Anyone else using GeForce 8800's yet?

Please pardon the n00b questions but,

What do I need to know about choosing motherboards?

Why would I need 2 video cards?

Appreciate the help and great tips so far.

Thanks!

I don't want to let this thread get too far off topic for SL, but since you asked:


That's a pretty big question, very hard to answer without knowing what you already do and don't know, and what type of system you're looking to put together. What I can tell you generally is that if you're looking for a system that you won't have to replace for a few years, go with a motherboard designed for multi-core CPU's, and for nVidia SLI (I think the ATI equivilent is called Crossfire, but I'm really not an ATI fan, so I'm not 100% sure). Generally anything labeled "nVidia 680i SLI" will be more or less the current top of the line. Beyond that, it's really just a question of bells & whistles. Oh, and as I said in an earlier post, make sure the video card slots are true x16 electrical for maximum performance.

You'll find that tomshardware.com is a great resource for learning about all things computer. See what they have to say about motherboards.


With two video cards, you can run up to four monitors without a performance hit, or you can pipe all the power of both cards into a single monitor (SLI mode) for incredible rendering power. Many modern PC games are designed to take advantage of SLI, so they run at lightning speed on SLI-enabled systems.

The trend we're starting to see in computer architecture these days is that rather than come up with new and creative ways to make better processors, companies are choosing to up the power by adding more of the same. Instead of an actual better CPU, I now have a quad-core, which means 4 CPU's in one box. Instead of an actual better graphics card, I've got two graphics cards, each rendering half the scene. (Note: I'm speaking generally here. The GeForce 8800 is indeed a "better graphics card" than any other on the planet right now. It's just that having two of them makes it "twice as better", and there's no single card that's as "better" as that.)

Think of it kind of how music had to be played before the advent of electric amplifiers. If you're a 16th century composer, and you want your violin line to be louder, add more violins (hence, the large symphony orchestra evolved from the small string quartet). If you're a modern day rockstar, and you want your guitar line to be louder, simply turn it up to 11 (any modern 3-piece rockband can easily play louder than the largest orchestra on Earth).

Computers seem to be going the orchestra route rather than the rockstar route these days. I wonder how long it will be before that changes. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

What you need to know is what you want to do with it Rockwell.
These days I doubt you can buy a mobo with anything but a PCIE slot, AGP being 'old technology' these days. Available budget is probably the greatest deciding factor in choosing AMD or Intel CPU. Similarly, mid-range speed or premium cost high-speed.
SL really is RAM/CPU/Graphics hungry so a RAM level of 1 to 2 Gb, 1 vital, more than 2 not a huge improvement.
CPU speed is down to budget again.
Graphics you're really talking of nVidia 7600 for a good, reliable card. Even at this level you have GS and GT variants, GT being the best but again more expensive.
I hope this helps, Bilbo

edit: my mention of 7600 is a starting point here.
Thanks Chosen for a better answer

Hiya Chosen,

Well,, I'm ordering the Infinity 1950 tonight. My configuration is basically the same as yours except for a few minor details like drive size and a couple of small add ons. The way I figure it,,, if yours is doing so well in SL then why fool with a different setup! SL is mainly the only entertainment application/program I'll be using it for anyway.

Hope to meet you in-world soon!

Isn't $4500 a bit extreme to pay for a PC if you are just using it for SL? *shrugs*

I wanna see a pic of Chosen's set up and desk

If I'd had that much leisure money to spend on SL, god help me, I probably would have. But since my budget was considerably more limited, I went the build-it-myself route to get as much bang for my buck as possible.

If I, a complete hardware noob, can assemble a computer, then just about anyone can. It wasn't easy, mind you. I had to do a lot of reading and I very, very, very carefully followed the instructions in "How to Build the Perfect PC". The authors claimed the task would only take a few hours; it took me a few days. But the results was an SL trip that purrs along very nicely for $1600 ($2000 if you count the WinXP-Pro OS). It's not a cutting-edge system, but it's powerful enough that only the most extreme LL issues derail my inworld sessions and it didn't empty my bank account.

Knowing what I know now, the only change I would make to my confirguration would be a better graphics card. The one I have is good, certainly MUCH better than I had before, but now I've gotten greedy and I wish I'd gone just that little bit further into the hole I was digging. Although, if First Look lives up to its promise, even that compromise will be erased because that viewer gave my card a real boost up in quality.

AMD Athlon 64 4000+ processor
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
GeForce 6800XT 256MB
Sony 22" widescreen monitor
2gb RAM

Yes! $4,500.00,,, “IS”,, an extreme amount of money to pay for ANY pc! And to be honest,,, I’m still having a hard time justifying the expense!

