Ultra-mode video card shopping guide

I would go with the HD 5870. The GTX 295 is really an SLi setup on one card and it's unclear yet if SLi or Crossfire will make a difference.

Plus two HD 5670s (2x 400 SPs at 775MHz) is less than one HD 5770 (800 SPs at 850MHz). The HD 5870 is 1600 SPs at 850Mhz.

Yes it's me again...

I've been trying to get the dimensions of the HIS HD 5750 iCooler IV 1GB (128bit) GDDR5 PCIe (DirectX 11/ Eyefinity) particularly were the cooler assembly is located on the card relative to the ends of the card. However trying to get answers of the manufacturers is like getting blood out of stone.

Anyone able to give me some pointers or able to supply the dimensions? I just need to know if it'll fit my case before I tell the shop to ship it.

The card's length is 19.7cm, width of 4cm. Now if you click on the picture of the card that shows the card from the top edge (next to the last one on the right), it will blow up and display a picture that's almost as wide as your browser window. Capture that image and print it out (landscape mode). If you don't have a printer then you will be forced to measure off the screen.

Now break out your calculator and ruler. Measure the length of the card (board part, exclude the bracket). Remember that it should be 19.7cm. So calculate the scale factor of actual to measured (19.7/measured). Now go ahead and take measurements of what you are interested in. Then multiply it by the calculated scale factor, round up and you get a pretty good idea of the actual measurements.

Edit: What I get is the cooler stops at around 17.5cm (measured from the bracket), at that point it's 2.5cm. It widens to 3.0cm at 15.0cm where the fan cage starts which widens to 4cm unit you're 6cm from the bracket and then drops back to 3cm. You should still do your own calculations.

Been thinking about getting a card for the wife so she can go nuts with Ultra Mode: Hoping this would do it for Low-Mid: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814143186 BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GT 512MB;

If you can recommend a mid to High Card for 100-200 that isn't HUGE (I need a card that only takes up 1 slot); that would be appreciated.

Caveats: I tend to shop NewEgg for their Customer service (Been burned on PriceWatch too often), and shop NVidia.

That's why you look at the pictures such as the one that's the bracket/ports view. Wider coolers will stick out and be all obvious like.

Kry8ter, sorry, can't think of one. The more powerful the card, the more power it uses, the more heat it generates, the bigger the cooler it needs. The 9800GT is pretty much the limit when it comes to low profile, single slot coolers.

As stated by some others, if you're building a new rig solely for CoH/V, then, even with Ultra mode coming down the pipe, a dual GPU system probably won't be much help to you, as SLI/CrossfireX tends to yield less impressive results in MMORPGs than in most other games.

Now I understand the idea of wanting a dual card set-up, I have one myself, but SLI or CrossfireX really needs to be treated one of two ways: either as the starting point for a very high end gaming system; or as an upgrade path on a mid-range system. I see people looking at building something new with dual cards at the mid-range which is something that doesn't really make a lot of sense. For example, the Radeon 5670s mentioned in earlier in an Alienware build would be outperformed by a 5770 or 5830 for less money with lower power consumption and heat generation. But if you already have a card like a 5670 and you're just looking to add some extra power to your graphics processing, then adding in a second 5670 makes a lot of sense, as its probably still cheaper than selling off the used mid-range card and then buying a new high end card.

However, I feel this thread represents a pretty large failure on the dev's part: by February, they should have had a pretty exact specification needed to run ultra mode, instead of all this guess work that we players have been making. And while I understand the need to still be flexible while this is under development, considering that many of their customers are considering a fairly expensive upgrade to coincide with this graphics update, I really think that it was their responsibility to nail down and post an exact minimum spec. While everyone is sort of panicking with the whole "can my system run ultra mode?" I'm pretty sure that ultra mode's requirements are going to be far less hefty than most are scared of: a dual core CPU at about 2.6GHz and a Geforce 8600 or Radeon 3850 are probably all that will be required for minimum spec (most game developers shoot for specs much lower than this for minimum specs, and we're talking about on very popular games like Mass Effect or Call of Duty; its stupid to eliminate 70% of potential customers out there with obscenely high requirements); cards in the current mid-range like GTS 250 or Radeon 5750 will probably be all that's needed to run the game at relatively high settings with a good frame rate. The bulk of worried posts in this thread could have been largely avoided by simply making a statement along the lines of "You WILL need at least CPU XX, X amount of RAM and card XXX from Nvidia or XXXX from ATI in order to run ultra mode: we are still shooting for a slightly lower minimum spec, but this is the guaranteed minimum spec required for ultra mode." This hasn't shown up yet, and so now we have people running around trying to shop for an unknown future, and quite possibly spending money that they could have put to better use somewhere else simply because the dev's have not nailed down a guaranteed minimum spec for ultra mode, and haven't posted that spec up in lights with arrows pointing to it for everyone to see.

So what is the absolute best card out there to run CoX with all the Ultra mode options on the highest settings?

If it matters, I have a 2.85Ghz Quad Core system with 8GB of Ram, 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate, and a 1000w power supply, not to mention a fairly huge case, so size of card of the power it takes isn't a great concern.

What I can't figure out is why I can run Crysis, Fallout3, and Mass Effect 2 with all the bells and whitles with my GTX260 but CoH is a lag fest if I turn on all the effects. And I have good net access.

I was thinking of getting the GeForce GTX 285 because Positron mentioned that one in his initial post in this thread, so thanks for the heads up re: DirectX 11. I guess money is an object to a point - I don't want to spend $700+ for the Radeon 5970 - but the Radeon 5870 or Nvidia GTX 480 look like possibilities.

OpenGL has evolved as well as DirectX, both taking advantage of the hardware available in Dx10/10.1/11 cards. Actually OpenGL had features found in Dx10 before there was a Dx10.

Apple announced their new i7 MacBook Pro computers today with the following video card info: