Recent content by Sylvester

Its nice that you care enough about your son to ask Clay. Imho graphics obviously, assuming you want the PC to have better potential as an entertainment device as well as an educational tool. Integrated graphics are intended as cost cutting options for small office systems which will run...

If you dont want to stretch to multiple tests with multiple cards then 285 because it offers the best single chip performance and will provide the least bottleneck for testing mobo /cpu /ram configs and so give clearest picture of a mobos capability and rules out SLI / Xfire driver snafus.

I am waiting for the 5870 myself. ebuyer have been good in the past, I agree Scan are not as eager to please, they seem to expect the customer to see it from their angle which is a bit self centered of them frankly and they certainly missed an opportunity to help me out with a rubbish product...

4850 beats the 4770 by only 5% max, its very close. Either will be good but the 4770 is cooler than the generic 4850 512Mb and uses 60W less power under load. (The 4850 1Gb in the 4770 review linked above is not generic.)

only issues with CRT are weight and bulk power is not that bad, I do care about power, just I care more about being able to see what I play without it looking like its made of lego and shmearing all across the screen, plus there is a display lag for many LCD types upto 32ms, I still make sure I...

I am with qubit on the CRT. My 21" Dell P1110 trinitron is flawless at 85 refresh but tolerable at 75 refresh and anything lower I see flicker even on 2D, in fact especially 2D. Gaming FPS I find certainly needs to be better than 30 depending on the type of game, if its an overhead view RTS...

we wont know until it gets benched, until then its the battle of the hype monsters

Do you know about Arctic Ceramique thermal paste ? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835100009 Its non conductive & almost as good as arctic silver, recommended for applications where shorts are a possibility. For future reference.

Cirrus logic pci Creative Voodoo Banshee 8Mb+8Mb 2D/3D pci Elsa Geforce2 AGP Sapphire Radeon 9700 AGP Powercolor Radeon X850XTpe AGP Asus Radeon 3870X2 PCIe

I don't know deus, that is the question. It could be 9/10 but I get the feeling its more like 7/15 with some of them. In any case thermal cycling stress depends on usage patterns. For manufacturers as long as its more than warranty its OK until they get a reputation for parts failure. With any...

Planned obsolescence is the thing which concerns me, after reading about the underfill issues with thermal cycling I can see how thermal cycling can be used to limit the functional life of parts at some average length greater than warranty. IMHO this may be a factor in the way parts are...

nVidia are launching die shrunk cards on Jan 8th which will throw the 285 into the mix. Should be cooler running, less power and / or faster clocks than the 280 and no X2 snags. This is what I am considering to replace a 3870X2 which is not performing right in older games. 280s are end of line...

I wouldn't go with XFX myself, their CS just tried to stiff me on 2 year warranty.

IMHO Some geek needs to sit down and work out bandwidth but it aint going to be me. I would guess its between the 2600XT and 3650. http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_3650/8.html This review gives you some idea of the relative power of the cards (pci). 3650 agp is a nice little...