Computer experts: graphic cards?

[Kyon`]

Really I would go with a single powerful card. Depending of course on what you're planning to play. Have a list in mind already? Really the dual thing just seems to be buggy at times and unstable for me. In all honesty unless you're running something bigger then a 24 inch and above 1680x1050, single card is almost much better suited. Power consumption is another thing to take into account. Really either could be fine, but a single card will do most people okay. Very rarely will notice any major difference from about 50 fps and up.

 

[Kipaste]

I'm no pro with this stuff, but I believe you are half right.

With online games your FPS is mostly effected by the speed of your connection so the card doesn't have a whole lot to with that, but one slight advantage is the rendering will be quicker, which means your maps may load quicker meaning you will be first on the map.

Read that somewhere and may be misquoting. I'm fairly certain game performance is mostly affected by the connection and lag time. Most cards can keep up with that. The only online FPS shooter game that I consistently came in first place was a game I hosted. No lag time. First on the map. Usually I get my butt handed to me by somebody and wind up in the middle somewhere. Sometimes in the upper ten to five if I'm online with like skilled players. There's always one guy that likes to kill the noobs, though.

I might start with saying that I'm not a pro with this stuff but I believe your half right. The connection speed matters to a point, but with most people having pretty fast connections these day the lag is usually caused because of ping time and the abilities of the server. Ping time means how fast your signal comes back from the server, not bandwith. A player with high ping will get the most lag and may appear as laggy to other players, that's why some servers have ping limits. So naturally when your the host the ping time is basically zero and the map will load quickly. Also the servers power come to play when the number of players rise because the server has more to deal with with. Underpowered servers will start lagging. The server needs more cpu and memory, as of course the graphics of moving characters aren't send between computers, but instead it could be described as sort of MIDI data and the rendering happens on each invidual computer and that is when the graphic card comes to play. Thus most games should work perfectly even on a bit slower connections when the ping is low and the server is fast.

I have a fast connection and I play on number of servers and on some I have lag and on some don't. Ping rising abowe say 70 can start causing problems, optimum is around 40 or less.

About the original question, I'd say any new graphics card will do just fine. I'm running a single card that was top notch 2 years ago and get to play pretty much every game on high details (exception being the black shark but I don't think there is a computer around yet that can handle it full on) and many of the cards on the market are more powerful than mine so just a pick one that fits your budget. I'd probably get the 275 if I was you.

 

[vene-nemesis]

How critical would it be to plug a pci.e 2.0 card in a pci.e 1.0 mobo?

 

[Simo98]

i definantly agree with a single more powerful card than two in SLI.

never been a fan of SLI, but i spose thats because im a cheap skate, unless it gives me double the performance im not to keen to go spending double the cash