Post:Hmmm... "Upgrades"

From Fusselman.org

For those of you who might not have heard, my newer gaming PC blew a video card last week. After discussing with Caleb, I order a fanned Radeon HD 5670 to replace the fanless BFG Geforce 9800GT that I had previously. I'd had problems with the fanless setup generating too much heat and sending the CPU fan into overdrive under heavy 3D load; In initial testing, the new video card leaves the PC almost silent under full load conditions.

As for ATI vs Nvidia, I'm still not so sure I'm sold on ATI; This is my first ATI since the "Rage 2 3D" days, and I'm just not a fan of the Catalyst software. Coming from the ForceWare side, it's just a big change, and took some tinkering to get my dual monitor setup running. On the upside, the 56xx series supports ATI's new EyeFinity system which means that the card has DVI+HDMI+DisplayPort (where my 9800 had 2x DVI). At this point, it just means more adapters to get two DVI monitors going, but beyond that, it means that the video card is actually triple-headed. Once I order a DisplayPort adapter, I should be able to run my entire monitor array off of one video card.

From a performance standpoint, I'm not really sure where I stand. Obviously the 5670 is a newer chipset and supports DX11, but I'm not currently using any of that, as I'm still on XP on that machine. In practice, I think my performance in LOTRO is about the same. On "very high", 150fps out in the open, down to a low of 60-75fps indoors (all at 1600x1200).