Recommendations

Hi there;

I'm planning on building a new system in the fall and I'm starting the planning now.

I'm not too concerned with the cost at this point. I'm thinking that I'm going to go with a quad core processor and the MOBO will be maxed out on ram. The MOBO will be a GigaByte board of some type.

My biggest quandary is video. I am a highly experienced computer tech but since I've never been much of a gamer I've never paid too much attention to graphics hardware design. Now that I'm into SL I'd like to maximize the graphics capability.

So I'd love to see a discussion around quality video, one specific question I have is about SLI. Would it be recommended to put in the dual video cards?

What about video RAM, how much of a difference does having 512 megs over 256?

My research to this point seems to be pointing to the new Nvidia 8800 cards.


As always, all and any responses are appreciated.

HT

sli as your probally aware works by having card A render all the even lines in a picture and card B render all the odd lines so each are only rendering half the image per frame of animation

which doubles your performance, which if price is no object you might as well

ram is used in 2 different ways, geometry and textures, the more ram you have the more of both you can cram in the video card without having to load, in SL's case where a scene may contain gigs of texture data it could be a good choice to go with the larger memory, which will help with FPS and if you notice your textures fading in and out of focus it will cut down on that

i use a 128mb card and have a slower 256mb card, in my case i perfer the higher speed over the ram but thats just me


btw i like gigabyte mobo's also