Robert-The-Rambler
01-12-2006, 07:10 PM
Well, today is a banner day for me. I just blew my tax return before I even got it on a rather tasty gaming rig.
I went to Best Buy and bought a nifty black case with a 500 watt power supply that has lights like the subwoofer systems in so many trunks of awful Honda Civics.(open box buy for 50 bucks) You can even see inside the clear slide out side piece much like bandpass sub setups.(Cool I must say) I also picked up a $30 Soundblaster Live 24 bit sound card for cheap 24bit 7.1 sound possibilities.(EAX 4.0 compatibility I believe)
Then I hit pricewatch.com. After the insane search of hours length I went for a pretty good getup.
Motherboard: ASUS A8R-MVP ATI RADEON Xpress 200 Crossfire motherboard
Anandtech wrote so positive about the board I bought it from Newegg.com for a steep price of $150 US!!! The few other palces that had it were a bit cheaper.
Processor: Athlon 64 3200+ 512kb cache( $160 at New Egg)
Video Cards: A Pair of Sapphire ATI Radeon X1600 XT 256 meg PCI Express cards
For 167 each at Newegg.com I was amazed since friggin pricewatch does not have them listed on their website at that LOW price.($203 is the lowest listed right now)
0 Man, for $334, you get 24 pixel shaders working together, 10 vertex shaders,(12 pixels each and 5 vertex) and access to the best AA available today. Read about it at http://www.atitech.com/technology/crossfire/index.html (Especially useful at 1024 * 768 on large screens like projections screens measured in feet) The things are clocked at 600mhz core and 1400 mhz memory with a less effective 128 bit memory interface compared to 256 bit for the X1800 series but we are talking serious speed for not a ton of money.
I also picked up a 250 gig hard drive from New Egg, too.(About $100) I already have 2 gigs of memory waiting for this setup.
So for about $1000
Asus A8R-MVP
Athlon 64 3200+
2 Radeon X1600 XT
Soundblaster Live 24 bit 7.1
2 gigs of PC 3200 system RAM
250 gig Maxtor ATA 133 hard drive
So I thought I would let everybody know that I am really hopeful about this setup and i'll be sure to try to get some benchmarks on what this kind of setup can do. NOBODY is doing tests to see how these kinds of moderate setups can fair against the more high end setups. We shall see. Is anybody else as fired up about CROSSFIRE as me?
I went to Best Buy and bought a nifty black case with a 500 watt power supply that has lights like the subwoofer systems in so many trunks of awful Honda Civics.(open box buy for 50 bucks) You can even see inside the clear slide out side piece much like bandpass sub setups.(Cool I must say) I also picked up a $30 Soundblaster Live 24 bit sound card for cheap 24bit 7.1 sound possibilities.(EAX 4.0 compatibility I believe)
Then I hit pricewatch.com. After the insane search of hours length I went for a pretty good getup.
Motherboard: ASUS A8R-MVP ATI RADEON Xpress 200 Crossfire motherboard
Anandtech wrote so positive about the board I bought it from Newegg.com for a steep price of $150 US!!! The few other palces that had it were a bit cheaper.
Processor: Athlon 64 3200+ 512kb cache( $160 at New Egg)
Video Cards: A Pair of Sapphire ATI Radeon X1600 XT 256 meg PCI Express cards
For 167 each at Newegg.com I was amazed since friggin pricewatch does not have them listed on their website at that LOW price.($203 is the lowest listed right now)
0 Man, for $334, you get 24 pixel shaders working together, 10 vertex shaders,(12 pixels each and 5 vertex) and access to the best AA available today. Read about it at http://www.atitech.com/technology/crossfire/index.html (Especially useful at 1024 * 768 on large screens like projections screens measured in feet) The things are clocked at 600mhz core and 1400 mhz memory with a less effective 128 bit memory interface compared to 256 bit for the X1800 series but we are talking serious speed for not a ton of money.
I also picked up a 250 gig hard drive from New Egg, too.(About $100) I already have 2 gigs of memory waiting for this setup.
So for about $1000
Asus A8R-MVP
Athlon 64 3200+
2 Radeon X1600 XT
Soundblaster Live 24 bit 7.1
2 gigs of PC 3200 system RAM
250 gig Maxtor ATA 133 hard drive
So I thought I would let everybody know that I am really hopeful about this setup and i'll be sure to try to get some benchmarks on what this kind of setup can do. NOBODY is doing tests to see how these kinds of moderate setups can fair against the more high end setups. We shall see. Is anybody else as fired up about CROSSFIRE as me?