How-ever, I’ve reached a point in life where I don’t want to be challenged building my own machine again or be faced with any other voluntary task that poses problems for me to figure out! I just want to turn the PC on and enjoy the SL environment! SL has enough problems of its own with out me adding my own PC customization to the pot. I haven’t bought a new machine since the Pentium first became available. I’ve repaired, upgraded, built and wrestled with more PC’s than I care to remember! Now, it’s time for me to sit back a bit and just enjoy,,,,, I hope!!! The way I figure it, this new machine,,, “should”,,, be able to handle upcoming software, and support new hardware add on’s for quite a long time before it becomes obsolete.

So,,,, with all of that said,,, my hat goes off to all of you who still have the drive and perseverance to continue the life and death battle of Machine vs Man. Luckily, I happen to have a little extra cash to purchase my new pc and raise a White Flag signifying my surrender to Software / Hardware battlefield.. I hope!!!!!!

I'll help you with that justification.

Yes, yes, you can play SL on your new computer, but nonetheless, having a cutting edge computer in today's rapidly evolving IT landscape is essential for a professional presence. In this way you can take advantage of the productivity gains of advanced software and stay current in any field. This gives you a competitive edge.

As it so happens, all the above is true, at least for my situation. I work in a Microsoft Gold Partner company, and it was increasingly difficult for me to match my work environment (.NET, VisualStudio, etc) on my home laptop. Not to mention that I'm getting too vision-impaired to enjoy a 17" laptop screen when trying to code in VS.

So SL was the motivating force behind my upgrade, but now that I have the system I realized I should have done this anyway. I was overdue for a new system.

Does that help?

Haha!!!!

Regan,,,, you're a bad influence!!!!!

One of my other SL friends is also coming up with all kinds of justifications for me also! What you stated,, IS, true though! And while I'm still in the IT work force,, I know that I have to make the effort to stay up to date on the latest releases..... See,,,,, your argument for getting the PC is working!!!!!

Want more justifications? I'll tell you why I got mine.

All I talked about in this post was SL, but this thing is for far more than that. I'm a pretty heavy multi-tasker. More often than not, I have SL, Photoshop, and Maya running at the same time, as well as several browser windows. On top of that, maybe Illustrator, maybe an InDesign or Word document or two, maybe Acrobat, etc, etc, etc.

Four years ago, when my previous PC was new, all that multi-tasking was no problem. The machine handled like a champ. As time went on though, and each piece of software evolved to become more and more resource intensive, I was able to run less and less stuff at once. To use Illustrator, I'd have to close Photoshop, for example, if a lot of other things were running. Needless to say, this was a serious hit to productivity.

What finally clinched it was when SL and Photoshop started to hate each other. Whenever both were running, opening a menu in any program would bring the whole machine to a screeching halt. It would freeze for a good 10 seconds or so, sometimes as much as 30.

I know what you're probably thinking, sounds like I just needed more RAM, right? Well, I agree, except the problem was that machine takes PC1066 RD RAM. It's fantastic memory (beats the snot out of DDR2 for graphics work), but it's ridiculously expensive. Adding another gig to that computer would have cost around a thousand dollars. There was no way I was gonna spend that kind of money on a 4-yr-old machine, especially with no guarantee that the added memory would actually solve my problem, or any idea of for how long if it did.

Even though I spent nearly 5 times as much buying a whole new machine, I'm absolutely certain my money is much better invested this way. This thing doesn't even break a sweat running all that stuff. I have yet to see a single running program slow down when opening a new one.

I'm sure in 4 or 5 years, I'll probably end up having the same problems with this machine that I have with the old one now. That's just how it is with computers. At least I'll have a few good years though, and the amount of work I can get done at normal speed instead of snail speed will more than pay for the $4500 over that amount of time.

Hee hee, in that last sentence Chosen, you mention the point I was going to make .. time!
Every little tweak, every little upgrade that speeds up the execution is an investment.
In SL alone it makes the experience so much more enjoyable but for everything else it means you can do your work faster, enabling you to do more in the time.
That has to be a huge justification.

Chosem, Bilbo99,

You should both give seminars in,,, "The Positive Aspects of PC Purchasing"!!!!! teehee

Absolutely! The fact that you can *also* run SL like a dream machine is nothing more than a pleasant bonus, an incidental artifact if you will, of staying current in your chosen field. Although, one could also argue that a necessary aspect of staying current in IT means experiencing first hand cutting edge software -- like SL -- and new market potentials for the future of the industry.

I'm hoping that same argument will persuade my accountant that SL land tier is a legitimate web hosting expense...

Great info Chosen, et al...

Do you feel like the system you got has more power than SL can use? Are there any components -- such as the 2nd graphics card -- that you think might not be adding significant performance improvements?

I'm thinking SL will be the most resource hungry app I'll be using, and I don't want to spend a lot on components with little or no incremental benefit.

Thanks

I wish I could tell you how my 1950 performed with SL but I had a rather discouraging episode with FedEx.

