Best Graphics Card?

I got 19" because of my restricted budget, first I tried a 19" widescreen but rejected it for a 19" normal.
I did this because screen area of the normal larger, or at least looks larger.

But if/when upgrading I would go for a 20"+ widescreen in the 22"/23" range as height of picture is approx that of my 19", thus it is wider and looks larger area. I'm expecting in due of time these larger w/s monitors will drop in price. It might be of course shops selling the smaller normal ratio ones cheaper to get rid, as is happening with TV sets.

love, June

Hey Rock,

I have no clue if you found all of the hardware info out or not as it's late and I'm too tired to read all the posts right now.

One sure fire way to find out all and i mean ALL of the specs about your computer's motherboard, processor, ram, etc is by using this handy little program. http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

I can be a great help at time like this. It works on every computer i have used it on.

It's called "Phase Change Cooling" and not very cheap nor for the less technically inclined, as it requires carefully installing gaskets on the surfaces to be cooled in order to prevent condensation.

There's also Water Cooling. Same method as a car uses. It carries its own ups & downs- like leaking water in your case. One plus is they make non-conductive fluids with the properties of the water/glycol mix but without the chance of shorting out your system if theres a leak. Plus you can pick up heatsinks for not only the CPU, but video, north bridge, RAM, Hard Drives, etc, and cool off everything.

My budget conscious favorite would be After Market cooling. Ditch the stock cooling on the CPU, get a decent heatsink with heat pipes. Possibly one that'll support a larger fan- less noise, more air.

Regardless of what new system you go for, DON'T skimp on the Power Supply!!! Nothing worse than someone blowing wads of cash on a new 'high end' system and sticking in a cheap $20 PSU.

VERY good point, with regard to cooling that's why a good case is important because you can have the best CPU heat sink and fan (HSF) in the world... but if the air doesn't move through the case then it won't cool efficitiently. The CPU HSF works in combination with the case airflow, without it it would be colling using prograssively warmer air (not good).

Hey everyone,

I am fortunate enough to be staying in Seoul Korea right now, and they have a wonderfull place called "Yongsan" It's right smack dab in the center of Seoul, near the US military base. Yangsan stands for "Dragon Mountain" But the funniest thing is, there is no mountain!!! So I am always wondering... did the dragon eat it??? Anyhow, Besides having a mysterious name, Yangsan also has a 30 square block electronics mart... yep thats right - every tech geeks dream world!

Its awesome, I go their ritually once a month, you can get everything imaginable, and they even have a flea market every saturday where you can buy shrink wrapped motherboards/cpu/vid car sets...

.... but about 6 months ago I discovered a true Gem...
off to the side of the huge multimonitor display walls, i saw it....

there it was...

waiting for me....


calling my name



------ a 30 LCD ----------- with 2056/1600 resolution
--- all for a price tage of $700 usd.... NEW!!!

Its called the UPLUS Vision

and has made my sl / computer experience all that more immersive and amazing....

so before you go out and buy your 22" 1900x1600 think about it... wouldnt you much rather work on a real work machine?

ok 700 for a monitor seams like a lot - but consider this - what do you spend your time staring at each day?

your mouse
your keyboard?

no... the monitor has your focus,

therefore doesnt it deserve some investment?

anyhow, thats my ramble for today

over and out

Fire


...

Spoken like a true enthusiast! Nice one! Well, recent life change means I spend more time in SL than watching TV. My eyesight not being what it once was and now having to use glasses for close-up I invested in as large a screen as would go on my desk. Now, SL is like going on holiday

The best graphics card is easy to find--it's the one that's most expensive.

thanks Bilbo.. what monitor did you end up picking up?

Well some doctors say its just as bad as tv. Its just another form of mind wasting action. Just a thought.

It does? I spent twice that on each of mine. But then, I'm sure each dollar probably goes a lot further in Korea, since that's where half this stuff is made.

Anyway, I totally agree with you that investing in a good monitor is crucial. If anyone's interested in a boa fide Chosen-Few-recommended monitor, the Eizo S2411W is it. I've got two of these bad boys, and I wouldn't trade them for anything. Details & specs are at http://www.eizo.com/products/lcd/S2411W/index.asp

If anyone's unfamiliar with Eizo, they specialize in making high end professional grade monitors for photographers and artists (they also have other lines for hospital and high end business grade monitors, but no point in talking about those here). Their S2411W offers better color match, response times, contrast, and overall realtime performance than any other flat panel monitor I've ever seen. They're truly beautiful.

When a friend of mine first got one and told me he'd spent $1400 on a monitor, I told him he was insane. Then when I went over to his place and saw it in action, I was like "I have no more questions. That is soooo worth it. Time for me to start saving up."

