New system time ?

[kevin]

Hardware Suggestions.
About this time every year the 'upgrade' urge hits me again. (i'm normally able to overcome it) The problem is as I get older, I become less interested in following hardware. So when the need arises it's difficult (well tedious) sifting through what's available.

 I'm sort of after a middle of the road system.  The system will be become my work station. So it has to be rock solid!

 I'm not really an huge intel fan (have you seen what they call an instruction set ? :) That's why! )  So will prolly go Althon FX64.  Single or mutli ?  dunno.    For video I want something that supports all shader models. So apparently that limits me to Nividia - not that worries me)   From what i can see the  6600gt seems like it'd be right up my alley.  Not too pricey and some pretty serious bang for my buck.  

Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated !

[Ian Price]

I have an AMD 64 Athlon 3400+ (1Gb) with an ATI 9800+ (256Mb) video-card for my desktop pc and it's superb. Runs everything I throw at it, top resolution, top speed. Doom and HalfLife 2 play great - no slowdown. I've had it over a year, so it's no longer top of the line, but it cost less than £700 ($1400? AUS) at the time, probably 3/4 of that now. Still above entry level though.

I don't know about shaders TBH, but I've not had any problems graphically.

[Digital Awakening]

Kevin:
I think both nVidia's and ATI's latest lineups of graphics cards got support for all shaders. However, this may differ between high, mid and low end cards. There are tons of cards from both of them so it's a bit hard to know what beats what. Lastest new is that ATI's X1900XTX card is the most powerfull card right now but I'm not sure if it's be launched yet as the test (in swedish) specifies the drivers as beta. Both companies are good with driver updates though. The best from nVidia is 7800 GTX 512MB. That's all I know these days.

[Draco9898]

Just get what I have, it works perfectly: Nvidia Geforce Fx 5200

http://www.dealtime.com/xFS-~KW-Graphics_C...ultra~FD-0~NS-1