I have an asus skt am2 and its an nvidia nforce 430. Is the nvidia mobo chipset compatible with ati gfx cards. thx
Yes. You can use ATi video cards on nForce chipsets, and vise versa. However, you will not be able to use Crossfire on an nForce chipset or SLI on a Crossfire chipset.
SLI and X-Fire are both bogus, why would anyone REALLY need to spend $500 more just on another vid card?
I know why you use it, serious gaming. That said I am not into it enough to justify that kind of spending.
Yeah i guess to support a resolution for a 30inch monitor you'd need 2 gfx cards...but i wouldn't spend that much cash on gaming...especially when paying back student loans..
For some people, their 3DWangMark scores have to be kept up. Also, it's a technology that most geeks dream about, but really will never own. If I had the money to spend, sure I'd grab it, but not because I need it.
LOL that sounds like an expensive habbit, geek equivalent of the dude in the new red converitble maybe?
there are some loaded ppl out there and they provide the demand and ati and nvidia supply. We cant afford it but for it to be made there must be ppl buying it. Supply and demand right?
More like people who want to tweak their WRX or Supra and keep doing so, despite if they saved up, they could get a brand new 'vette. So long as I can play 1024x768 smoothly, I'm fine. I'm eyeing the 3700+ right now because it's just a tad over $100. I'm waiting until I get my savings going back up again, but I'd like to bump up my CPU power before the 939's start getting scarce.
Not true. As new technologies come out there is less demand but still a high supply so price drops. When a company is still making the chips they are producing less with less demand so prices either stay constant or rise a little. The best deals are in the middle of the line. Back to the subject, ATI and nVidia are cross-compatible, but they don't work together as well as they would in their own environment. ATI w/ Intel and nVidia with itself is usually the best combination (before Core2 came out). As for the X-Fire and SLI comment - I know why people buy it. They're either enthusiasts, or looking for that little extra. But there is really NO noticeable game enhancement for that price. I can see that using a larger resolution might be nice... maybe watching TV on a nice big screen, working with many image editors at once, doing professional game design, or generating large banners for marketing ---- but the gamer really will not see any noticeable difference. The eye generally sees at 15-20fps, what will increasing your fps from 150 to 155 really do?
The people that want SLI can afford it and want to play at insane resolutions with eye candy cranked up. 2048x1600 or so is going to require more than one GPU to maintain smooth performance with any modern game. You can't run Obilvion or FEAR, let alone with eye candy turned on, at those resolutions with just a single card. I don't see people with SLI setups saying how awesome it is. They're talking about 1600x1200 and up with 16x AA/8x AF and special effects turned to the max. I'm mildly amused when these people overclock them too (I probably would too, but it's the entire premise here). If you want high-res and the eye candy cranked up on any modern game, there's no single CPU available that can deliver that much above 1600x1200. Is SLI and Crossfire marketing? Of course, but it's not simply because they're getting an extra 1-2FPS. The gain is being able to maintain a comfortable FPS level at a higher resolution. Of course, there's also the CPU aspect of it. In some cases, you run a high-end Crossfire or SLI setup, you run out of CPU power before you can max out the cards.
I understand the high resolution, I'm saying the typical gamer. They're spending all this money for a Quad setup to play Counter-Strike Source or BF2 -- that seems rediculous. It IS rediculous. I understand the whole money and enthusiast thing.. I'm just trying to let people know, its a want not a need, by any means. Generally people over-invest in Videocards and under-invest in Memory. CPU is only one aspect that's limit your vpu performance, let's not forget that you need a decent psu. We're talking one that supports 30-40amp on the 12v rail. Not to mention it'll need to be 500w at minimum. Finally, people focus on RAM clock speed. When vid-cards need extra memory they go to your system memory, which is typically slower. Improving ram generally increases game performance. Especially when tweaking the timings.
