what no 7800's?

Yeah, we bought 3 of these machines, and they all came with 2 of the 6800's. I'll be using my ATI and Nvidia discounts to order a pair of cards from each for each of the 3 machines. (We do 3D development, so we require both Nvidia and ATI to make sure we build the shaders properly for both cards... damn I wish they'd make a standard for this crap...)

E1

Which is easier to work with, and handles the graphics better in your opinion? Nvidia, or ATI?

I actually have pros and cons for both...

I seem to burn up Nvidia cards on a regular basis. I think I've gone thru 7 in the past 1.5 - 2 yrs.

The ATI's seem a lot more stable, both with the drivers and the hardware. But I don't seem to get as much performance as I used to.

IIRC, the card I sold Ron had a little better performance. I sold him a BFG 6800OC (I believe), and I am running an x800. I'm very interested to see how the PCIe cards handle the dual SLI -- both ATI and Nvidia.

Overall, in the end, they are both about equal, its just about which card you can afford with the features you want. ;) But if I had a choice, I'd do all BFG cards again, those damn things are MONSTERS...

E1

Yeah, I got the BFG 6800 OC from John. That thing is a friggin TANK! I can't max it out. I've tried! I have every game cranked for full detail and a decent resolution and it just flies through and eats it all up. I'm truly impressed with it. It's still not even overclocked from its origonal setup either! If I really wanted, I could tweak it for even better performance.

One thing I noted though is that it's the first video card I've seen ( in many years ) that actually discusses a number of CMOS table settings to initially optimize it before you even hit it with drivers. It did make a difference too in its performance.

Speaking of ATI, new driver released:

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... 5&from=rss

nividia released an updated driver also 81.95 on there wedsite, but im sure by the time the LAN rolls around they'll update it again.