This thread leads to a one and only logical question !


Do you prefer Kittens or Puppies :D ?

Both? lol

Ah yes a GPU should be 5 months old to count as a GPU for you :) Don't get me wrong I use mainly AMD and I don't have issue with it ;)

Just out of interest, how do you know that the problem was with the CPU?

Yeah, it happens a lot. My Nvidia 260 card was great. It was my switch from ATI and it was like salvation from graphical cancer. Now the digital tumours are back...

So now I feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place. I'm actually hoping that a third option will emerge out of nowhere and knock these two muppets down a peg. Much like Nvidia did back in the day.

People worry about the future of the graphics card market. I think we're already on our way towards finding out.

AMD got one big plus over Nvidia/Intel atm... they make the whole pack themselfs... Motherboard,CPU & GPU... it works better cause it has better compatibility ... The prices are lower too and the performance is not that much in diff ;)

nah it should just be actually available the 680 is nothing but a stop gap

680 is available: click

Out of interest what was the problem with the system you had to return you never did actually say what it was.

Well, it was back in the mid to late 90's IIRC, and it was a cheap computer I had purchased for my son, and he was a huge Quake (or Quake 2, or Doom, dammit sorry my memory sucks) fan. And that game would simply not run on that computer, even though the specs said it should have. Constant crashes. I mean I don't think he ever played it once without it at some point crashing. And of course, I'm the parent, and I'm supposed to know the answer, and, well, I didn't know. lol And searches on the then young internets revealed known issues with that AMD CPU and Quake (or doom, or whatever). And those same searches revealed issues with other games that my son had, and well, that was enough for me. I've never had an issue with any game running an Intel (well, except for when I try to run a game that's too much for it, then it won't run lol).

I am sorry about the details if they're incorrect. I'll email my son and see if he remembers more clearly the details. Something tells me the game that really started it though was Quake. I seem to remember that game for some reason and I never played it lol.

See that bit above the price where it says "OUT OF STOCK."

yeah very "available"

Quite possibly true. But keep in mind that AMD processors were pretty much unheard of back in the days of Quake and that was what? About 15 or so years ago that happened? I've never experienced a crash in any id game while using an AMD processor. But I was using an Intel back when I first played that game.

I mean, hell, I black list stuff too. But I'm not going to hold a grudge that old over something that has changed so utterly since then.

wait your holding the ATI RAGE against them? DUDE come on that was 15 years ago thats like holding Jurassic park against Spielberg cause it scared your kid... Hell we don't even use glide anymore!

Oh, I see what you mean about the 680 being basically unavailable.

I wasn't thinking of them yet anyway. Aren't they like over $600 each??

I was thinking more along the lines of say 2 560Ti's in SLI mode, then upgrading to the 680 or 6.whatever later when they came down in price. I learned in my last build what a HUGE performance bump you get when running in SLI, so I'm kinda sold on that now (or I guess AMD has what's called Crossfire I think). I mean the jump in performance is STAGGERING. I had two 470's that were waaaay outperforming a single 590 (top at the line at the time IIRC) according to my and their 3Mark11 scores. That's pretty signficant IMO.

So, two 680's were kind of out of price range anyway.

Or are you saying 680's are kind of a minimum right now because the new games coming out are already pushing that???

Yeah. I held that card against them for a while too. Well, the Rage Pro that is. But I still went back to them again eventually. Admittedly I wound up wishing I hadn't as the drivers got steadily worse. I had to download (then) year old drivers just to get things back up and running properly again.

But the point is that 15 years is a long time in the computer world. Even if it's not quite long enough for ATI / AMD to develop some decent drivers.