Deal of the Day: SAPPHIRE Radeon X1950GT AGP

If your still hanging on to that AGP video card slot PC for whatever reason, and sick of playing Bioshock at 800x600 resolution, maybe a slight upgrade of your video card will keep you alive and kicking until your next build.

The unfortunate thing is, since hardly anyone uses AGP anymore, upper level cards are sometimes much more expensive then their PCI-Express counterparts. However, occasionally a good deal does come along, like this Sapphire Radeon X1950GT.

This card has 256MB 256-bit GDDR3, is HDCP ready, and can run most of today's games at close to max. All this for around $140 from Newegg, which is a little bit cheaper then my BFGTech Geforce 7800 GS OC AGP which was $150 after rebate a few months ago.

Whether you need it or not is up to you, it still won't give you Crysis on max settings, but as an intermediate card to hold you through till there are some more DX10 options, it may not be a bad investment if you can wait a bit more to upgrade. Just make sure you take extra power and cooling into consideration, and of coarse do all the necessary research before you buy.

Link to the card on Newegg.

Deals of the Day

You didn't ask for them so I posted them, enjoy



Frys.com has the flipping sweet (yea I said flipping so what?) OCZ Platinum 2GB memory kit for $54.99 after a mail in rebate. It's PC6400 and runs at 800mhz with a solid set of heat spreaders on each stick for you overclockers out there.



Most keyboards suck for gaming, seriously. They can get you by but not actually improve your game, the Logitech G15 however can. With programmable keys and display this keyboard is suhweet. Availalbe from Buy.com for $47.99 after MIR



Keeping this one short, Newegg has the Evga 320mb 8800 GTS for $259.99 after MIR. Its badass, you want it, you buy it, you love it.

AMD ups the Game to 3 for Quad Cores and Crossfire

This may be old news for people, but there's a little bit more than meets the eye. AMD at Sunnydale on July 26th revealed news about their new cpu and gpu technology. Dubbed "Phenom", the monster quad core had a bus speed of 3.0ghz (yowzas!). The other neato news from AMD was the Phenom powered rig showing 3 HD2900 cards in Crossfire. Talk about some serious firepower, although the HD2900 has been quick to fall behind the 8800 series, 3 cards in Crossfire might be enough to surpass a pair of 8800 GTX in Sli.

There's a little bit of confusion here upon viewing the Phemon Rig. After hunting around I learned that the third card in Crossfire will be used to compute JUST physics calculations. I noticed this when this when there was a apparent lack of another Crossfire type dongle shown below. The effects of having one cards devoted solely to physics are unknown but it is sure to improve performance somehow.
What this means is that it's not truly splitting the load equally amongst 3 cards, it's two cards in crossfire with a third working on something else. This will probably take a lot of work off of the other 2 cards which would be ideal allowing the other 2 cards to work on other tasks. I'll have to rummage around for more info on this but I'll keep you posted.

DX 10.1 Won't work with current DX 10 hardware

Leave it to Microsoft to screw over consumers.

For all of you like myself who just plunked down a couple hundred bucks on a spiffy new DX10 card, be prepared because DX 10.1 isn't "supported" by the current slate of DX10 cards on the market. What does that mean, well nothing TOO bad but if you thought you had the latest and greatest you might just be out of luck.

At Microsoft's annual SIGGRAPH conference, they gave a lecture on Directx10 and the eventual Directx10.1. Directx10.1 wont require SP1 for Vista, improves rendering and is not "supported" by the current Dx10 cards as the lecture stated. It's interesting why the current hardware won't be able to "support" Directx10.1 and whatever "support" means. Is it a software issue or is it truly a hardware problem?

This news could render the current DX10 cards out of date within six months time. Details are scarce on exactly why DX 10.1 is not supported. The validity of this information is still up for debate but until further news.