Human_Being

When thinking about that slight lag behind the GTX 260 in some benchmarks, also keep in mind that the drivers for the 5770 are still young.

Actually, the 9800s are still available as the GTS 250. The GTX 2xx line however, based on the G200b chip, turned into a money-pit for Nvidia. It was vastly more complicated than the prior, G92-based cards and was fabricated on a 65 nm process. Late last year, ATI released their 4xxx series, manufactured at 55 nm process, and badly surprised Nvidia. The 4xxxs provided similar or better performance to the Nvidia offerings at each market-tier, but could be manufactured at 20-50% lower cost. The resulting price competition dragged the GTX 2xxs down to the point where Nvidia was forced to lose money on each card sold. They could either pass the chips on to their board-fabricators at lower cost than they paid the chip-manufactory, or they could pay the difference to the board-fabricators when they retailed for less than Nvidia's MSRP (because of their sales-guarantee with the fabricators).

Nvidia considered this an unpleasant but warranted act of "buying marketshare" while they waited for the G300/Fermi chip to come out. That chip was supposed to arrive in early fall, before the ATI 5xxxs. It is now projected to come out (maybe) in February/March. That's too long for Nvidia to go on "wrapping each chip in a $20 bill". Yet they can't make a big announcement that they are shutting down production either; they have no replacement and the drop in price from retailers would cost them even *more* money on the remaining boards as fabricators tried to liquidate their stock. So they told the board-fabricators that they were having "supply difficulty" and slowly choked off the flow of G200b chips. Once they had an artificially-created rarity in the market, then Nvidia quietly told the fabricators that the GTX 260, 275, and 285 were being EOLed.

That bit of information made it out into the news and hasn't been confirmed by Nvidia on their website (perish the thought!) but has been dug out by diligent tech-sites like Anand.

Excerpt:

I've been cheering for the Green team for a long time myself, but Nvidia has been machine-gunning itself in both feet for about a year now. Conversely, the new ATI 5000s are really sweet little pieces of engineering. Here's a review for the mainstream 5700s.


That would be a legitimate objection.


It might show up. I don't think that I'd rely on it doing so, though. I was going to recommend an EVGA model to you, but those appear to be gone, gone, gone.

Fixed long ago. Utilization of two-cores is now the default.

How much of a span of time does "repeatedly" cover? If it's just over this weekend, it may be that they have an error on their end that won't be fixed until the business week starts on Monday.

Regardless, nothing should happen to the characters on your Trial account, even if there's a delay between expiration of the Trial period and Upgrade of the account to subscribed status.

Are there any other details you can give us about your situation?

No. The only DirectX 11-compliant graphics cards right now are the ATI 5xxx series.

Unless dwindling supplies of a now out-of-production product and the possibility of ongoing SLI demand serve to keep their prices right where they are.

Do this after every patch, even if the defragger says "your system does not need to be defragmented". That 3% fragmentation is all CoX files; the Updater will stuff bits of the patch anywhere it can.

Not really. I'd give the 5770 ($165) another glance just to be thorough. It's a bit faster in benchmarks than the GTS 250 and is a little more "future proof" since it supports DirectX 11 (which something like only one game, Dirt 2, uses thus far). However, you would again have to put up with some graphics glitches as per Bill Z Bubba's sticky thread until Going Rogue actually comes out, and might have to deal with buggy drivers until ATI gets a solid handle on their new product.

But there's absolutely nothing wrong with the GTS 250 ($135). It should work well right off the bat and the $30 difference can be put towards some further upgrade on the rest of the system. The GTS 250 is definitely the more "certain" value to you here.

If you get the chip, it will not fit in your current Socket 939 motherboard; you will need the new one. If you get the new motherboard, I don't think your current RAM will work in it. So those three items are kind of a package.

I presume you're not referring to the Graphics card or HD sections above. Noiseblocker makes Multiframes in 140 mm too. Yet their 120 mms will move the equivalent CFM of a generic 140 mm for the same noise level. Also, they claim a Mean Time Between Failure for their bearings of 20 years of constant operation. So it's $25 for a fan...that you could pass down to your grandkids =P (and in the meantime will operate silently via manufacturer warranty).


