You guys seem to monitor component prices quite a lot - how much more can we expect to see the GTX 460 drop in the coming weeks? Ebuyer has the Gigabyte one for £169, Scan is doing a special today for £163; are things likely to get better than this in the next 30 days or does this look as good as it gets for the moment? My mouse trigger finger wants to jump at the Scan offer today but I don't want to go spending money if it's just going to keep dropping...
For the graphics card there are two main factors: 1, $ to £ conversion rate 2, The competition, I.e what new Nvidia cards or ATI cards are due. So the 1, is very good at present £ is at a 2 month high, but these can go up as well as down. :=) And for 2, not much competition until ATI bring out a mid range 6 series. So i would say now is a good time, to make the jump, or wait till January.
Wait a fortnight. Currently ATI have nothing that really seems to compete against the 460 in the ~£150 price range, however they are due to be releasing new cards round the 12-14th October (depending on what site you read) and the sensible bet is that it has to be "better" than a 460 I'm waiting with baited breath to find out if this time "better" means more powerful or cheaper.
the cheapest card mensioned the 6770 its been called is ment to be above 5850 performance nearly closing in on 5870 only reviews will tell. But if it retails for under £150 its bye by nvidia at that price point as well.
This. Plus, ATI/AMD are rumoured to be onto something quite spectacular with the upcoming 6xxx series.
The entire point of this "panic" is because I foolishly believed upgrading from a 1280x1024 resolution to a 1080p resolution would be the end of my GPU, and as many people on here told me, it wasn't the case; if anything, performance hasn't changed at all. Perhaps waiting to see what's around the corner might not be such a bad thing, November isn't too far away and the more games that come out running badly, the more I'll want to part with some hard-earned cash to make things right.
Pretty sure the difference in running Crysis at those resolutions is quite large... Anyways, hold out the 6 series!
Innit. A lot of people upgrade purely because they feel the need. It's easy to fall into that. However, I haven't upgraded in a long time because a) I haven't had the money and b) My PC does everything I want except game. However, I'd be the first to admit that if I was making that kind of resolution change (which I recently did) the latest things I would be able to play (and actually do) are Starcraft, Deus Ex and UT99 If a 460 will play the games you want, at the res you have, who cares what's coming? If it won't or you want to account for the future (always tricky with upgrades) - wait. Up to you....
Little bit of forum searching suggests GTX260 (with Core 2 duo E7400 @ 2.80GhZ with 4GB DDR2 RAM and isn't happy with how Dead Rising2 plays I would use this logic ^ *except* when there's a likely competitor to the 460 coming out in a fortnight.
Yeah, GTX260 should be able to cope with 1080p, but i'm a bit skeptical about that claim of no performance reduction.
Thing is, although obviously nobody can say for certain, I suspect the new cards will be high end, not mid-range. That's usually how it goes. Last year was the same.
True, but ATI already has the top end of the market covered, but they don't seem to have a decent £150 offering that can compete with the 460. If I ran ATI (isn't that just AMD these days?) then I'd be hurrying to drop a £150 460 killer on to the market ASAFP, safe in the knowledge that the 5870/5970 were already the preferred high-end solution.
We are looking at 2.3 months to xmas...prices will drop for the xmas sales, also there are only 3 months before the VAT rise so alot of places will have the "pre rise" sales going because some re-tailers will be concerned about the lull in sales Jan 2011 onwards. My money is sitting pretty in the bank to build a new system Dec onwards...if your patient wait to then, competition will have released a few new cards and the retailers will be scrambling for your business to see them through the lull Jan 11 onwards.
Mind you, when I said, "no performance reduction", I didn't actually measure the performance difference down to the fps, only the perceived difference, and I couldn't find any at all. I think if I fired up Crysis or Bad Company 2 I'd probably be disappointed, but in games like Half Life Ep 2, Oblivion, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age, it's not like there's sudden stutter; I expected all my games performances to take a nosedive! That's the thing about the 260: in average games, it's great; in performance hungry games, it performs terribly. My rig isn't cut out for the heavier games anyway, I think by December I should have enough cash for at least a decent GPU and hopefully a new i7. Personally, do you guys reckon there's a massive difference between i7 and i5, or does i5 suffice for most gaming related tasks?
A cheap AMD tri- or quad-core suffices for most gaming related tasks, or an i3 from Intel. Stick with the i5 unless you develop an addiction to converting video or some such, you won't see any benefit from an i7 when it comes to gaming. The games you mention aren't that demanding, so it's not surprising you're getting decent frame rates. I imagine you were getting much higher FPS before the resolution switch but obviously your current frame rates are perfectly acceptable if you say you've not noticed. I'd wait a bit, as everyone else suggests you should. There will be new cards from AMD this year which means there will be price drops on current AMD/ATi cards and on NVidia cards too. Buy now if you're desperate, but it doesn't sound like you are so hold on to your money a bit longer and it will go a fair margin further.
