I have my e4300 OC'ed to 3.33ghz at 1.47v. With my Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, I load at about 67C with Small FFTs in Orthos. 71C in blend seems awfully high for a Vendetta 2. BTW, I would try RealTemp. On some e4300's (like mine) Core Temp sets my TJunction wrong at 100C, adding 15C to my...
It will bottleneck LESS at ultra-high resolutions. Any older game will fly even with a 3850. Maybe he can get a 3870 or a 4650 if they come out soon and save the rest for later. A 4850 would be wasting money if he's not going to upgrade cpu anytime soon.
Doesn't seem like CF works with Crysis yet...
BTW, I would do the Crysis benchmark 3 times. The benchmark moves so fast that on first run it has to load a lot of textures and brings the average down.
Yeah, I would never buy a 24" monitor unless I was loaded and knew I would have enough money to buy a new gfx card to regularly run at native res. I'm fine with a monitor a few inches smaller with twice the performance.
I have 2 friends (brothers) who went out and bought 9800GTX's on Monday. One of them bought 2, the other only bought one with the intention of buying another soon. They both also got some EVGA 780i motherboards. Mind you, I told them a week ago to wait until the new offerings from ATI and Nvidia...
Yeah, at least we know that so far. I want more than just synthetics and CoJ, hopefully he'll get Crysis working...
Edit: I found some 9800GTX benches in CoJ for comparison:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/5363-bfg-9800gtx-512mb-review-13.html...