Can an Nvidia 9800 GTX run Crysis on the highest visual settings

I wish it were.
The owner is one of EVGA/TPU forum's heavy hitters (forum name "Fitseries3" at TPU. Has a SR-2 build thread there)
Here's another couple of his creations..... (component fit out listed in the forum gallery).


A bit OTT. But if you have the connections and you aren't buying retail then why not!
My system is a little more mundane (Core i7 950/X58/6Gb RAM/Corsair 800D/ Corsair HX1000)

Yeah. It is pretty over the top. But wouldn't I love to have one of those!!!

And as for your system, it doesn't seem mundane in my eyes. Especially not with the GTX 280 SLI!

I will be joining work soon (college over!). Intend to spend a part of what I earn on a really mean build. Not sure whether I should wait for 2011 though. Any ideas?

Well, it all depends on what you do with comps really.

If all you do is play minesweeper on your comp, then.....

In truth, i'm in fact quite happy with my 9600gt, and don't really want to hassle with upgrading or building a new computer.
Then again...I still play starcraft?

If you're planning on a mainstream (P67) build then 2011 is the likely way to go. That would allow the market to settle down pricing wise, more choice in boards and more importantly any driver/firmware.hardware issues should have been found and hopefully solved by the early adoption.beta tester crowd.
If you're planning on an enthusiast setup then I'd jump onto an X58/Core i7 setup either whenever you feel the urge to build (if buying all new) or once Sandy Bridge launches (if looking at new/second-hand) There may be some people who migrate from X58 to P67 just to have the newest setup, although X58 is still going to offer the best performance. I wouldn't expect X58/Core i7 to drop markedly once P67/LGA1155 launches but it's possible that some small price cuts take place from motherboard vendors.
"Patsburg" (Sandy Bridge-E/LGA 2011) won't probably hit retail until mid 2011 and will likely be hugely expensive for at least six months, followed by being merely very expensive from that point onwards. Taking into account pricing/availability (including the need for a matched quad-channel RAM kit) and possible bug fixes, the time frame could stretch out further than your patience!

@DBZ - Looking to get an enthusiast setup. My current build is the first system I ever assembled (with a lot of help and advice from the guys here at TS). Would love to put together a beast now. Any ideas on AMD's Bulldozer platform and how it is expected to compare against Sandy Bridge? Since I'll have to build the rig out of savings from my salary I might have to keep a watch on the budget. Or maybe I could purchase components over a period of time and put them together once I've acquired everything. Would that be good?

Also, is liquid-cooling the way to go?

EDIT: Sorry. I seem to have hijacked this thread.

I never recommend purchasing components over a period of time, because you are 'wasting' their warranty period while they are just sitting around gathering dust. Just put that money in your bank account ....... you can always purchase stuff once you have saved enough money to purchase components for whole system.

I haven't had chance to dig info about Bulldozer yet (may be DBZ in a better position), but initial information shows that SandyB ridge will be roughly 10-20% faster than currently available processors (but I guess it would be better to wait and see what actually is the real numbers once the processors are out in the wild).

Hows the weather tomorrow? Actually, I don't know; you'll just have to wait and see to be sure.

My (most likely outdated) understanding is that intel was shooting for similarities with nehalem, but higher power efficiency and aiming at portable computing or something. I'm probably wrong though, that was like last year's wikipedia article.

WTF.?
***EDIT*** I take that back. It makes about as much sense as any other comment you've made in recent history
http://www.techspot.com/vb/post912832-10.html
http://www.techspot.com/vb/post912786-8.html
http://www.techspot.com/vb/post912807-11.html
http://www.techspot.com/vb/post912786-8.html
http://www.techspot.com/vb/post912786-8.html (hint: the OP doesn't need to update his/her SLI board to accomodate SLI)

Anyhow...
@Rit
As Arch said, get all your components at the same time. Even if the chipset etc stay the same, possibly there will be a core stepping change or some doodad added to the spec to keep the customer base buying.
As for Bulldozer...who knows? I don't think even AMD's guys are sure about what it can and can't do. Once samples start getting into OEM/motherboard manufacturers hands then the benchmarks should start leaking out to the rest of us. From what I've gathered on forums and read, it won't be an overly groundbreaking CPU line-it will however close the gap between AMD and Core i7. I don't think anyones expecting it to offer better performance than LGA 2011 though-although it should be considerably cheaper.

Also liquid cooling still relies upon ambient air temp. With high ambient temp and high humidity a liquid cooler becomes less effective and you generally have to rely on higher fan cfm (and the attendant noise) to improve the heat exchanging ability of the radiator/s. Either that or push-pull (fans both side of the rad) and/or stackable radiators.

