So, are you guys planning on upgrading or buying any new kit? Extra hardware, better stuff? If not, then why?

My dad wants to upgrade his comp, so we were going to upgrade mine and he gets my current stuff.

Looking at the cheapest Intel quadcore with Penryn core (when released), an appropriate mobo and CPU cooler (probs arctic cooling freezer 7 pro), 4GB good speed DDR2 RAM (overclock!), a new (modular) PSU and 2 500GB HDDs.

Im going to make my own comp when i go to uni... Should have enough money by then Then ill be able to play alot more games

That will probably mean another person asking me bout hardware, Stu's been doing it too (don't know why, everything will change by the time he does it, lol). xP

I'll be getting a couple of these soon.

At a guess, I'd say that is the prerelease model of a 9800 (Ultra)?

EDIT: After looking at HardOCP (I recognised the watermark), it's a 9800GX2, basically a pair of die shrunk 8800s in one card. In other words, no big improvement, and entirely dependant on SLi.

I wonder where the SLI connectors are.. I can't see them on that picture.
I thought for a moment that it would be running over the PCI-Express 2 bus, but then I thought that would be crazy, and remembered the SLI bridges, like the new 3-way bridge, and think they will use a bridge still. I mean why announce 3-way then prevent it in future models - that way, 3x8800U's would be better than 2x9800GX2's.

Sometimes they don't put the SLi bridge on some preproduction models, I think.

Also, how would 3 88Us be better than 2 98GX2s? The latter is equivalent to 4...

Thanks for reminding me. I made a mistake there. Forgot they were two cards together.

What did you think they were then? Just a die shrink for such a monster card?

No, I just forgot they were a double card for a moment!

Though, I think I may have put that before because of this:



It's unclear as to whether they mean 30% faster per-chip or per-card. If it were per-card then I'd be right.

Well I'd guess that would be single chip performance, and even the new GTs and GTS have near ultra performance (the G92 ones) from what I've heard. It's probably saying atleast 30% for non SLi compatible things.

Yeah, the new GT's and GTS's are great, but they suck at higher resolutions. 8800 Ultra ends up being many times faster at resolutions 1920x1200 and above.

Ultras have more RAM though, don't they? Performance seems to drop sharply when cards don't have enough GRAM to cope.

I believe it has more to do with the memory bus width than the sheer amount of memory.

Well I guessed it was something to do with the memory!