Hi guys and gals, i am putting a whole new PC togeather and just bought this mother board (ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard CPU Type Athlon 64 FX/Athlon 64
FSB 1000MHz Hyper Transport). I am going to buy next the video card. any suggestion on what kind of card should i get. I also bought the amd anthlon 64 3000+ venice intergrated into chip fsb socket 939 processor and two hitachi deskstar 7k80 80gb 7200 rpm 8mb cache serial ata 11 hard drive i am setting them up in a raid format. any sugesstion on the viedo card please.

Obviously the choice of card depends on your budget. At the lower end my choice would be for an ATI X600Pro. If you can run to it, at the top end an X850XT.

I still prefer ATI over NVidia. In the early days of FS2004, almost all the problems with weird colours and things seemed to be with new NVidia cards. ATI didn't have any major problems. I decided to go ATI then and have stuck with it.

I've just received an order from a client for a PC with the following spec

AMD 64 4000+
1 or 2 GB DDR 400 RAM
160 GB  SATA H/Drive
ATI X600 Pro 256MB PCI-e graphics
Logitech cordless KB/Mouse
Samsung SM913N 19" TFT monitor
DVD-RW

For cost reasons, had to make slight compromise over the graphics and I've gone for an ABIT board that's slightly cheaper than yours but with almost identical spec. I'm really looking forward to this one. Will be very interesting to see how it benchmarks as it will be the fastest machine I've ever put together.

BTW - he's moving up from a 1.4GHz Duron. Think he'll notice the difference?

Didn't anyone notice Bruce bought an SLI mainboard?

Guess what Bruce? You get to buy TWO very nice and expensive video cards if you so desire! That will work extremely well!

SLI is a chipset feature which makes running two graphics cards on the PCIe bus at once possible, but that's why you chose that mainboard isn't it?   ???

Say, a pair of SLI enabled NV6800 Ultras? 6800GT's ? Or possibly the cheaper 6600GT's in tandem......

Don't forget to look at and buy PCIe and SLI compatible cards only, even if you only buy one, as you may want a second one at a later date.

If you don't want 2 graphics cards, maybe a cheaper nForce4 Ultra based mainboard should be bought instead..... er, if it's not too late. You then would be able to consider the "other" non SLI video cards such as the current ATI X800 range and a plethora of non-SLI Nvidia PCIe cards.

Non SLI cards will work on  that SLI board but then you burn your bridges if you want to add a second card later, as only a pair of identical SLI cards will operate in SLI mode.

Another option would be the ASUS A8N-E mainboard which is an nForce4 Ultra chipset, with a sneaky ability to run a pair of SLI cards as well  

Rob, I think ATI lost the edge on filtering prowess with the release of nvidias 6800's, not completely sure though. Also, Bruces spec is misleading, he actually bought a Venice core cpu and not an FX.

FLASH! I read at OCAU news that ATI are releasing "SLI" cards as well, or have just done so. They are called "Crossfire". Not sure if they run on the SLI boards, but I would think so.

Bruce, the weak point in that rig is the CPU being only a 3000+, but that's not all bad if you want to save some money. You see, that shiny new Athlon 64 XP3000+ Venice cored CPU should overclock quite well, giving you a fast CPU at a discount price if you are able to do it. (it's not that hard)
In light of that prospect, and for better overall system performance in general, consider buying some quality ram, not really expensive, but good quality overspec ram, so that a little overclock on that cpu is made easy.

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Well, I can tell you that I have been absolutely astounded at the number of ATI owners with seemingly insurmountable problems, and the threads in forums concerning those problems are some of the longest I've ever seen, so there are two sides to that story. In addition, ATI have been plagued by driver support problems for years, and I only hope this situation is over.


Happy shopping  Bruce !!    

Yeah well that 3000 Venice will work well especially overclocked. I doubt ATi version of SLI will work on Nvidia SLI. Unless  am mistaked wouldint nvidia have it trademarked or something? Congo ATI does beat 6800 series i FSAA and AF by a very small margin some people post comparison pics I can not see a difference really, a lot of those pics are taken at an angle so ATi has the edge anyways, striking comparison to those Macsters. Back to it I would choose a nvidia card for fs because last I checked M$ devs on nvidia. I think many people that buy ati get sucked in by the higher clock rates, much like Intel and AMD. That is my speculation why it beats Nvidia in FSAA and AF because higher clock rates but Nvidia has twice as many pixel pipelines wich gives it more bandwith and smoother running. If you do go 6800U route dont get the extreme, you can get the BFG 6800U OC wich has clocks half way there of the "extreme" counter part. You loose like 25Mhz on the core but most cases thats easyly remedyed. Im an Nvidia guy as you may have guessed because it is stable, overclocks well, very few problems ever arise, I personally spend my money on a problem free and stable product over the edge of performance. If you ever Overclock a cpu an you are playing a game on an unstable cpu and all of a sudden your computer crashes....it sucks.

SLI has been mature even before nVidia got it. It's the same as the Voodoo 2 link option that made these things render half of the miage  and combine it on one output channel giving you the option of going beyond the 800x600 limit that these things had in single operation.

About the RAM: get 2x 512 instead of 1x1024. believe me it's faster that way

The SLI marker only notes the capability to run the cards in SLI mode whitout using the bridge module that is usually needed

Yes standardzation is a must but ther must be new development, its not standardized untill it is around and prroven. Lets take DDR2 for example, not many like it because it is fast but the latencys suck. Intel has already made the move to DDR2 and AMD will to shortly after dual cores come. Then DDR will be like SDRAM old phased out sucks. I see where you come from though on SLI we got these people buying 2 video cards, ahh wonderful now we start to see why Nvidia established this, not only are people spending money on 1 but 2 video cards doubling Nvidias profit! I am sure Nvidia could put 2 gpus on a single card but they would not make as much as someone buying 2 cards. Yes we see performance increase in SLI but its also much bigger than that for the corporations. Albeit there stillpossibility to run 1 card on an SLI board  the market could quickly devide with people buying 1 ccard boards and 2 card boards and we all know what goes on from there. As far as im concerned SLI is a money maker, dual GPUs would not be very hard I do not think but 2 6800U SLI= 1000, 1 6800U with 2 gpus would probably be 600-700 dollars. We wont get into the money Nvidia makes on their SLI chipsets. Fortunatly most people dont make enugh money to spend 1000 on a GPU interface so game devs will make games that work well with lower end systems to make money. Things kinda balance out but we must be carefull or PC will end up in similar boat as macintosh.

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SLI is not the same but similar to the old Voodoo technology in principal. (when did the Voodoo technology mature and die a lonely death?)

So is the NVIDIA® nForce4 SLI Chipset the same as the nForce4 or nForce4 Ultra chipset? I believe it's entirely possible to mod an nForce4 Ultra board into an "SLI" hybrid with the stroke of a pencil across a bridge on the mobo's chip, however, this requires BIOS support and an extra PCIe graphics slot, and nvidia get VERY upset with any manufacturers who exploit this capability at the moment because it means they can use the cheaper non SLI chipsets to produce "psuedo" SLI boards.