The general thought among the engine team here is that SSD will be common place in ~2 years. By then they'll have the kinks worked out, they'll be a decent size and the price won't require a bank loan to get a good one. 

You are missing the point and are comparing apples and oranges.

Traditional SATA mechanical disks, which do ~110-115mb/s reads with 8-10ms seek time are not exactly in the same category as SSDs with 0.1ms seeks and 200+ mb/s reads. Neither are laptop drives that are even slower. 

...if you are using an SSD as your only drive, and filling it up with rips of The Wire, you are a giant failure of a man.

These are crazy awesome value now, I bought a Raptor about 6 years ago for the same reasons, and it was ace. 

The cost of RAM per density is and has been dropping on a curve similar to Moore's Law. For the near future I'd see a co-existence of both systems, cheap terabytes are nice. 

This is the weirdest thing. Pandora and Windows Vista can make sounds just fine, but iTunes, MediaMonkey and Quake are silent. This is on my Macbook Pro.

Any ideas? I've never seen anything like this before... 

Is Quake running under Windows or Mac OS X? 

Windows Vista. I also don't have sound in games like Peggle Nights. It's absolutely bizarre. 

Actually, never mind. I uninstalled the audio driver I had in here and put in the default Boot Camp driver. All is fine again. I love Windows! 

 

Yeah, fooling around on PC for awhile. I wanted to do some WPF coding/learning, so while I'm here ... :) 

yeah, you probably know this by now, but always always use boot camp drivers. :) 

I normally wouldn't deviate but I was really trying to get UnrealEngine3 running here so I could work at home and I installed some other drivers. I have been properly flogged and will stick to the script from now on. 

Let's preface this with a bit of history. I've been an NVIDIA user since Geforce 256 and a pretty happy one at that. I've never ever had any signifiant driver issues with NVIDIA products, so I sticked to it, especially considering I've been hearing of and reading about multitudes of compatibility, stability and general driver issues on the ATI front over the years. The one time I had decided to make an exception was (I think) about 4-5 years ago where I had recommended a specific ATI card to a friend after having seen it receive a few good reviews. Except that we could never get it to work: the system would power up, give video, boot, etc, but not a single ATI driver package would recognise the card so we were stuck with the generiv video driver. After several days of battling with installations and reinstallations, we said fuck it, took the ATI card back to the store, brought an NVIDIA card with us and it "just worked". Needless to say, that had only reinforced my idea that I should just stick with NVIDIA.

Fast forward to today and NVIDIA Fermi GTX470 and GTX480 cards launched and they're a huge load of poo poo in regards to it's power draw and temperatures and full load operating noise levels. I've been holding up upgrading my videocard for a long time now: I am still using a 8800GTS, all the rest is modern (i5 750, X25-M os drive, 650W PSU, etc) as I have been holding out to see what Fermi ends up being like. Now I am at a crossroads. I had been considering going from 8800GTS to the GTX470, but when you compare it to the ATI 5850, it becomes a really really hard sell: the slight improvement in performance is directly offset by the slightly higher price, the power draw at load is 120W (!!!) higher, the load temperatures are 15C higher and the accompanying increased noise levels are obvious. The second major issue are the reports that Fermi cards do not really truly idle if you have 2 monitors attached to the card (which I always do), see this: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1258/15/ resulting in absurdly high power draw and temperatures even at the desktop. All in all, this all sounds like some serious package of black humor.

So I am very tempted to bite the bullet and just get an ATI card, the 5850 sounds like very good value, BUT... browsing around dozens of forums I am still seeing that on average, ATI users seem to have a lot more compatibility, stability and driver issues than NVIDIA and I am still having shudders remembering that time I had to troubleshoot that ATI card I had recommended to my friend years ago. There are supposedly some flicker issues with some ATI cards, some issues with Bad Company 2 rendering glitches, etc etc all really stupid sounding things that should've been ironed out in a quick fashion a long time ago, but yet people still seem to have to deal with these things.

What's a man to do? Should I just suck it up and go for the 5850 and potentially deal with annoying retarded driver issues on a common basis, but sleep soundly knowing I got myself good performance for low cost with reasonable power draw and temperatures or do I value my sanity and driver stability and reliability more and just go with the GTX470, despite it's very obvious shortcomings? 

I can only speak for myself but I just got a new machine with an ATI 5870 in it and it's amazing. I haven't noticed any weirdness at all. I played the 'Just Cause 2' demo yesterday with everything absolutely max'd out (from resolution to effects) and it never dropped a frame.

I used to steer clear of ATI but they're fine these days. 

I have a love/hate relationship with ATI/NVidia as I too am looking forward to owning an HD 5850 soon to replace my GeForce 9800GTX. Hopefully I'll have similar results to Willem, as for some reason L4D2 does not seem to run as fast as I thought it would in my new computer. 

Oh right, L4D2 was another game I tried .. max'd out, runs amazingly well! I can't speak for the other models, but the ATI 5870 is a god-like video card. 

With my 8800 GTS 512Mb, but I got a 5850 and I game @ 1080x1920 and everything i maxed out (even crysis), and my editors work and everything.

Also Catalyst Controll Center allows for some overclocking, but you can use third party software to overclock even further than CCC will allow you. And these 58XX cards overclock up to 40%.

The 5850 is a real good value for money buy, and the 5870 is compared to GTX 470/80.

Just buy one, you wont be dissapointed :) 

I have been buying ATI cards for a while now... they're great. I have a 4870 at the moment and I love it. Their newer cards have great performance for a good price, supposedly the power consumption is low and the cards are quiet.

The driver support is good, they release a new set every month with performance improvements and bug fixes. I can't recall ever having any major problems with any games or apps, honestly (I'm sure it happens but I haven't come across anything myself).

In short, the newer cards are great and the driver support is good. Given your comments above I'd say just get one. 

After reading some reviews, I ended up placing an order for the Sapphire HD 5850 TOXIC (see one of the reviews here: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1238/1/.

The fact that it's factory overclocked, averaging a 9% performance increase over the reference card in addition to using a non-reference HSF that simulatenously results in noticably lower load temperatures won me over pretty big. 

I have a geforce 5900, i knew the 50's would eventually come back into fashion! 

Jago that's the one I wanted but it was sold out on newegg :( Maybe by the time I get some money it'll be back in stock and we can be videocard bros :D 

Depending on your PSU you can have fun with AMD GPU Clock Tool, MSI Afterburner and Furmark. And overclock the shIIIIIT out of it!

JF - Get a 5970!!! 

That Nvidia used to have better OpenGL drivers than ATI. Not sure if that is still the case. 

Oh it sure is. 

But Intel has the best!

I have to try a driver roll-back to see if I can get geometry picking to work again. On the plus side the latest drivers actually passed all the tests for OpenGL 2.1 compatibility for the first time.