If anyone's looking to buy one, I recommend getting it from colormall.com. I've found their staff to be incredibly helpful and friendly, and their commitment to service to be impeccable. And they ship these things for free, which certainly doesn't hurt either.

To give you an idea, at the time I bought the first of the two monitors, other Eizo dealers were all telling me I'd have to wait 2-3 weeks for a factory drop ship. But when I called Colormall, they were like "Well, that kind of thing doesn't happen here. How soon do you need it? The day after tomorrow? Ok, let me make a phone call, and I'll call you back." 10 minutes later the guy called back to tell me it was all set. Awesome. And then when I called to order the second one a few weeks later, as soon as I gave them my name, and before they could possibly have had time to look up any records, they said "Did you want this one express shipped too, or is regular shipping OK this time?" They remembered me personally, weeks after the first sale. I was impressed.

http://www.colormall.com/FlexScan-S2411W-Widescreen--P658C119.aspx



Oh, and for those who want to go huge, Eizo just came out with a 30" version, the FlexScan SX3031W. Some of the specs aren't as high as on the 24" S2411W, but it still looks like a hell of a screen. http://www.eizo.com/products/lcd/SX3031W/index.asp

8800GTX ULTRA on a 6800 extreme, 4GB of RAM under winXP and not, i can't run it smootly as it MUST be (@1920x1200 max sets). So the performance aren't related to poor hardware, but poor code. Well i don't know where's the news here.

Sadly this is not allways the case.

ATI cards are traditionally cheaper then Nvidia and 18months to 2 years ago where the better card.

Unfortunately (...because i loved ATI for a huge amount of years) in the recent past years and today, nVidia is a step forward... i'm not talking about the price, but the high-end gfx cards. Damn expensive, but if you need it for something specific (or if you're just an addicted gamer...) you can't go elsewhere.
It's gonna happens exactly like Intel VS AMD... where the first is almost 1 year ahead because of the C2D.
This isn't necessary a good thing, since we won't another monopoly here... uH we're OT.

Speaking of Monitors:

I just picked up a nice lil' tidbit about a difference between LCD & CRT.

LCD's dont like to drop below native resolution. Anotherwords, if it prefers 1024x768 and you need 800x600 or less, the picture will become fuzzy-er. I forget the name for this.

Yet, LCD's come in some quite impressive sizes. I was thinking of storing away my ol' Dell 19" CRT for a new 22" LCD, but the Dell still works, is still sharp, colors are perfect. Still not ready yet. I love my CRT despite the disadvantages/advantages.

Thing is when you do change you will say Why did I not change earlier.
I love the space saved and the flat picture.
Only regret wish I had got 22"/23" widescreen in stead of 19" normal. But when I bought earlier this year they were twice as much, now only £50 different.
(Was £130, £250 Now £99, £149)
Love June

Yes, the price-drop is astonishing. Day before yesterday I replaced my 2x 19inch TFT DVI monitors with 2x 22inch TFT DVI widescreen monitors (good all-round spec; Philips). The price they were on sale by an online retailer was just too good to resist.

Moved the "old" 19inch TFT DVI's to my backup machines but in doing so nearly broke my back trying to lift the 19inch CRT's off of the desk!

LOL! I thought about the Space part! But then I also have a desk from the late 80s that also supports a 20" TV along with the Monitor. Modern PC Desks are so "frail".

I was looking at the 22-24" widescreens. Maybe come Income Tax Return time? That or I'll go with a 1 TB Hard Drive.

By then the prices should drop even more.

Although I'm currently stuck on a 20" LCD (Apple Cinema Display) due to the way I'm set-up down here in London (on a work placement), when I got back up to Scotland before Christmas I'll be switching back to my 32" HDTV, yum

Need it to play in my set-up in Scotland since my computer is on a desk in front of a couch, maybe 1.5 - 2m from viewers, so the HDTV resolution is perfect for visibility and awesome size =)

Snap! Does your text have an identity problem with the widths of the uprights though? I mentioned this before and someone assumed I was Vista but I'm XP.

LL has released information about the best performing video cards.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/11/15/typical-frame-rate-performance-by-graphics-cardgpu/

Hey guys, since this discussion on hardware has been pretty interesting, I'm wondering if anybody noticed Ivan Linden's recent blog post on the same topic:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/11/15/typical-frame-rate-performance-by-graphics-cardgpu/

According to the chart, the only two video cards in existence that consistently average above 30 FPS are the GeForce 8800 and 7900. Notably absent from the list is the 8600, but if the one in my laptop is any indication, it would fall in the same range. I'm sure the numbers probably are a bit skewed since it's likely that someone with an expensive video card will also have a high end CPU, a good motherboard, and a good amount of well-performing system RAM, all of which obviously make a huge difference. Still, it's pretty interesting.

