Is this a good deal?

[Christopher]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...Id=abcat0507002&type=product&id=1188558584689
Is that a good price and a good card?

 

[Spartan Erik]

I would say so, but make sure you've got a large enough power supply to handle that (and the PCI-E ports available)

 

[Christopher]

I have a 500W power supply so that shouldn't be a problem. It needs a minimum of 300W.

It only takes up on PCI-E port right?

 

[Livewire]

It only takes up on PCI-E port right?

I believe so. I'm not actually aware of any pci/pci-e/agp cards that require two slots though, so I could be wrong, but I don't think it'd say PCI-Express x16 interface if it needed 2 slots (I'd expect something like Dual PCI-E x16 interface).

Plus a pre-built I found on another site only had one pci-e slot and it said it had the same card in it, so I think it's a single-slot requirement

 

[piché.power]

doesnt look like a rip off to me

 

[Christopher]

Thanks for helping me out.
Now I have to decide if I want to buy it. I found it cheaper on a different site.

On a different forum people told me to wait for directx 10.1. Did it come out yet?

 

[Livewire]

On a different forum people told me to wait for directx 10.1. Did it come out yet?

DirectX 10.1

DirectX 10.1 is an incremental update of DirectX 10.0 which will be shipped with, and require, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 in January 2008.[2] DirectX 10.1 will be backwards compatible with DirectX 10.0 hardware, but the new features will not be available until 10.1 compliant hardware is released. The release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality.[3] Features scheduled for DirectX 10.1 include:

• Mandatory 32-bit floating point filtering
• Mandatory 4x anti-aliasing
• Shader model 4.1

Looks like it's sometime soon if it's gunna start shipping with Vista SP1 in Jan of 08. Doesn't say it's already launched though, so I dun think it's out yet.

 

[nexhunter]

Chougard if your looking for just a video card to get you through and vista working without much problems then yes this card would go good but if your looking to use directx 10.1 when it comes out then you will have to upgrade to an ati hd 3870 or 3850 but you will need 2 empty pci spots in your case since it has the huge cooling fan. Link to ati site with hd 3800 series detail
Currently nvidia has not released a card with full directx 10.1 support but the new 8800gt is close to it from what i hear if the rumors about nvidia making a 9600 series cards those are supposedly post to be full directx 10.1 complaint.

Let you know all graphic cards do not use more than one apg/pci/pci-e slots they just take up so far 2 pci openings now if your computer motherboard is sli/crossfirex/crossfire ready then it would take 2 pci-e slots but that because it is 2 cards instead of one running at the same time but most high end cards that will require 4 slots on the back panel to be used and less room for other stuff to use pci/pci-1 slots on your motherboard. To run the 3800 series in crossfire mode you must have a motherboard that supports crossfirex ati's latest technology to use 2 graphic cards at same time. But most of the time /sli/crossfire/crossfirex is not needed as the cards are already powerful enough and why spend double the price when you could over clock if you have sufficient cooling.

 

[Slothie]

We barely have games supporting DX10 yet and probably won't have for quite some time now, 10.1 is just marketing hype untill games actually bother to support it.

As of now, I'm happily using 8600GT SLI.

 

[brittain]

Make sure you have enough power suply and pci-express slot free but ive got the 2 8600GTS in sli but 1 8600GTS i realy recomend if you are on a budget.

 

[Christopher]

Thanks for helping me out everyone.
Right now I'm running Vista on a core 2 duo and 2gb of memory, and sometimes dwm.exe takes up almost half my memory. Would that card take some of the load off of the main memory?

 

[nexhunter]

Sorry but it won't help decrease the load but it will decrease the load off the processor trying to render your display that all a video card does besides help render frames. if you have 64bit version of windows i would recommend getting some more ram then but if on 32-bit then get 1 more gig if your having those problems but hopefully with the release of service pack 1 there would be less memory hogging processes. Yes there are some games that support dx10 like world in conflict, crysis and other but non for the mean while of right now will be full dx10 besides microsofts games but not sure if that why halo 2 requires vista to play.