i can gaurentee it would run crysis so your a bit off there phemox, i have a 8500 and can run crysis at max settings for most of the game, only when i get into really dense foliage does it lag below about 25fps. its really not a bad card.
Well, if you say so, however a lot of benchmarks show that the card performs in the sub 15 fps range in Crysis. Compared to the old ATI X1950 256mb that is able to get you around 26 fps on average, the 8500 really isn't such a good card for the money.
I might have exaggerated a bit by saying it won't run, but what I meant was that in my experience having 15 fps with Crysis makes it quite easily unplayable in most areas.
Also, even the 8600 has difficulties running the game at the Medium settings, so to be honest I don't really believe you, especially not that it runs at max settings with that card.
only when i get into really dense foliage
Yeah, but with max settings the foliage is always dense.
i am not up to date with mainboards. what chipset does a quad core intel need? what mainboard with good price/performance ratio would you recommend? (i don't want high end stuff. i will never use SLI and RAID and such things...)
<edit> how about the ASUS P5Q Pro? </edit>
I would go for a P45 or X48 mainboard at least. Most of the newer ones support DDR3 memory (usually have names like Asus P5E3).
Some of these mainboards even support BOTH DDR2 and DDR3 in case you think DDR3 is way too expensive, which it is in my opinion.
The P5Q Pro is really good, I would buy it if not having DDR3 memory is no issue for you. It also has 2 PCI-e 16x 2.0 slots, so installing a new 3D card like a AMD/ATI HD4870 is no problem.
