Ultra-mode video card shopping guide

I understand that.

The thing is, I don't want to be in mid-range, I want to run it ultra settings, ultra quality, maxed out, and the GTX 260 can't do it alone.

Waiting for another update from Posi.

(b^_^)b

Well you're in the best position to say for certain but it looks to me like if you didn't mind doing a bit of modding, cutting those 'fins' off the side of the fan shroud would allow it to fit. Or you could just cut away the whole conflicting part of it if that would do better. Your PC so your decision but I'll trow it out there. And it shouldn't have any impact on the CPU cooling, particularly if you just cut off the fins. Thank you Dell and your wonderful case design!


You can ask the Devs but I doubt they'll say. They keep to their own schedule on such things. As for the $$, if you don't know what to spend it on just send it my way and I'll take care of it for you. More seriously, there's no need to spend that much on a PC, well, period. I don't know what you have now but if you're perfectly happy with it and the performance you get now, do nothing. Spend the cash elsewhere or save for a rainy day. If you're not happy with it, then just spend enough to get it where you will be happy. None of us here can tell you how to spend your money but we can suggest and advise things if you have some sort of plan in mind as to where you want to go.


Then it sounds like you want something in the high end of Posi's chart. The higher you go, the more assured you can be that it will do what you desire. From what is public, I'd say 5770, 5850 or better ATI-wise. Or like a GTX 280 or better if you prefer Nvidia.

An 8800GT 512 should be able to do minimum UM based on what we know right now.

'Fraid not. The 9800GT and by general equivalency, 8800GT 512MB, form the bottom rung of UM performance per Posi. You're a good ways below that. Sorry mate.

That's a laptop chip and pretty much only the latest and greatest of those will have any hope of UM. Yours however, is not one of those. Sorry.

Don't know your specs but yes I'd expect it will run hotter. That assumes it works. Here's the deal, just because you have a PSU rated to 460W and the card says it wants at least a 450W doesn't mean you're in the clear. You need a mobo with a PCIE slot (I assume you have at least this), your PSU will have to have PCIE power connectors for your card, and you need enough amps on your 12V line to feed the card. Miss any of those and you're not going to get it to work.

Refer to this image and this image (hopefully the links directly to the images work).

The two labels are for 750 Watt and 730 Watt power supplies respectively. Look at the first chart; see the "+3.3, +5, +12, etc" across the top? Those are the various voltages that different components in your computer require to run. The row beneath that lists the amperage (amount of current) that the power supply can output at the given voltages. The value we're concerned with here is the "+12" volt rating.

Now, little math: Wattage = Amperage x Voltage. In the case of the first label-image, we have 60 Amps at 12 Volts - a total of 720 Watts output.

Now look at the second label-image. In this one, there are four listings for "+12 Volts". This is because the power supply has been built with several weaker "rails" for 12 Volt output that work together. A few years ago, most power supplies started moving to this kind of design for 12 Volt output. This gave some advantages in construction, but also added new complications like trying to balance the load across all the weaker components evenly. More recently, manufacturers have been moving back to robust, single-rail designs. In a multi-rail configuration like this, you have to rely on the manufacturer's listing for Combined Wattage across all the 12 Volt rails - in this case 672 Watts. Note that 16 Amps x 4 rails x 12 Volts is 768 Watts, not 672; the difference is the physical limitation of multiple rails trying to work together rather than a single one able to work at its max.


That output at 12 Volts is really all you need to see to figure out if a power supply will support your CPU + graphics card configuration. Depending on what your CPU is, it could have a power draw anywhere from 45 Watts to 130 Watts. The 5830 graphics card will have a draw of around 100 Watts. I would note however that it's a really good idea to have some head room of output above what you precisely "need". Firstly, the efficiency of the power supply (how much of the electricity you are paying for is lost as heat) presents itself as a curve across the potential output. The best efficiency is likely going to be somewhere around the 3/4 max-output mark (varying with model) and drop off as you approach 100% output. Furthermore, power supplies will degrade in performance with age and use. So a "pad" of potential output will give you a longer service life at a given load.


If you're shopping for power supplies, Corsair is a very good brand. They'll give solid performance and reliable build quality at a fair price. Some people like Antec offerings as well, but I can't speak to those. Depending on the model, Enermax can be excellent while still not breaking the bank. My personal favorite is Seasonic, but while they tend to offer superior quality and performance to everyone else, it comes at a premium in price as well.


Unless you have specific reasons for wanting a 5830 at a given price point, I'd recommend that you read some online reviews of the card. The general consensus on the 5830 is that it's a good card, but is a priced a bit high for its capabilities. The lower 5770 and higher 5850 seem to be better values for their cost.

There is one other issue, and that is all other things being equal, running a power supply significantly under its rated maximum will likely cause it to run cooler than its design limits, and as a result run its fans much slower which reduces noise levels.

When I stuck the 5850 in my Dell, I also ripped out the power supply and put in a Corsair 750 (actually, I'm pretty sure its exactly the one you link to in your first pic). It has a fan the size of a small jet engine at the botton of the power supply, but I notice it hardly runs: I don't hear it really running at all. Probably because of this:



Its basically designed to run practically fanless until you get to about 400 watts or so. It probably doesn't even notice the piddly 350 or 400 watts I draw under my system's high load levels. A 500 watt power supply would have probably been plenty, but it would probably be running its fans constantly when the video card was drawing its max current.


One other thing I should mention is that the closer you approach the limits of your power supply, the less likely it will be to hold rock-solid stable voltages or control shifting loads on its rails. So whatever you calculate your system to need, you always want a power supply that can deliver significantly more than that for a variety of reasons.

Its a little more complicated than that. For example, the ultra mode demo included a feature referred to as ambient occlusion. Its a way of rendering a scene with a technique that simulates the effects of geometry on lighting. See 17:45 of the Ultra Mode demo. Ambient Occlusion is a technique (or rather a set of techniques) to estimate how much of the ambient light in a scene is being obscured in different parts of the scene, and therefore causing implicit shadowing. Its potentially a computationally expensive technique. Depending on how they implemented it precisely, it could add computational load to your CPU, or your GPU, or both (my guess, and its purely a wild guess, is that they did some hardware-accelerated OpenGL geometry mojo).

Ultra Mode encompasses a significant number of different enhanced rendering techniques, and to run it "at maximum" requires a CPU and GPU capable of running all of those settings at their limits. But that doesn't mean running Ultra Mode at less than the absolute maximums is necessarily going to be worthless. You're probably going to have to see it for yourself to know if running at less than the absolute limits is really noticable to you.
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Thank you for specifically mentioning this, it had completely slipped my mind to do so.


A 9800 GX2 is two 9800 GT-class chips in the same package. Essentially it is its own SLI in a single slot. Whether Ultra Mode will support multi-GPU configurations like SLI (Nvidia) and CrossfireX (ATI) is, I think, still unconfirmed.

Better. You should be able to get some decent UM action. I'd guess medium UM or so based on Posi's chart.

I've said this before, perhaps in this thread but maybe not, just because the new test client says you can do UM, doesn't mean you really can. The CB is still ongoing so testing is likewise ongoing. Which means the final specs aren't set yet. For all we know, that message will pop up for anyone running anything whatsoever, regardless of actual capabilities. As much as it may be nice for the game to have that message, I fear it is spreading false hope right now to those with systems that just won't make the cut.

Good point. My bad. Well it should at least get low UM. And no, there has been no public word of late concerning UM and SLI/Crossfire working together. On the up side, I'd consider it pretty certain the Devs want and assumedly will get it working eventually.