BTW: I think our OP is probably long gone so hijacking the thread probably doesn't assume the same importance as an ongoing problem they might have.

Doesn't matter, its still fun to talk about builds....

I don't really believe in waiting over 6 months for a new part (ie: Sandy Bridge). You end up waiting for a product that's probably overpriced (however slight), with possible bugs (Pentium 4 comes to mind). Besides, you still don't know what sort of performance increase we'll be looking at, 6 months to find out that Sandy Bridge increases performance by 5%, no difference anywhere else, and reduced overclocking headroom? Of course, that may not be the case, but we may also end up waiting for something akin to the nVidia 3xx series (which never came to fruition for desktops).

LMAO. I guess so.

I suppose it could be clearer.

Thanks for those insights guys. I think my system (with an X3 720 @ 3.6GHz, HD 4890 and 4 Gigs of RAM) should be able to handle most games till 2011. Around which time are the new CPU architectures expected? Q1 2011? I'll wait and take my call then.

Also, is it worth immediately to upgrade from the HD 4890 to something like the GTX 460? I'm gaming on a 20" widescreen @ 1600x900.

I think LGA1155 will arrive earlier some time in Q4/Q1 window. LGA2011 will be launched in early Q3/2011 I think.

It will help I believe, but frankly you would be better off not doing that upgrade right now. Because by the time you have enough money to assemble your new system, no matter how good 460GTX is, it would be reduced the lower echelons of the mainstream market, and much faster incarnations or new architectures from both players may be around the corner. So, I believe 4890 is pretty good graphic card for the time being, stick with it until you build totally new system, and save every penny you can

LOL

@Rit
I'd second Arch's thoughts re the 4890. If you buy a GTX 460, except for DX11, you probably wont get a massive step up in performance. With the new lineup of cards due out towards the end of the year - you could conceivably pick up a HD 6770/6850(?)/GTX 475 (with HD 5850/5870/GTX 480 performance) or a current gen card at a better price/performance point.
Unless the 4890 is struggling on some games, I'd stick with it. Having said that I used to have a 4890 in my secondary rig (before I won the 5770) and I have an MSI GTX460 Cyclone 1Gb card coming next week. If you'd like I can swap out the 5770 and run some benches/post results and give you a subjective evaluation between any gaming differences of note.

EDIT: Strike the last part. One of my customers just bought the Cyclone in a staight-up trade for a XFX HD 5850 Black Ed. I have a second Cyclone coming on 12th Aug (was going SLI to replace the GTX 280's) so I can get some comparison stuff happening then.

That would be really nice. Thank you so much. Also, have you noticed any differences between the HD4890 and HD5770 in terms of performance? Can the HD5770 match the 4890?

From a gameplay aspect there isn't a great deal of difference. The game IQ is a little lower for the HD 5770 in some games ( GTA 4 draw distance the most visually noticeable) but in essence, any game I could play with the 4890 still had similar gameplay ability with the HD 5770. Crysis and Crysis Warhead are supposed to run slightly smoother on the 4890 but I couldn't detect any difference using an optimized DX9 setting (as opposed to the unoptimized stock DX10 path)
Games I've played with both cards would include: Crysis, Warhead, Stalker (ShoC and CS + mods Oblivion Lost, Priboi Story, 1935 build, Lurk, Stalker Complete), Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, most of the Call of Duty games, GTA: VC, SA and 4 (VC and SA very heavily modded), Far Cry 2, UT2004 (Out of Hell mod), FEAR+Extraction Point, FEAR2, World in Conflict, CFS3and probably a few more.
I had a reference HD 4890 and the difference in noise and heat between it and the 5770 is quite noticable- the 5770 is a reasonably quite card. Also, neither card was much in the overclocking department so they were both run at stock speeds . For the amount of extra heat/stress/fan speed it wasn't worth a few extra fps.

HD 4890 was around 65-70C during extended gaming- not too bad, but the idle temp on a reference card is 45-50C (say 40-45C and 20-25C over ambient respectively). The HD 5770 is about 5-7C cooler (with reference fansink/shroud) under load and about 10C cooler at idle.
That's in a chassis with fairly good front-to-back cooling (150cfm approx.not including zone cooling)
Running a benchmark like Furmark or Kombuster would add around 5C to the load temps in each instance (rough estimate as I don't run benchmarks generally). All things considered, the temps are reasonable- at the other end of the scale my GTX 280's in SLI would run at around 85C if they weren't liquid cooled (43-45C max load temp w/ waterblocks)