Kouta

I sold the video card, thanks everyone.

I was preparing my drive to install osx onto...

Using partition magic 8... yeah bad idea it corrupted everything and i lost all my data and its not recoverable by about 30 different programs... it will see it but the bigger files are too fragmented to recover successfully... oh well, thats what the interweb is for

rmriggin

That is what happend to me one time. I stopped using partition magic to do the partitioning after that. Using the disk utility in the OSX installer worked a lot better.

Kouta

Or I could have just been smart and looked that pe8 doesn't support winxp64 *Sigh*

the mac thingy looked like it was trying to do wierd stuff the the drive... oh well data lost, internet to gain.



now to make this crossfire thing to shine... i can do it... just gotta figure out all these blasted settings again... so rusty.

hornbm

yeah partition magic doesnt work on xp 64



nvidia > ati



I went with the 3700+ on mine and its a GREAT overclocker. kinda wish I had went dual core tho

rmriggin

My next PC will definately be dual core. I am going the Intel route though because for the first time in a long time Intel chips are cheaper than AMD.

Kouta

the preliminary things of nvidia vs ati crossfire vs sli were somwhat inaccurate since ati was still working on the drivers. in recent reviews of x8x8 sli vs x16x16 sli vs 8x8x crossfire show the crossfire not that far behind even nvidia's x16x16 sli architecture. Plus this computer was built on a budget, my ati crossfire setup was 200$ cheaper than a comparable nvidia sli setup. I am sure by now though nvidia has stepped up the driver area, plus ati has a big hurdle to tackle using thier dongle setup, thats another reason I am using the x1600... so I don't have to deal with that but now my pci-e bus and processor have more overhead to deal with. I am sure I can somewhat minimize it, but it will always be there... but even with nvidia now you dont have to have the internal cross link thing (i have no idea what its called right now) which should add more overhead as well. Will also be interesting to see what ati does with thier xpress 3200 chipset.

Dual core is nice, but alot of games are having a hard time really taking advantage of the setup, just like they dont really take advantage of the 64bit extentions at the moment. Also depending on how things change with AMD they might not have to since AMD is trying to go reverse-hyperthreading (having multiple cores/instruction paths look like one path to the os) and also hypertransport 3.0 got ratified. Also looks like socket 939 and 940 are dieing sometime soonish as well...

I just think it sucks how much more its divided now though...

Intel vs AMD, then the subcatagories of Intel SLI vs Crossfire, then also on the flipside AMD SLI vs Crossfire... so there is basically a total of 4 arch-motherboard/chipsets ya have to deal with now.

My computer was never ment to be the best, just meant to perform better than my last one and give me some more options to play around with. Plus i like the ansiotropic filtering that the ati has over the nvidia, plus being able to have HDR+AA is nice. I like playing with lighting. Granted the nvidia has better framerates, I still have playable framerated with debatably but marginally better graphic quality.

Oh well as with everything its all how much I wanted to pay and what I have to deal with to get what I want. This setup does what I currently want it to so I am happy with it for now.

j0rd4n

good to hear you like what you got