bump

I couldn't tell you about your RAM issue, but personally I never pay much for RAM at all and it's never created any issues for me, I would tend to doubt that you are seeing any big performance issues because of RAM.

I definitely understand the SLI/Crossfire pain. Once it's configured properly (on a per game basis) it's fantastic, but until then, ugh. I think nVidia's newest beta drivers fixed my issues, but my gosh were they annoying, and you're really pretty safe with any single card solution. But, if you're playing at a high resolution, you really don't have much of a choice... SLI becomes necessary.

The 480 is generally considered the second worst DX11 card (the first is the 590 due to it's poor design) It's hot powerhungry and not that much faster in the real world than a 5870
Real world your looking at the 6970 or 580 for the best card at the moment with the 6970 wining in my book due to much lower cost and lower power requirements
out of interest why did you buy a 2 almost 3 generation card that generally costs more than the last generation card thats faster and more efficient?

...

I agree with wodmarach the gtx 480 is not a good card to buy new now. Its basically a gimped gtx580. If your going to be spending around £300 on a graphics card you'd be better off getting the gtx570. Its about £30 cheaper on average, draws a little less power and runs a little cooler. It competes(even winning out on some of them) with the gtx 480 on gaming benchmarks. The gtx570 should be enough on your 1680x1050 display though.

If price isn't an issue the gtx580 is currently the best single gpu card on the market but you get less fps per £ then the gtx 570. Though you do get more fps in total.

The problem you will find in the future on some games is your cpu will become the bottle neck. Games like crysis, gta 4 or arma 2 require a decent cpu as much as a gpu if you want to get good fps out of the game.

Edit: As for your ram I wouldn't bother replacing it with faster speed ram until you upgrade the cpu. If your motherboard doesn't support ddr3 it will be expensive to get 1066mhz ddr2 ram(nearly twice the cost of the equivelent amount of ddr3).

Add to that AMD's new chips are due out next month and we should see prices drop on current chips from both companies

You don't happen to have a link on what we should expect from these new chips? I'd be intrested to see how they are going to compare to what intel has on the market currently.

Will have to wait for independant benchmarks then. I may hold off my i7-2600k build I've been working on and see what they have to offer. Have they given a date on released info?

Thats a nice motherboard, Its way more then I'd ever need in a motherboard but it nice all the same.

Thats one of the midrange ones apparently i've seen a top of the line bulldozer board with full board cooling and even more ports etc

Its got to be a fair bit north of £150 if it supports quad sli like it does. I'd personally only ever need a dual SLI setup if that.

this is slightly lower end but the way its looking bulldozer may have enough lanes for 4x8 on it's own..

I've never done SLI or Crossfire. Seems so silly to me... I would rather upgrade twice as often than buy two cards at once (or a two cards in one thing).

Also other than stupid fucking Borderlands and its stupid fucking shadows I have not had any problem maxing any game in the last 10 years using a single GPU.

crossfire/sli is little use until you hit multimonitor then you worship at it's feet. 3 1920x1080's take a lot of horsepower to fill.

aaaand necroing to say thepre release prices have just hit