ATI X1600?

[Matte]

Is this card any good to play games like Crysis or stuff? Not the newest games, but just run TF2 and so on almost maxed settings

[QuestOfDreams]

Um, Crysis is probably one of the games that need the most powerful cards ...
The ATI X1600 is a 3 year old card. It's pretty much the minimum to get Crysis running on lowest settings.
The ATI HD3650 is newer and rather cheap. A HD3850 , a GF8800GT/GTS or GF9600GT would be even better with a good price-performance ratio. There are newer and better cards of course but they are more expensive.

[Destron]

If you want to run everything on low settings, sure.
I don't think there's a consumer-oriented card (e.g. sub-$350) that can run Crysis on maxed settings. It will also depend on the rest of your system, mainly your processor and your amount of RAM. And if you want DX10 features you'll want Windows Vista, which is a complete bottleneck.
To give you some context, I have a pretty nice build (AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 2GB RAM, nVidia 8800GTS) and it doesn't run on high settings very well.
Also, before this I had an X1300 and it ran the source engine (Half-Life 2, Portal, TF2, etc) like CRAP. I don't know how much further up the X1600 is from the X1300, though.

[Matte]

I currently have an ATI Radeon 9200, and it is crap too, but it works. It's stupid though that people can see me through water with their high settings, but I can't because of my low settings -.- But yeah, I see through grass and they don't

[Agentarrow]

well, it's a trade off.
I personally prefer the ATI Crysalis series, I have the top of the series, (or it was when I bought it a year ago) ringing in at a whopping $500.
I have the graphics card to play any game, however, programs and things my sisters use (it's the family computer) crash all my games. (iTunes, Linewire, etc.) stuff I never use that causes serious problems -.-

[Danimita92]

I recommend the geforce 8800GT 512mb
I've got it, works excellent

[scott]

well, i currently have a geforce 7400 (laptop) with 512mb and 2GB system ram and i can not run crysis too well!

so last week i decided to max things out, 3Ghz daul core, with 4GB DDR3 system ram on an asus striker II extreme, 750w PSU and a lovely geforece 9800 GX2, this is the top graphics card out there at the moment, and on its own reports are saying it can not run crysis full spec and sli 9800 gx2's still strugle at the absolute max settings of crysis (max resolution of 1900+ with 8AA) all this costing just under $2000 so i wouldnt go for the very best as nothing that is comercialy available can play crysis. (though the reports where all using DDR2 ram and lower spec motherboard)

the 8800GT seems like a good card for its price

[Danimita92]

Well if you want to go really high, you could get a quad core instead of a duo, and instead of 4 gb of RAM you could get 2, it's the same for crysis. I'm not entirely convinced about the geforce 9x series, the game gets high fps with an 8800GT, or even better, an 8800GTX.
Check this out, it helped me a lot:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-5.html

[scott]

i looked at the quad cores but they wernt that impresive and far to expensive, a quad 3Ghz was $1200 and a quad 3.2GHz was $1800 and my daul 3GHz was $230, more cores do help but for games and single aplications they mainly use one core each so the higher the core value the faster that aplication will generely go, however havind daul core does improve speed but its not like adding them up to get a 6GHz cpu, it would probably end up with about 4-5GHz as it takes cpu power to sync them together.

[Danimita92]

Well I'm gonna buy a new motherboard, 2gb of ram and a quad core for only 210€ which would be $328.21 off the internet, look for the quad core Q6600, it's the cheapest one, not the best quad, but still better than a duo.
Look:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=3406

[AndyCR]

In my personal opinion 2 of the 4 cores will be wasted a great deal (read: most) of the time, so cutting the speed of each core to get 2 extra makes little sense today as it makes 99% of your tasks slower to make 1% significantly faster. This will change as more applications become multithreaded, but now and in the not-too-distant future it's a waste for all but things like code compilation, modeller rendering, and so on; things which can be easily split up and thus already have been.

[Danimita92]

Yeah, but that's kind of the point, you're not going to spend mega-bucks on a duo if most if not all software, games, etc will be designed to use up to 4 cores. In other words, you're not going to get a duo, and then a few months or a year later end up buying a quad too.

[scott]

and so it goes on, get a quad core and aplications will be designed for the 8 core processor.

Battle field 2142 - 1.7GHz

Warhammer 40k - 2.0 GHz

Age of conan - 2.4 GHz

call of duty 4 - 2.4GHz

Mass effect - 2.6 GHz

Devil May Cry 4 - 3.0 GHz

crysis - 3.2 GHz

A quad core 2.4GHz cpu will probably reach around about 2.8GHz performnace speed, possibly a little more(due to the point i mention next), the point of multiple cores is for multi-tasking, one core will be running all your rubish xp and virus scanner and so on, allowing other cores to play the game, unless the game specificly states it will utilise mulit core cpu's then the chances are if you want to run a high cpu powerd game your going to need a high clocok speed, if you look at a dual core computers task manager and the system resources, just watch the second core when running aplications, a single 3.6GHz cpu would probably get more frams per second than a quad 2.4GHz, however if you do multi-tasking, playing games, downloading, listning to music and/or watching a film then this would be where the quad core comes intoa league of its own, it would probably handle all of those tasks at once (provided you have enough ram and graphics power) with little trouble, as each core would take up a task of its own (running 4 computers at once) i went for the dual core as i dont want system freezes and the newer games are starting to get the multithreading/ multicore usage.

it all depends on the user and what the computer is being used for.