They evidently dropped my PC from a substantial height and the PC arrived with severe damage. I already sent it back to CyberPower requesting a complete new PC to be built. After spending over $4,000.00 on a machine, I do not want any of the components from the original PC due to fear that their life span has been severly limited from such an impact. Even the case was sprung where the back plate and tray were jarred free, the side panels didn't fit right any more and get this,,,,. One of the Nvidia 8800 cards was completely out of it's PCI slot with its contacts resting on the motherboard while still being firmly secured to the back plate. Can you imagine what kind of impact could cause that to happen????? Now I know what the Ex in FedEx stans for... Explosion!!!!!!

Oh no thats horrible Which is now making me very nervous as I wait for my Alienware to be shipped

Just a slightly off-topic question here: What are you using for power supplies to power these 8800s?

I tried ultramon also and ended up going with multimon, dont exactly remember way now.
But it works great.

http://www.mediachance.com/free/multimon.htm

I ordered the Tagan 1100 watt power supply with my machine. It was a recomended choice in the configuration screens and the most powerful they had available. I wanted to make sure this PC can handel any thing else I might throw at it in the future...

I shouldn't have used that term. "Throw". This machine has had enough bad luck already thanks to FedEx.

They should have a new motto. "We add an extra option to what ever we deliver. Now it rattels!"

A few days ago I got and installed a NVIDIA 8800 GTS I also had to install a new 550W PSU since mine was only 300W. I haven't seen much difference in SL since I only have 1Gb of RAM and just a Pentium 4 3.0GHz prosessor. I also use Windows Vista Home Premium. The computer I installed them in is about 2 years old. I can't afford to spend a lot of money at one time so over the next few months I'll be slowly upgrading. This is a bit off topic but I was wondering if this motherboard will be a good one to get?

I'd be willing to be the second sentence here explains the first. SL does not directly support Vista yet.

Also, I don't know for certain that the GTS line of 8800's has quite as big of a jump over other video cards as the GTX does. The GTS is still a hell of a card, and most likely still way better than almost any other card out there, but compared to the GTX, it's got slower clock speeds across the board, less memory, and significantly less stream processors.

Your motherboard might also be holding you back. If your PCI Express slot is not true x16 electrical, you're not gonna get the max performance out the of that video card (which I assume is probably what led you to your next question).


Glancing at it quickly, it looks very similar to the one I have, just a different manufacturer. The biggest differences I see are yours has a slower FSB (800/1066 as opposed to 1333/1066), and a slightly different collection of ports. For example, yours has a parallel port; mine does not. Seems like the comparison between the two is one of those "a little less of this, a little more of that" type of deals.

Fair warning, by the way, it looks like it's got the same onboard sound that mine has. Replace that with a real sound card right away if good quality audio is important to you (Soundblaster X-Fi is inexpensive and sounds great). The onboard audio has impressive specs on paper, but in practice it sounds pretty crappy.

Other than the audio, I've got no complaints.

Actually between XP and Vista I've seen about a 5-10 fps increase and its a bit more stable for me.



I did have a 6800 card installed, so its actually a decent upgrade.



The motherboard is in my price range so thats not a realy big problem. I'm not ready to buy a motherboard yet so I am still looking at different ones. I need to get a new case first anyway since the computer I have now is a Gateway.

The on-board audio for the motherboard I have now is actually not that bad, but I do like the X-Fi card better though. The motherboard only has 2 PCI slots, so I had to switch to the onboard audio due to the video card and X-Fi card almost touching.

Before you spend money on a motherboard, buy more RAM to upgrade to at least 2GB. Unless your existing mobo is maxed out, and you HAVE to buy a new one before you can get more RAM. I would expect memory to be a much bigger bottleneck for you right now than the CPU or motherboard are.

1GB is only barely adequate for SL these days under Windows XP. Vista is more memory-hungry, so I would expect 1GB to be inadequate. It's really pretty easy to tell if your computer has a hard disk light; if the light shows more than an occasional brief flicker when you run SL, you don't have enough RAM. The occasional flickers will be SL hitting the disk cache. More than that means the system is hitting the swap file, which you never want it to do if you can possibly avoid it.

Thought I'd add some good news to the thread for anyone thinking of getting one of the GeForce 8800 cards- Sometime around April or May of 2007, Nvidia is supposedly releasing the GeForce 8300 and 8600s. The estimated price of the higher end 8600s is expected to be about $180.

So there's some good news for those who want a bleeding edge card without the high price tag!

Whats more, if you want the 8800 series, but cant swing the extra cash for a beefier Power Supply - the 8800 requires between 20-22A on the 12v rails, minimum- Thermaltake makes a Video Card ONLY Power Supply that powers on/off with your system. I've seen 'em around for $50 online, such as HERE

I'm using the 8800GTX and I see the improvements in everything, not just SL. I'm also running Vista with it and I've been very lucky to have no problems with SL and Vista. When I was running XP, I used Ultramon for dual-monitor taskbar - unfortunately, it doesn't work that great with Vista, although apparently the long-awaited 3.0 version will address that.