Good AMD mobo

I've got an Abit NF7S V2 and i gotta say its brilliant. You can definitely change the multiplier in the bios, cos i've my cpu overclocked nicely.

I'd definitely recommend the Abit or maybe a DFI Ultra Infinity, same chipset but i've heard if you want some serious overclocking the DFI has a little bit extra
 
Before Doom 3 came out I would've reccomended a stronger 128MB card than spending the extra cash on a 256MB that most games won't fully utilize.

From here on out you'll see games start to reach for that image fidelity through uncompressed and low compression textures.

I think it's best to go with a 256MB card, the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB... is best bang for the buck right now.

~Krelian
 
About multipliers, some boards can change the multipliers of "unlockable" Athlon XPs by unlocking them without the need for you to modify it yourself (or buy a speedstrip). However, even those boards cannot change the multipliers of permanently locked Athlon XPs. Yes, most Athlon XPs being fabbed today can not be unlocked by those methods.

On a side note: the Athlon 64 (possibly including future 32-bit only socket 754 chips) can not have its multiplier raised, but it can be lowered (thanks to Cool & Quiet). This is very useful if you're trying to push your chip by raising the bus speed. Athlon FX chips can have the multiplier freely raised and lowered, but there aren't any cheap models of that.
 
The 256MB 9800 pro hasn't proven itself to be that much better then the 128MB in performance tests... but I recently read up on how easy it is to modify the 256MB 900 Pro to a 9800XT, which gives you quite a bit more performance and would save you the money of actually shelling out the extra dough for the XT. I'll see if I can find that article again, then post it here.

---Ammut
 
To date most comparisons drawn between 128MB and 256MB cards illustrate that to date most benchmarks and games don't take advantage of 256MB cards.

Doom 3 does.

Half-Life 2 will.

Most new games will follow suit.

If you want a card that'll pull off most games the next few years a 256MB card will give you the best advantage.

As I said in an earlier post,

"Before Doom 3 came out I would've reccomended a stronger 128MB card than spending the extra cash on a 256MB that most games won't fully utilize."

That's different now... hell, Doom 3 has optomizations for currently non-existant 512MB cards...

~Krelian

P.S.: I do agree that flashing a 9800 Pro to an XT BIOS is a good idea provided it's using an R360 core (as the more recent production lines of 9800 Pros are).
 
So if you have a 256MB 9800 Pro, if you simply flash the bios w/ the 9800XT one, you get a 9800XT? As long as its using an R360 core. That is crazy. And not too difficult.
 
If flashing bios difficult and/or risky for video crads. I read somewhere that with some third party bios, I could OC my 9500 pro to 9700 pro speeds. Is this true?
 
Flashing the BIOS is always risky to some degree; you're voiding your warranty and also there's a chance that the flashing process will render your video card unusable. If you do screw it up, however, and have a spare PCI video card lying around, you can boot up with that and reflash the other card.

The 9500 to 9700 hack I believe only works on the stock 9500 (not the pro) - not sure on that one, though. Also, AFAIK it is just a driver hack and can be enabled with the Omegas.
 
You are right about the 9500 non pro thing, but that is something else. This is ocing, the other deal was more of an "unlocking" process.
 
Reactivating pipes didn't even work on all of the 9500s anyway. With some of them it worked flawlessy, some worked but they had rendering problems, and with some it didn't really "work" at all.

Oh and Krelian, I wouldn't exactly call enabling uncompressed textures an "optimization" for 512MB cards. But indeed, future games will have nice bloated textures to take advantage of the extra memory. Sheesh, they really need to develop some new texture compression, and get the hardware to back it up. Just throwing more and more VRAM on those things gets expensive, especially when you're talking about GDDR3.
 
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