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Geforce 280

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0 comments, last by bombinator-dev 16 years ago
OK, so with that being released today, I'm having a dilemma. I upgrade fairly regularly. Unlike cars, which lose 80% of their value the moment you drive it off the lot, I find it actually costs less to upgrade to the top of the line consistently than just to buy a computer once every X years. I notice that you can often get 90-95% of the value of a piece of hardware if it was top of the line, and you sold it within 6 months. Total cost for consistent upgrades over a 5 year span is around a rolling $2500. Not too bad when you figure the same machine would cost 3x that should I just buy it once every 5 years. The problem I see is that it really isn't an improvement over a GX2. I'm looking mainly at Crysis. I could care less about the other games as they all seem to run fine on cards several generations older. I'm looking to run @1900x1200 with no anti aliasing. On one hand, the 280 will crush the GX2 with it on, but running extremely poorly compared to not being able to run isn't what I call an improvement, so no AA for me. On the other hand, I hear SLI boards, and this would include the GX2, suffer from microstuttering. So 27 fps on a GX2 might actually appear worse to the human eye than 22 fps on a 280. And there is dual monitor support. I love dual monitors, and SLI boards (well, non workstation cards) currently don't support more than one monitor. Multiple monitors are not a deal breaker, but they're extremely nice. (You can turn them on with the GX2, but it's not an instantaneous process). I'm also not going to wait for ATI. I've had loads of problems with ATI boards, and have another computer with an ATI card, and it doesn't support software aspect scaling. I have a widescreen monitor, and play many games which only support 4:3 resolutions, and my monitor has no support to scale the games, so it has to be the video card. Finally it comes down to power and heat which I hear the GX2 requires less power and generates less heat than the 280. I've had problems in the summer before with my computer freezing due to the video card, so I'm slightly worried about this. Any other concerns I need to take into consideration when looking to upgrade to a GX2 or 280? (Pro's/Con's of each)
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From all the reviews I have seen if you are not going to run with AA on then keep your GX2 as the 280 is not that big of an improvement. Two more things: while the 280 isn't the beast of a card I was hoping it would be it is damn sexy and why not wait on ATI's offerings? They should be out next week.

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