, it's unplayable, not just poor performance. :P 

cheers.

sounds like SLI for nvidia cards. 

Thanks for the info - it was helpful.

I may not go for the 6800 as it is a lot more expensive (in the UK) then the 67 or 66.

I'll have to see what the US price is. 

Newegg have the E6700 @ $509 (�258)

And I was in the States three weeks ago. I think I missed a trick there :( 

core 2 duo prices apparently dropped recently, so I'm upgrading to a e6600 (best bang for buck for conroe atm), and a 8800gts 320mb 8-)

Also, necros: if you cant get the drive going, try to recreate the partition in your chosen size(s) without formatting, windows may not do it but lot of other disk utilities will. At least that way you can typically run any freeware data recovery application and get almost all of your critical data back.

That being said, due to this happening to me several times over the years, and with harddrives being so cheap, I now keep everything I want to keep on a 250gb mirrored sata RAID array, with periodic backups of critical stuff to an external. Highly recommended. 

Guess i should have looked at the timestamps of those posts before replying. 

I have absolutely no clue what hardware is up to these days. GeForces are numbered between 8 and 9 thousand now, Radeons apparently rolled over at 10k and are back to being numbered 1000-something. Have they invented AGP Express yet and forced everyone to buy new motherboards and everything again? What about RAM, what number do they have after the DDDR now? 32? I'm sure there's a billion new CPU socket types I have to make sure I match also. Anyone keep their finger on the pulse of all this dumb shit?

I like the independence and control of building my own machine, and that's about it. The rest is a complete pain. :) 

It's a great time to buy a new system. AMD have been making great CPUs for years now and are currently cheap-as, and Intel's finally ditched the ^%$#* P4 and their Core 2 Duo is a top notch processor.

With AMD, there's still 3 desktop sockets, and it's a little confusing.
If you want to use your AGP & DDR ram,
go for the old socket 754 or the newer socket
939 (make sure it has AGP though). If you're building a new system or want to have an upgradeable system, - socket AM2 is AMD's main platform, but it needs DDR2 memory, and PCI express (PCIe) Video.

If you've got lots of money and don't mind supporting chipzilla the Core 2 Duo is the bomb, with huge on-chip caches and a proper design. Just make sure you don't get confused by their marketing and buy a "dual core" pentium D. These are still based on the rats-arse Pentium 4.

(AMD also has a new generation CPU on the horizon. Their quad cores may even beat out the core 2's , but production is probably still a while away.)

OS wise - stay away from Fista if you can, it ~is~ beautiful (http://chalain.livejournal.com/43015.html) but is riddled with DRM and the usual MS shit, and can even have major problems just copying files (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/15/vistas_long_goodbye_continues/comments/).
NV and ATI are also having problems just ~making~ drivers for it.

Thats what i reckon... Dunno about vid cards though. They are still making new AGP cards, so it's not dead yet. 

http://chalain.livejournal.com/43015.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/15/vistas_long_goodbye_continues/comments/ 

yeah, I put Vista Home on a pc I assembled for my aunt and cousin, in may. It was very slow to extract zip files for some reason! (With the inbuilt archive program.)

Also the ADSL connection at my aunt's place had some delay so they couldn't activate the windows in time and now it's locked up. I think XP had the same thing though. I hope they get it sorted out with a few phone calls to microsoft.

Also, I had trouble having the programs to appear in the menu. I installed em as admin but they didn't appear to other users and I dunno how or what I should do, I think I made some shortcuts by hand in the end.

There are not that many 64-bit native programs yet it seems. They haven't even compiled Opera for that, even when it's available for probably your kitchen microwave.
There is a 64bit Firefox port called "Minefield". Didn't try it yet. 

There is a 64bit Firefox port called "Minefield". Didn't try it yet.

I can see why, the very name doesn't exactly give one confidence. 

now that's what I was looking for.

If you're building a new system or want to have an upgradeable system

Yeah, I'm on the last legs of the current upgradeable system, so it's time to put in the dough to step up to a new one. Is AM2/PCIe the kind of thing I can patch with new hardware bits for some time to come? if so, I'm off to newegg.

OS wise - stay away from Fista if you can

yup. I still use 2000 :D I'm building a new machine to finally upgrade to XP, now that its planned obsolescence is looming, so I can play this copy of Company of Heroes that's been whispering sweet nothings in my ear since november.

(lol @ vistula) 

I'm sure that going from 2000 to XP will be a comfortable ride but it's hardly an upgrade.

I've been using Vista for almost a year and had no problems at all. It found everything when I intalled it - 2 pre-release versions, 2 RC version and Ultimate - and I can't remember having to re-install anything, certainly nothing Quake related. There is no slowdown and boot times are much quicker, no network issues, I really can't think of anything I don't like. And it's pretty.

But it is different from XP and you have to learn these changes to use it effectively. Oh, and in my opinion, switch off the admin rights blocker (or whatever it's called), that IS a pain for people (like me) who constantly "fiddle" with settings, programs, registry etc.

I have a dual boot set-up with XP but use Vista as the default OS. 

I'm sure that going from 2000 to XP will be a comfortable ride but it's hardly an upgrade.

Which is why I never bothered. If games hadn't started "requiring" XP, I still wouldn't. 

> Is AM2/PCIe the kind of thing I can patch with new hardware bits for some time to come?

Not so sure about this... AMD and Intel play their cards pretty close, and the industry kind-of exists to force people into upgrading.

You can't go wrong though imho. With AM2 you're getting a mobo/cpu about half the price of Intel, but the core2duo is the current top dog. And both platforms have more expensive and higher clocked CPUs available for you to buy when the prices drop.

PCIe is probably a good choice though, and getting a mobo with lots of memory slots.
(I bought a socket 754 board cheap-as awhile ago but it only has 2 memory slots! Dumb &^* Still - the K8VM800M is a great thing - Fast, and a rock!)

> so I can play this copy of Company of Heroes that's been whispering
> sweet nothings in my ear since november.

Laugh. 

Does anyone have any personal experience with this card?

I'm not after comparing this card with Nvidia, and I have already read loads of reviews, so no need to quote any links. I'm looking for responses from anyone who has this card and is using it on a day-to-day basis. 

Does anyone have any personal experience with this card?

I have one, now, but I'm not using it for gaming or other work, but it could be worth a shot... 

agp cards worth anything?
I have an oldish Athlon 1800+ system. Thought I could buy a used card for this.
Nvidia of course, so there is opengl support. Is a 7000 series limited by the bus? I don't know anything about these modern things.
I have MSI 6830 mainboard. 

For a 1800+ AGP is the way to go. No idea about the 7000 series though. 

just some / any cheap nvidia card. 

Tom's VGA charts are the most useful to get a feel for the various chips:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=740&model2=739&chart=285 

I'm having alot of trouble with my machine, it's always had some weird randomn reboot problems, but now it just reboots each time it reaches the windows loading screen, I can leave it on and it just continuously reboots... I've tried switching most of the hardware other than the mobo and cpu, with no luck, so I guess it must be my mobo or something?

If I wanted to get a new mobo+cpu in an ~300 euro price range, what would you people recommend? Core2duo I imagine?