Matrox VC

[[THANATOS].El-Huevo]

I'm building myself a new PC, so this time with some of my savings I wanna buy something that last for a few years, a friend told me to get me a Matrox VideoCard ... but this is the 1st time I've heard of this brand, you guys think this VC support several games?

Or what would you recommend?

I kinda want to build a "monster" of PC ...so I'm open to suggestions and advice

Thx in advance =)

[[THANATOS].Metal]

From what I understand, Matrox makes cards for commercial/business use.

More of a CAD/Graphics design card than a game card.

[[THANATOS].Sneye.GT]

Matrox is NOT the way to go. About 10 years ago or so, they were a real threat to the gaming cards. Kinda like the Voodoo cards were. They're still being made, I have no idea why, but you pay about 3 times more than you should for 20% of the performance. Best bang for the buck right now, (my humble opinion) would be either a Radeon 4850 with 1 gig ram, a 4870 with 512 ram, or a 9800 GTX.

[[THANATOS].-Hades]

260 GTS, 280 GTX, or 285 GTX


Cheaper alternative: 9800GTX+

[Spluff]

Cheaper and more powerful alternative- 4850 / 4870. The 280 is the more powerful single card, but it's price makes it worthless. If you wanted to pay a high amount you would be better off putting two 4850s together in crossfire, which will blow it out of the water.

[[THANATOS].El-Huevo]

Excellent, thx a lot guys for the help and the info, I've been reading about all the VC's you told me and some of them are amazing, I'm quite interested in the bundle of the 2 VC's for crossfire for the 4850's, what MB and processor would you recommend?

I DO inttend to put a lot of money on this PC so I don't have to buy something again in several years, I worked with this last one for more than 4 years but to many things it can't just be supported, so I'm trying to make a really good investment again.

How much RAM should I have? 4 Gigs?

Thx again!

[[THANATOS].Sneye.GT]

[TR Wrote:.El-Huevo[MX]"]Excellent, thx a lot guys for the help and the info, I've been reading about all the VC's you told me and some of them are amazing, I'm quite interested in the bundle of the 2 VC's for crossfire for the 4850's, what MB and processor would you recommend.

I don inttend to put a lot of money on this PC so I don't have to buy something again in several years, I worked with this last one for more than 4 years but to many things it can't just be supported, so I'm trying to make a really good investment again.

How much RAM should I have? 4 Gigs?

Thx again!

Any dual core from AMD/Intel should be fine. 4 gigs is also fine, you'd be bottlenecked at 2 gig ram.

[[THANATOS].-Hades]

Intel processors are the best buy right now. I'd suggest the E8500 if you want dual core and a q9450 or q9500 for quad core. Ofcourse, if you have extra cash you can buy an i7 which blows away everything else.

[ENFORC3R]

if you want it to last you awhile upping to the i7 cpus and going with triple channel ddr3 ram would be a good investment as more and more programs will be taking advantage of these things in the future. two 4850s sound great they are cheap and powerful, and if anything you can always just swap those later on for some new VCs that come out.

[[THANATOS].Pommiewog]

ENFORC3R Wrote:if you want it to last you awhile upping to the i7 cpus and going with triple channel ddr3 ram would be a good investment as more and more programs will be taking advantage of these things in the future. two 4850s sound great they are cheap and powerful, and if anything you can always just swap those later on for some new VCs that come out.

Are the prices for DDR3 more reasonable now?

Also it would be better to get the 4850x2 than 2 4850s. I think it works out cheaper, and from memory performs better.

I could be wrong.

[[THANATOS].Metal]

It's the same. The advantage to the 4850x2 is being able to crossfire two of them bitches while only eating up 2 slots on the mobo.

So you'd be getting 4 cards out of 2 slots.

[[THANATOS].-Hades]

2 4850's are faster than the 4850x2 but it's slightly more expensive.

[[THANATOS].Pommiewog]

[THANATOS Wrote:.-Hades"]2 4850's are faster than the 4850x2 but it's slightly more expensive.

I though it depended on whether your motherboard's 2nd slot runs at x16

[[THANATOS].-Hades]

Well it's hard to say which is faster since Single cards are more stable then dual chip cards and then SLi cards. Cards that have dual chips on one PCB generally have less available RAM then dual cards in SLi. But this goes both ways and either combo wins in different tests.

[[THANATOS].El-Huevo]

Aw man...so many good stuff hehe I'm still figuring out which will be the best investment and that I can afford it.

I do wanna thank you guys for the help, so plz if u have more input to share I'll appreciate it

Thx again