graphics card
 

im thinking of updating my graph card from a radeon 9600 128MB to a 256MB card or a 512MB card. any suggestion of whats the best

ATi 1900XTX or nVidia 7900GTX !!!

I would say go for ATi 1900XT as they are the same as the XTX except for clock speeds. and I have yet to see one 1900XT that can't be clocked to XTX. Plus it costs a lot less.

The bad at ATi is that if you want to have two GC in your PC you have to buy a more expensive version of the card (named crossfire or so).
With nVidia you can buy two of the same GC and put them on a SLi-Mainboard.

But, if you only want to have one GC in your PC then it's unimportant.

The crossfire mastercard solution is about to be replaced with a better solution. The next crossfire chipset from ATi will have it integrated into the northbridge so no need for a mastercard anymore.. :)

However I think that SLi and Crossfire is unessecary as when any games can use all the power avaible the cards are to old to give what the games needs anyway so... 1 card solution is what I go for.. :D

As multi-core CPU's are being release, I'm sure that video cards in the future will also have multiple GPU's... Parallelization rulez! :)

Luckily for you a few graphics cards with more than one GPU has already been released. Sure not in the same Die but there's atleast to gfx chips on it.. I know Gigabyte released a 6600GT 256mb card that had 2 6600GT cores on it. And Asus has one 7800GT with 2 cores on it.. The prices on the other hand... well lets just say it costs more than standard SLI... :p

I think I can manage to live through another one or two years and then buy some relatively cheap single-board multi-GPU video card... ;)

thanks for the posts. i think i might go with ATi 1900XTX. any good sites where i can get it.

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=317238

No idea about how good komplett are in the UK but here in sweden they are kickass... :D

And please this is no advertising its just a little tip for the man. Also as I said I would recommend getting the XT instead of the XTX as the only thing that differs is the clockspeed and that is easily fixed... :)

thanks for that. and sorted the advertising prob. how to u sort the clock speed??

Just do a little reading on hardware forums aobut graphics cards overclocking and you'll get all the info you need. Or search some on google for "ati overclocking" or so.

Overclocking must always be done with some caution though so read up on it first and try to overclock a little by little until you find the optimal speed (on most XT cards thats higher then XTX clocks and without any problems!).

On a Budget Like me?
 

I found a great value with the Nvidia 6800GS AGP and I was able to unlock a few extra pipelines giving me basically, w/ a little overcloacking the performance of a 6800 Ultra..

It's not The Best, but for my Money it Runs BF2 and Half-Life and DoomIII great.. if you got an AGP slot to fill;)