Apos: Get me back up to speed on where hardware is for a new rig....

[Apos]

So I've been out of the gaming hardware purchasing scene for a while now. I won my governor's camapign in Virginia, and now I'm working on a project to send send money over mobile phones.

But... I've been distracted. I have lots of money now, and I want to get a new rig at some point, but I have no idea what the state of the market is like.

My system today:
3Ghz with 1GB of ram (400bus?) and a Radeon XT9800 It runs things like Ep1 pretty good with AA and decent resolutions.

So I look at tech sites today, and I have no idea what's going on: dual cores? Radeon's line of XT345345 whatsits? None of these model numbers or power things offer ANY comparison to the past. Sometimes the higher numbers are slower than the lower numbers... and so on.

So basically, can people give me a sense of what the market is like? What is the good gaming hardware out there (stuff that will mmake TF2 and Ep2 look sweet)? And, more importantly, what stuff is on the horizon?

Being uninformed, if I buy now, for all I know, PCISUPERExpress is coming in early 2007, and I'll be obsolete with my PCIExpress mobo. So what's coming an when should I buy and what should I aim for?

Thanks in advance for any advice/clue you can give me.

 

[Apos]

Oh, and I know some of the deal on Windows Vista an DirectX10, but not really much about the hardware that's supposed to take advantage of the,m

 

[Asus]

Intel will be releasing Core 2 Duo (July 27th although benchmarks are out) and it runs faster and with less power than the Athlon 64 now. AMD will be dropping prices before the end of July up to 50% to remain competitive. Both AMD and Intel use DDR2 now.

GPUs have got a lot faster since the 9800. More than double easy.
ATI: 9800->X800->X1800->X1900 (current)
Nvidia: FX5900->6800->7800->7900 (current)
Current cards are pretty even between ATI and Nvidia at the moment.

This fall both Nvidia and ATI will be releasing DX10 cards. If you can wait until then that would probably be the best time to buy.

 

[Apos]

I don't think I'll be too tempted to buy until TF2 and Ep2 are really on the imminent horizon.

But what's the deal with motherboards, slot types, memory speeds, and so forth? Are there any major changes on the horizon that will make stuff obsolete in the way that AGP slots have become? What do all these new CPU cores fit into? Is mostly everything at the top of the line 64-bit now?

I'm sort of confused by the CPU wars certainly, as the advertised speeds seem, if anything, LOWER than mine (2.7Ghz still offered as really sweet).

Is there anything of note in the sound card area or has that basically topped out (I mean, you can't get much more than perfect sound quality and taking all the burden off the cpu which my old rig had pretty nearly).

 

[hungryduck]

I don't think I'll be too tempted to buy until TF2 and Ep2 are really on the imminent horizon.

But what's the deal with motherboards, slot types, memory speeds, and so forth? Are there any major changes on the horizon that will make stuff obsolete in the way that AGP slots have become? What do all these new CPU cores fit into? Is mostly everything at the top of the line 64-bit now?

I'm sort of confused by the CPU wars certainly, as the advertised speeds seem, if anything, LOWER than mine (2.7Ghz still offered as really sweet).

Is there anything of note in the sound card area or has that basically topped out (I mean, you can't get much more than perfect sound quality and taking all the burden off the cpu which my old rig had pretty nearly).

the increases have really been made in memory bandwith and handling and the fact that all the cool cats use dual core CPU's these days, though for gaming the benefit of two processors is questionable, that is slowly changing.

the switch to PCI-express, and the huge SLI/Crossfire trend was a big one too.

regarding the CPU speed thing....let me explain.
Alot of people look at AMD cpu's clockspeed and say "oh thats slow" when they see its only 2.6ghz. Whereas intel is selling CPU's that are stock at 3.4ghz and such.....the thing is that while an Intel cpu may do 1x clock cycle per hertz (correct me if my terminology is off) an AMD cpu will do 1.5 clock cycles per hertz, which more than makes up the speed difference. Up until the release of Intels new conroe chip, AMD has completely dominated the enthusiast and gaming CPU markets, with the clockspeeds of its fastest processors "only" at 2.8ghz

the only real development in the sound card arena has been Creatives new line of "X-fi" cards. These cards supposedly take all of the load of processing sound off the CPU, thus helping performance, and apparantly they sound really good, but I wouldn't know don't have one.

The other thing I can think of is that we're seeing more and more people use widescreen LCD monitors these days (they are nearly as cheap as a reg 4:3 aspect ratio LCD's) and thus there has been a lot of demand from gamers to get game developers to support widescreen resolutions in their games.....

When it comes down to it, you haven't missed that much....just standard growth in the computer industry (faster speeds, faster memory, more ram, more v-ram, etc.).....although it seems that conroe is going to be one of the biggest things to be released in lonnng time, but even so, how it shines in the real world remains to be seen.

Thats a lot of confusing info written by me to chew on. Have fun!

 

[Apos]

Thanks! Are there any major non-backwards compatible advances on the horizon, like a new mobo archtecture, slots, etc.?

 

[destrukt]

Thanks! Are there any major non-backwards compatible advances on the horizon, like a new mobo archtecture, slots, etc.?

Amd came out with socket AM2 about a month or so ago, so avoid going for socket 939.

 

[Cole]

Also Socket AM3 is to come out next year I believe although Am3 processors will be compatible with Am2 sockets.