Biggest bang for my buck

looking to get a new system together, i am a gamer and i want to absolute most gpu power for my 200$ video card budget. this can include any SLI or X-fire setups. the mobo i am looking at will probaly be a x-fire/sli compatible. and my cpu will most likly be an i7. not sure if im going to do 32 or 64 bit yet.

any help would be appreciated greatly.

thanks will do, by the way my current machine is a P4 AND agp

A core i5 will definately save you some money to get a higher graphics card, it can also save you some money to get a better cooler and OC your system a little bit. I may be wrong here but i believe i read that the core i5 can only run in dual channel DDR3, for now and probably for another year or so this isn't going to be something that you should need to worry about. I would definately recommend a 64-bit system though as 32-bit is limited to 4Gb of RAM and that will prevent future upgrades, especially when 64 and 32-bit versions cost the same price.


The 5850 looks to be a great card, but so far it is a little hard to find and still expensive, i usually see it for $280-$300. The 5770 or 4890 are also cards that you can look at, the 5770 consumes less power and is very quiet. It does have a few draw back, mainly the 128 bit memory bus. but it would fit your price range and you can later get a second one for xfire. Also it has potential with maturing drivers to go up in performance.

Just my opinions.

It may be pointless right now, but when buying a new system it is also good to look to the future a bit and DX11 isn't a bad investment for the comming year. But it is also true that there isn't much of anything to take advantage of that now other than some media players designed for HTPCs.

someone needs to say it, i7 + $200 gpu budget? for gaming. Seriouly? if u can afford the i7 then put ya hand in ya pocket and get some decent grfx.

anyway, back to the question, for $200 u are looking at a 5770 as the best bet, but honestly, its really not that good a card,

64 bit doesnt mean slow.......i have 320 steam processors and 9600gt with 64 beats my 3870 in some benchmarks

What are the other parts you are considering? Perhaps some trade-offs are in order.

What resolution will you be using for games? If it is high, then you need a stronger vga card for good gameplay.
Some games do not scale well with multiple gpu's. I would look for a single great card. A single good card will let you pay less for the psu and the mobo.

With ram so cheap, do consider 4gb or more and a windows-7 64 bit. Here is one study:
http://www.corsair.com/_appnotes/A [...] alysis.pdf

ive done lots of reading on this site an others since my OP.

why pay 400+ for a video card now that is DX11 when the games that require DX11 come out that very same card will be approx 200.

also im leaning more to the 1 card for approx 200 that has sli/x-fire i do not play any games that would benefit from sli mode currently. my main games right now are world of war craft and counterstrike. Aion is playable but only if i want to (literally) see less than half the graphics, i loged on and said: " WHERE IS THE GROUND!"

thank you all for your help here, much appreciated. current system set up is looking like this:

MOBO http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813128400
GPU http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814125291
PSU http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817153038
CPU http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819115215
RAM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820148262
HDD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136351

Subtotal: $873.94

any other thoughts would also be appreciated.