Alright, so whatever you do, do NOT but a Radeon X1950XT if you´re looking for a new graphics card. Sure its actually quite powerful but its warm as heckfire. This card get so hot you´ll see artifacts in the game after about 30 seconds of gameplay wich will then escalate and lock up your whole computer. Now I have been adressing this issue on and off since I bought my new computer 10 or so months ago. I actually thought it was the drivers fault for a good amount of time and just waited for ATi to release new Vista drivers. I ended up blaming ATi and Vista for my artifacts problems. Anyway. So I finally got it under control. I manually underclocked my card and manually upped the fanspeed on the card with ATi Tray Tools. I Then ripped off the side of my case and took a big ass table fan, made for people, not computers, and pressed it against the side of the big monster of a graphics card and put it on full speed. Seems that now I can maintain a constant 58 - 63 C temperature while playing demanding 3D applications.

This means that I can FINALLY play Crysis. So I actually clicked "New Game" on Crysis yesterday and I might come off sounding like a complete delerious fool now but its one of the best shooters ever made, ever! It it! Jason Ocampo was not lying in his 9.5 review (go check it out if you havent). It increases what we expect from shooters from now on when it comes to graphics, sounds, atmosphere, open ended gameplay and awesome shooter action. I can run the game at the highest widescreen resolution (1440 x 900) with everything set to Medium except a few things wich I have cranked up to High and it looks AMAZING! I really cant see how it can look any nicer and I am only running it on mostly medium settings. The framerate isnt really good. This game eats any computer thrown at it so the FPS kinda drops in firefights and large areas but its playable. It dosent make it hard to play, its just noticably bad in some spots. But its so gorgeous I really dont care. It _IS_ truly the best looking game ever made and I dont think anything will beat it for a good while on any platform.

Play this game. Screw the "If you have the computer to handle it, play this game" because, lets face it, you dont. No matter your system this game will laugh at it. So go with what you have, scale the graphics down a bit and play this one. I cant wait to get some more free time so that I can really sit down and get through it.

*EDIT* Fixed about a 100 grammar and spelling errors. Man I was in a hurry when I wrote that blogpost. *EDIT*