The heat isn't bad all. These GPUs can run fine upwards of 100C. Plus the coolers on the high end parts at 1GHz have improved coolers vs. the one you see above.

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The GTX 285 is still the fasted single-GPU car don the market. The nice thing about the 4890 is that when OC'd it approaches the 285 in performance for much less.

The only catching up nVidia has to do is with their prices, which I don't see happening anytime soon, if ever.

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No nVidia card is running a 1GHz core out of the box. Some people have managed to get 800-1000MHz cores on the GTX 285s using Liquid Nitrogen, but for the most part they stay well below 800MHz.

You might be thinking of their Shader or Memory clocks, which have been well beyond 1GHz for years now.

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Screw that. I'm still running an 8800GT and I have yet to see any reason to upgrade. PC/360 cross development ftw. Sort of.

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not really. The 9800 series may have been more expensive to start with, but it's gone down quite a bit, and it's still tough to find 8800's for the same prices.

I bought a brand new Geforce 9800GTX back in december, and it only cost $160

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That's what you sound like.

There's plenty of good games coming out for the PC. We've got Starcraft II and Diablo III coming from Blizzard which will both be epic. ArmA II is also going to be an exclusive title. Then you've got the plethora of multiplat games coming out on the system that will be capable of better graphics and in the case of FPS games, the best controls.

If you wrote up a wish list of games you want for you precious consoles, chances are that 60% of them are getting a PC release also.

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*Looks at the vendor hawking obviously pirated PS3 games*

Riiiiight.

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How many of those are going to be tampered with DRM issues though? As much as I want to play Crysis, Warhead, or Spore, I won't because of SecuRom. Dragon Age is another game I wouldn't mind getting, but seeing that Mass Effect suffered from SecuRom issues, this might have the same fate even though Bioware says there won't be any DRM. If you guys pirate that's another story altogether.

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I do have the option of using both OSes, but it makes me love them that much more since they put in the time and effort to not make just another crumby port that plays as it should on my OS of choice.

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AMD has made an impressive comeback after the Athlon X2s got their asses handed to 'em by Core 2s. Phenom II are fantastic, just recently made the switch from Q6600 to a Phenom II X4 940 and couldn't be happier.

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I used to have a 9800GX2 until I switched to a 4890 last week. While I do prefer nVidia's software, I haven't really found any issues with ATI's. But I don't miss physx, there wasn't any games I played that took advantage of it, so it was basically useless to me.

My choices were between a 4890 and a GTX275. The 4890 won out because it was cheaper, and had better performance at 1680x1050 (my resolution). Not to mention Fallout 3 absolutely loves these cards for some reason, and I was in the middle of playing that.

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That's true, but I don't see i7 being viable yet unless you're serious about benchmarking, video editing or something along those lines.

It also helps relieve the bottlenecks imposed by Quad-SLI or a Tri-SLI 285 setup, but even then you'd do fine with something like a Q9650.

By the time games take advantage of quad cores I'd imagine the i7/i5 to be obsolete.

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Which is why I still kick myself for getting the Quad core.

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They're barely more expensive than dual cores and offer huge performance gains ... err, if you multitask, anyway.

I suppose single games may not see a boost...

But I can finally watch 1080p mkvs seamlessly, my AMD X2 3800+ didn't have enough juice, and it would stutter.

But the Q6600 handles it like a champ.

Worth every penny I paid for it, IMO.

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Feel free to correct me on this.

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Indeed this $600 card is overkill.

So go ahead and buy a $150 graphic card and play Crysis on high or TF2 on max settings and all the haters quit saying PC gaming is expensive.

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Wow! Really? Where does it say that?

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I upgraded to this from a 9800GX2 and I get about 10 more fps on average (from 30-35 to about 40-45). While you might say 30fps is good enough, the framerate actually dips below 30 quite a bit in some scenes. Plus, 30fps is considered minimum, 60 is where its at. Fallout 3 also got a huge performance boost out of this, I get at least 60fps (vertical sync won't let it get higher), but my old GX2 would only give me about 40fps.

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Why, that wasn't much of a protip at all.

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In a lot of cases a multi-GPU solution is needed for acceptable framerates.

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Wrong place, my bad. :/

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Even though they didn't mean to :(

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If it makes you feel any better: I thoroughly enjoyed mistyping my comment under yours. It was an experience.

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Yes.

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Similarly-priced cards between ATI and nVidia are pretty much neck-and-neck in terms of performance. Oh yeah, nVidia has CUDA and PhysX support, but that hasn't been entirely a deal breaker for PC gamers. ATI supposedly is going to have hardware Havok soon

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It's too bad nVidia's price are still rather outrageous. Maybe they'll get their prices down when the GT300 launches, although seeing as it could possibly be the first DX11 card on the market I can imagine it being cheap. The 8800 series definitely wasn't. :(

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that said, i love mine. it's been maxing every game i throw at it (because i'm not gaming at a ridiculous resolution)

although i do have a nice little overclock on it, too. :3

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I would turn off the PC, unplug the card, take it outside, then shoot it with urine.

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Oh awesome!! Good to see folks with humor here! XD

As for the card... Eh, not like I can afford it.

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