Weren't the Macbooks kind of noisey recently? Anyway, the Mac Pro's fans are 120 mm. That's the standard for most tower-style PCs. Also, Macintosh certainly isn't the only company to think of ducting air through specific paths in a case.

It's fairly easy to replace a fan in a PC. If you're concerned about noise and are willing to spend the money to quieten a noisy PC, you can get Noiseblocker Multiframe fans or Scythe Slipstreams for around $25 and $13 apiece. They're expensive for what they are, but do the job they are designed for.

In terms of graphics cards, you're not going to find a quiet Nvidia card with stock cooler much above an GTS 250, or perhaps GTX 260. Beyond that, you would have to get an aftermarket cooler that tends to vent the heated air into your case rather than channel it out the back. The ATI 4xxx cards are supposed to have a similar noise/performance profile to the current Nvidia cards, but the newer 5xxxs are supposed to be somewhat quieter. Sapphire also offers their Vapor-X cooler series of cards. Oh, and on the low end stay away from these little rat-scream coolers.

If you're really serious about keeping things quiet, you can cut down on HD noise with a well-build, quiet-drive HD in one of these to eliminate transfer of read/write noise.

Other than that, make sure you've got clear air paths, tie down all cabling, and remove dust from your machine regularly.

Can we take this to mean that you also checked your antivirus software wasn't blocking the newly-patched and altered program?

First figure out what kind of powersupply you already have. You need to know: the total Wattage it's rated for, how many totals Watts/Amps are listed on the chart printed on the side for "+12 Volt" rails, and how many free 6-pin connectors are hanging off of the power supply.

It's the only card that looks like that, except for all of the others =P. Compare the Diamond (bottom central image) with the picture of the Sapphire you linked.

It's the reference card design. The only difference is the sticker the companies put on the top.

How are you getting that? From what I could see of the pictures all you could get a look at was the side. *All* of the "brick" design 58xxs look the same from the side: red plastic with vent holes cut at specified locations. The only difference between manufacturers is the sticker they put on the top. Also, each of the companies that has an "open fan" design also sells the brick version.

If it's a Sapphire, that would make it the most expensive and, from past history of the company, the best quality offering.

Graphics card matters much more than processing power for game play, and the GTS 250 is inferior to the Radeon 5770 (which functions around the GTX 260 level).


As to the rest of it (pricing things out from Newegg):

i5-750 = $200
ASUS P7P55D LE motherboard = 135
4 GB DDR3 RAM = 100
1 TB HD = 100
DVD burner = 30
Radeon 5770 = 165
600 W (quality?) Power Supply = 100
Win 7 install = 100
NZXT Beta chasis = 40
Aftermarket cooler = N/A

Total for self build = $970
Cyberpower Price = $950


On the face of it, that looks like a decent value. However, the company can't be selling at a loss. So either they are getting very good wholesale prices, or they've shaved quality on some components. Of concern to me would be: the RAM, the HD, the power supply, and the graphics card. Getting low-timing or poorly rated ram would be annoying, but not crippling. A low quality HD is most likely to be a little noisy and may have a shorter lifespan. The powersupply in the Newegg pictures is "Cyberpower brand", so I have no idea of its noise, build quality, or even 80 Plus efficiency certification. You can get a junk 600 W power supply on Newegg for $40. Finally, from that picture I can't tell who's graphics card that is. If it's Diamond, they are the cheapest but also the poorest rated of ATI card makers. I have no personal experience with them, but je_saist says they're unreliable and they get rather consistently-bad reviews on Newegg.

Some of the components are from decent companies though. The motherboard is an ASUS P7P55D LE (which you can see from the image gallery pictures). The Newegg reviews are questionable, but most of those relate to difficulties with getting an initial POST from the board, which Cyberpower has already done. Reviews of this class of boards from independant websites have been fairly favorable so far. Do note that the two PCIe x16 slots are permanently at x16 and x4, so Crossfire might be a little choked for bandwidth if you wanted to go with dual graphics cards in the future; and it's not liscensed to do SLI at all.

So those unknown components aren't guaranteed to suck, but I might put the question to the company on those particular parts.

There's a seperate tab to select assembled pcs. From looking at the numbers of reviews, either most Newegg shoppers don't buy them or the people who come to Newegg for pre-assembled PCs aren't the type to come back and post feedback.