Are you kidding me?
No
- when will time be right to pull the trigger on a quad core / dual SLI rig to take me to the promised land (until the next great thing that is)?
2009-ish? Of course, by then SLI will probably have cycled out of fashion again, replaced with multicore-style GPUs cards.
Never. I’m hardly a tech guru, but it seems like video cards evolve their featuresets, for lack of a better word, as often as brute force factors like speeds and amount of RAM or whatever. You’ll have a beast of a system that’s overkill for all but one or two current games, and by the time new games come around that should theoretically be ideal for all that horsepower you’ve got, they’ll also want support for Direct X Version-you-ain’t-got-it and you’ll be upgrading again anyway.
You might want to get some SLI if you are using a 30" or triple monitor setup, otherwise its not that beneficial, since the marginal improvement only really gets off the ground at high resolutions.
Bingo. SLI is only reasonable at a minimum resolution of 1920x1200.
I can play EVERYTHING I throw at my new system at 1680x1050, all settings
but FSAA set to the highest possible. I haven’t given it a proper Oblivion strain
test yet, but Company of Heroes is really, really nice. The demos in 3D Mark 06
play at framerates around my monitor’s VSync. This is just one 8800 GTS and
an E6600, 320MB and 2GB respectively. Factory overclocked MSI brand GTS.
If you get a super-wide LCD from Apple, you may consider SLI of some sort.
Next year’s system is always better, and you’ll never upgrade if you keep
looking at next year’s new, hot system.
Speaking of temperature, quadcore is a fucking reactor. SLI GPUs likewise,
except with rear-facing turbines. There’s a chance you can’t drown out all
that noise without also hurting your hearing.
Do you plan to HELOC the house?
You don’t have that now, right? If so, it will not be for a long time.
As far as thinking about a computer from Dell or whatever, I don’t. I always custom build my systems from parts. Its far cheaper and better.
Right now I would not get a quad core. They are not worth it. I would get a quad core capable computer, so that in a year or two when the prices drop and software actually takes advantage of it, you can just plug it in.
Any motherboard now should be quadcore capable, except the cheapest crap.
But if you plan to replace the CPU ‘soon’, you might as well buy a cheap E4400
or something. You still get dualcore, but perhaps not the same gaming performance.
Anyone else smelling a viral marketer?
Well, Intel plans on dropping prices around July 22nd of this year. I think the lowest priced quad core will be around $270 so it might be a good time to buy it then if price is a factor.
I actually know who this poster is in RL, he’s not a viral marketer.
The thought crossed my mind, but it’s not overt at this point, so I figured we might as well humor him. He’s not hurting anything.
I googled his post to make sure it wasn’t a stock VM post and it didn’t return any hits, so I think this guy is legit.
They just did a price cut. You can end up waiting forever, because you will always be getting a better bang for your buck a few months from now.
I was just informing him about a price cut. I didn’t say he had to wait for it. It might be an option for some people who wouldn’t buy a quad core at around $530 but would be more willing if it was priced at around $270.
Man! I got accused of viral marketing when I posted about grapple last year too! Rough crowd…
I think I’ll pass on SLI because I am not rocking a 30" monitor by any means… Thx for the responses…
This just means it’s your other account, can’t fool us.
Well to be fair it is almost impossible to read a forum these days and not be confronted by big brand names left and right. The whole thing makes me sick.