Man, I guess I should have been worried at my x1950 when it would run at 120C+ during gaming.

the bench marks are all well and good but...

it would ba FAR more useful if you included several low cost option in any tests as a solid base, something your average person might actually buy hell even the current entry level ATI HD 3650 at £55 average price im running right now would be a starting point for a base.

for instance the HD 3650/1gig gave me a real FPS boost over an old AMD X1500/512 of around 21FPS extra in Cysis at 800x600.

please include some older and cheaper cards that people buy and use today for a good basis to instantly see if we should consider upgrading at 3 times the cost.

im not sure if i misstyped it as its not gone up yet,what i meant was "thats X1550/512" sorry

The HIS "IceQ" cards.

While they're a little more expensive (£131) than the standard one, they're cheaper than the Toxic, have same amount of memory (512MB) and while they're not overclocked so fast by stock, the config program which comes with them gives you a great deal of control. And they vent properly out the back of the case, unlike the Toxic.

I have an earlier IceQ card, and I'm very happy with it.

Assuming the labels are correct, it appears that running a dual 4580 degrades performance in Crysis to far below that of a single card running the same driver version.

Is that correct? If so, any idea why?

I don't understand the Crysis figures and it's bloomin' annoying.

I started using a Crysis run-through with FRAPS out of idle curiosity some time ago when it became apparent that the built in benchmarks are hopelessly inadequate.

My methodology is this: I choose the game settings, load a Crysis saved game and play through a short section part of the game.

At first the test results were fairly predictable as more powerful graphics cards gave better results in terms of frame rates and Nvidia had an advantage over ATi, doubtless thanks to the Way It's Meant To Be Played.

The fly in the ointment is that dual graphics chip cards and SLI/CrossFire perform far worse than a decent single graphics card which goes against logic. It's not just a low FRAPS score - the game plays like you're running through treacle.

Here's the thing; a number of readers have picked up on this apparent contradiction in the test results of some of my reviews - high 3D Mark scores and low Crysis scores - but no-one has said that they run HD 4850 CrossFire or a GeForce 9800 X2 and have a great time in Crysis.