Wow! An 8800GTX SLI! That's powerful enough to play some games for some time. Crysis... I've played that game but I guess it would depend on what you want from it. As a tech demo I would say it does a very good job, but gameplay wise there's quite little replayability. I'm not sure about the Online games as I've only had a few matches which weren't really satisfying.

Personally I doubt it's that good an idea to get a new build yet. AMD is now vying with Intel with their new Quad Core processors. It might be a good idea to wait for the whole "David vs Goliath" battle to finish first. Lol.

Maybe wait for another short while and get Far Cry 2? Apparently better graphics and an open ended gameplay. GTA meets Far Cry minus the monsters. Lol.

oh my god... the 8800GTX is like the best on the market, get Crysis, just to do your computer justice... that's ridiculous man, I'm thinking of buying a PC with similar graphics capabilities when I ship off to college.

jephree bumped me over from my thread (http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread.php?t=55306&page=2) so I figured I'd add my 2 cents.

I've always known when it was time to build a new rig when epic released their newest Unreal Tournament (I know, I'm a little late). I'm still a HUGE fan of mindless online run-and-gun shooters.

I figured with Age of Conan & Warhammer Online coming out (both of which I'm mildly excited about), I wanted a rig that would handle it all.

I've been hearing alot about Crysis, but really wasn't planning on trying it until I got this build together. Someone mentioned earlier that they were less than happy with the online play. Why is that? (BTW - I realize the rig I built is not a monster powerhouse, but feel that it could run Crysis at least as well as the rig that Best Buy built specially to show off the game - see my specs in the other thread & let me know what you think).

On a further note - I beta tested America's army (FREEFREEFREE go get it) for the first two years of its developement. By that point, my rig barely ran it & I had to bow out. Now that I'm getting this rig together, I can't wait to get back to it.

Being that I'm a big fan of online play (the more people on a server the better), what other shooters out there would you guys recommend?

Battlefield and Counter-Strike. Any Unreals and in its time the Halo PC game was pretty awesome online

Team Fortress 2 seems to be quite a hype as well. Its gameplay really requires team work so it would also depends on your luck on finding team mates.

true dat.

TF2 is the only on-line game I've played.

I like it a lot. The cartoon nature somehow makes the war game more palatable to me.

It is indeed a team game but there are numerous clans looking for members and or if you play through Steam you have your Steam friends.

Also just being a regular on a server will find you friends / teammates.

yup yup, good fun.

Ok - I just got back from BB (Best Buy) & was talked out of buying Crysis. Here's the reason:

I installed XP Pro 64 bit on my new system. They told me XP Pro 64 bit is not Direct X 10 compatable. Crysis NEEDS Direct X 10 in order to run with all of the eye candy. One guy even told me that it will not run PERIOD on XP.

Here's my thoughts: The box said Win XP or Vista (no mention of DirX10 yet) & for the graphics card it wants a compatible DirX9 or DirX10 compatible one (then it listed minimum ATI & nVidia cards).

Will Direct X 10 run on my Win XP 64 bit system having the nVidia9600GT 512mBt (DirX10 compatible) card installed???? Do those guys kow what the hell they're talking about? Do I? A little help please.

Thanks in advance.

(BTW - ideally you'll tell me that DirX10 will run on my system)

DirectX 10 will only run in Vista.

DirectX 9.0c was just upgraded by Microsoft and is probably the last upgrade there.

A DirectX 10 capable card will run DirectX 9.0c in XP.

Crysis will run in XP and it will run on your card.