If that chart isn't the world's best ad for the 8800, I don't know what is.

Also, it's of course kind of sad that even the highest peak on the whole chart is barely North of 45 FPS. What a testament to the overall slowness of SL. Oh well.


EDIT: Looks like Strife beat me to it on the link



Sorry to hear you're having problems, Vittorio.

First, which video card do you actually have, the GTX or the Ultra? There's no such thing as a "GTX ULTRA". If it helps, you can find all GeForce 8 series cards listed at http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce8.html.

Or are you saying you have one of each? If so, then maybe that's part of the problem. I'm not sure it's a good idea to have two non-matched video cards in the same machine, especially if you're running in SLI mode. I don't know for a fact that it would actually be bad, but I'd guess that the discrepancy in clock speeds between the two cards could destabilize the system.

Anyway, you're right that SL is inefficiently written. The fact that it requires high end hardware just to get a decent frame rate is evidence enough of that, as the aforementioned chart reflects. However, with a setup like yours, you shouldn't be having trouble. 25-45 FPS should be your minimum average. My rig is very similar to yours, and as I've already written, SL runs VERY smoothly for me. The same goes for everyone else I know with similar hardware. Even on my laptop, which has less than half as good a CPU (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo T7500), 2GB RAM, and less than 1/4 as good a video card (256MB GeForce 8600), SL still runs really well. So it must be something other than your video card, CPU, and amount of RAM that's acting as your bottleneck here.

What kind of motherboard do you have? Is it designed for the video card and CPU you've got in it? What kind of RAM? Do you have the sticks configured in matched pairs? How new are all your drivers? How new is your BIOS? How fast/reliable is your Internet connection? What else do you have running at the same time as SL? When's the last time you thoroughly swept your system for spyware and viruses? How fast are your hard drives? When's the last time they were defragged? When's the last time you checked them for errors?

The answer to any one of those questions can make a huge difference.



I might think twice about that if I were you. A TV is only going to give you a resolution of 1920x1080. That's 15% less pixels than would be on a 24" monitor, and 49% less than you'd get on 30" monitor. Or, to put it the other way around, a 30" monitor will give you almost 80% better total resolution than a 32" TV. That's huge.

There's a big difference in ppi too. The TV is gonna give you about 68 pixels per inch, while the 30" monitor would give you over 47% more, at a little over 100 ppi. Again, that's huge.

Considering all that, I would never describe an HDTV as "yum" when it comes to computer display. You wouldn't even have enough vertical pixels to show a single 1024x1024 texture at full size unless you went to pains to remove all window frames from the display. That would mean viewing such a texture at full size in Photoshop would never be possible, as even Photoshop's full-screen mode still has little bit of GUI in it. I don't know if you do texture work or not, but if you do, the TV really won't be adequate for it.

I realize you're leaning toward the TV because there's going to be some distance between the computer and the monitor. However, consider that with any monitor, you can always increase on-screen font size if you need to, and you if you really feel the need, you can always decrease the monitor's displayed resolution at any time. But you can never up the resolution of a TV if you find it to be lacking. (Contrary to popular belief left over from the past, modern flat panels can actually down sample very well with proper video card settings).

A 32" TV will be significantly cheaper than 30" monitor though, so if budget is the chief concern, and you absolutely positively must have have a big panel, then the TV might make sense. Other than that, you can't go wrong with a good monitor.

It's obviously up to you though. I'm just trying to be helpful if I can.

I too was a little surprised not to see the 8600 listed. I have 2x 8600GTS in SLi (usually disabled for SL), and can confirm that the card was comfortably achieiving 30+ fps on Windlight Ultra setting, as you suspected.

These cards obviously supported by, as you say, " a high end CPU, a good motherboard, and a good amount of well-performing system RAM"

Also what that chart doesn't tell us about is who is running SL in SLi mode. I have dual 7900 GT's in SLi.

Some advice about SLi, Split frame rendering works well in SL but makes video playback choppy in other applications. I've found the best results with AFR2 (Alternate Frame 2). SL has issues with AFR1.

And more Hardware Linky Goodness, the results of Steam's Online Survey of Hardware.

(Steam- the online content delivery tool for games like Half Life2, Counter Strike Source, etc)

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey_v6.html

When Linden recomend from thier test say the GeForce8800 or 7900, I've looked at suppliers and they add letters, seems to be 2 or 3 versions.
does it matter much which is bought?
Love
June