I'm not exactly extremely cyber-savvy here, hehe, so I have a couple basic "ballpark" style questions and I'm sure that you guys could give me a good "ballpark" answer..
I have a mid-sized case right now that has been housing a Q6600 @ 2.4ghz with stock cooling for a while now. Vista 32bit, 2 gigs DDR2 (667/533/400)... I finally decided to put a few bucks into it and make it usable for gaming without going for heinous record breaking framerates and dollar expenditures either, hehe..
So, after a good month or so of research, I decided to toss in a 512mb HD4870 and a BFG 650watt PSU. I determined that for my price range, that was far and away the best option for me, even if I am more nVidia biased anyway. I have been very satisfied with it so far, my little 19" widescreen monitor has a native res of 1440x990 and the setup will run FEAR at that res with *everything* fully maxed, soft shadows on, 4xaa/16xAF, and EAX/HD sound - the in-game benchmark never dips below 45fps, maxes at over 120fps IIRC..
So I'm very pleased with that.
I HAVE noticed that this card creates a LOT of heat though, and I don't exactly have a humongus cave-like case here... the GPU temps seem ok, but this leads to my 1st question -
...can I O/C my cpu to 2.8ghz without doing ANY cooling mods whatsoever? The new PSU has a monstrous fan underneath it but I really don't know much about o/c'ing and with the size of the case and the nuclear heat generated by the 4870, I question if I should just leave it alone.
My 2nd question, that you all saw coming a mile away, is - **BALLPARK**, what kind of performance can I expect from Crysis? (Not WArhead). I don't really plan on running high resolutions, 1440x990 is a LUXURY to me and I'd be totally happy with 1024x768 to be honest, and anti-aliasing is by no means something I really care about either. I would really love to be able to run it at 25+fps with the 'ultra' detail settings applied. You guys would be much better at helping me determine what I can expect.
Thanks a ton for any responses, I really appreciate it.
Dave
I have a mid-sized case right now that has been housing a Q6600 @ 2.4ghz with stock cooling for a while now. Vista 32bit, 2 gigs DDR2 (667/533/400)... I finally decided to put a few bucks into it and make it usable for gaming without going for heinous record breaking framerates and dollar expenditures either, hehe..
So, after a good month or so of research, I decided to toss in a 512mb HD4870 and a BFG 650watt PSU. I determined that for my price range, that was far and away the best option for me, even if I am more nVidia biased anyway. I have been very satisfied with it so far, my little 19" widescreen monitor has a native res of 1440x990 and the setup will run FEAR at that res with *everything* fully maxed, soft shadows on, 4xaa/16xAF, and EAX/HD sound - the in-game benchmark never dips below 45fps, maxes at over 120fps IIRC..
So I'm very pleased with that.
I HAVE noticed that this card creates a LOT of heat though, and I don't exactly have a humongus cave-like case here... the GPU temps seem ok, but this leads to my 1st question -
...can I O/C my cpu to 2.8ghz without doing ANY cooling mods whatsoever? The new PSU has a monstrous fan underneath it but I really don't know much about o/c'ing and with the size of the case and the nuclear heat generated by the 4870, I question if I should just leave it alone.
My 2nd question, that you all saw coming a mile away, is - **BALLPARK**, what kind of performance can I expect from Crysis? (Not WArhead). I don't really plan on running high resolutions, 1440x990 is a LUXURY to me and I'd be totally happy with 1024x768 to be honest, and anti-aliasing is by no means something I really care about either. I would really love to be able to run it at 25+fps with the 'ultra' detail settings applied. You guys would be much better at helping me determine what I can expect.
Thanks a ton for any responses, I really appreciate it.
Dave