Whats the difference between sata 1.5/3.0 and ultra sata100??? Will older mb's that support sata 1.5 support ultra sata100? Im building a new computer for my sister who has been using the same computer for over 5 years. This is going to be her wedding gift, so I plan to spend roughly $1k. I already have most of the components figured out, but the one part Im never up to date with is video cards. Should I go with a x850xt or a 6800gt/6600 gt? Whats a good budget video card around $150-$200?
I'm not an expert on the SATA, although I do believe the older 1.5 boards support ATA100 as well. Could be wrong so double check with someone else. I just finished building this comp I'm on for about $800 which included a 19" widescreen LCD. I used cd-r and DVD drives from an old computer, as well as speakers, keyboard, and mouse to save a little chunk of cash. So I'd say $1k is definitely plenty to make your sister quite a nice wedding gift. I got everything from newegg, including this video card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814131424 I also got a great deal on memory from them. Two 1G sticks for just $175, plus they look very nice and shiny because of the red heat shield. Great quality: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820231047 Talk is cheap, so give me a few minutes and I'll post a picture of what Oblivion looks like on my comp with that X800GTO card.
Ok well that took entirely too long lol. Apparently Oblivion disables the Print Screen function and you have to go into the game files and unlock it. Stupid! On top of that, you can't take a screen shot with Anti-Aliasing turned on. So the screen shot I finally took was with no AA, when I normally run the game with the maximum 6x, which looks MUCH better so you'll have to trust me. I also took a shot of Prey (didn't come out so well because the .bmp file came out in 4:3 aspect ratio and I play in 16:10, so I stretched the picture which messed with the quality and then turning it into a JPEG didn't help either. The last picture is from F.E.A.R. running with every single thing maxxed out. It doesn't run very smoothly, but it's playable, and really I just wanted to show you what the card itself could produce. So, without further ado...the screen shots... ***NSFW I suppose*** There you go. That's what the little $140 card will do for ya, and that's completely stock. I'm sure I could get more out of it if I knew anything about overclocking. I wouldn't spend any more than that on a video card these days anyway because the DirectX 9.0 cards are about to be phased out and replaced by the new DirectX 10.0's pretty soon. Oh yeah, keep in mind this is a PCI-Express 16x card. They're the new standard so make sure the motherboard you get has a slot. Hope I helped!
