holy crap isg, good eye, yeah, that machine is incredible for the price. not the fastest ever but still can play just about any game, damn.

Yeah, about 4 years ago... Lol, no just kidding, it's not all bad and actually a pretty good deal for that price still, but processor and graphics card really aren't very fast. AMD has been beaten bad by the latest Intel Core 2 Duos and Quads stuff and frankly there are better graphics cards than the 8500 for (relatively; as in best bang for bucks) less money!

Only thing you can't beat is the total price of only 299$ I guess, but as you'd be buying outdated hardware I wouldn't jump at it.
(I doubt it would run Crysis, Supreme Commander or any of the newer games, in fact I'm pretty sure it won't.)

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.

i also plan to get a new pc soon. probably i will get an intel Q6600 cpu which should be nice for rendering in modo and blender.

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>

...any suggestions about a silent power supply and a silent cpu cooler?

there you go vent, all those support intel quad cores. take your pic, some things to keep in mind, pci-e slots, ability to add more cards, type of ram, sata slots, ide slots, sli/crossfire support.

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.



Yeah, but with max settings the foliage is always dense.



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.

well to be completely honest i do have a dual card setup and i didnt measure the difference between when i have sli running and whne not having it running, but i have never had sli make a big difference anyways so it cant be that different, also i am talking about the crysis demo, so it only maxes on high, and not ultra high like on the full release. also most of the demo your on the shore most of the time or on some sort of path, so there is little vegetation there. but it does work. dont know about your sources, maybe it has something to do with the 4gb of ram i have, but i do only have a shitty processor too, and it still works.

I see, well I don't know. My dad has a 8400 (which is a bit of a disaster when it comes to the latest games, but it runs Flight Simulator X), and for the 8500 score I just looked on the internet with google compared some benchmarks that way... Perhaps SLi does matter more, after all it's usually somewhere between 40% and 60% faster than having only one card. I wasn't talking about the demo, but I'm not sure if it would matter that much, I always thought the demo runs worse than the full version. But I have played the demo only twice or so.

Anyways, I don't know... I wouldn't really recommend that card, but I think we can agree that the system it was about isn't all bad, especially for it's price, I definitely must admit.

thats definately agreed, even if he bought it and put a $200 card, he still has a decent machine with a great card for only $500 which is incredible.