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ATI/Half-Life 2 Bundle Confirmed
An anonymous reader writes "The Inquirer has a recent article on the launch of ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and 9600 XT, happening tonight at Alcatraz." In fact, there's now a press release announcing that "...customers purchasing ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and 9600 XT will also get a free copy of Half-Life 2 when the game ships", whenever that is, and confirming the price of the 9800 at $499, and the 9600 at "under $200."
My understanding is that at least at the start, you don't get a CD, you get a cupon that let's you download it from Valve's Steam system. In the future will it switch? I somewhat doubt it, but I hope I'm wrong.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Forget it, the only bundled item I want to see are the hardware specifications for their card, so that someone can build decent free drivers for them. Is it so much to ask that you know how to use what you're buying?
I heard previuosly that it will not be the full version of HL2 shipping with the ATI 9800XT. I heard it will be a single player only version. WTF is with that, or am I wrong?
Really, an all 1 one machine doesnt exist.
I found that out too. Had a dual CPU Linux box for almost all things (beside a server running Samba, DNS, DHCP and all this type of server work). Linux was fine, but the machine was too slow for newer games (when dual booting to Windows), many games did not use the second CPU, some ATI and other drivers did not like two CPUs at all...all kind of nasty little problems.
The simple solution was a game-only computer: 1 CPU, fast video card (time to upgrade the old Radeon 8500LE). I can whole heartly recommend such a setup. If you buy the latest-and-greatest hardware, you'll have endless problems with Linux (e.g. nForce2 mainboard: no IOAPIC, no Firewire, just now they start to work, 9 monthes after the boards were available, Linux 2.5 was better but not everyone like to live on the bleeding edge). I don't blame any Linux developers as it's clearly the fault of the hardware vendors who don't supports Linux drivers actively, with very few exceptions. Use old-and-venerable hardware (1+ year) and it's a great Linux box (read: everything works out of the box) but when dual-booting to Windows for games, some hardware is no longer supported, or does not work well any more, or is just too slow for current games. I was not able to find a one-size-size-fits-all, so I bought 2 sizes and I could not be happier.
My next video card will be some updated ATI or nVidia card. With HL2 bundled or not. That will go to the Windows-mostly machine. The current ATI 8500LE will go to the Linux-mostly machine so I can finally connect 2 monitors.
It's not the perfect setup taking more space and needing a KVM switch, but it simplifies the choice of hardware a lot as I don't need to wait for simultanious Windows-and-Linux support. Getting Linux worh with it 1 year later is fine for me.
And for those who'll cry "I cannot afford 2 computers, I want my latest-and-fastest video card to be supported in Linux" I say: those video cards are far too expensive anyway. How can you afford a US$500 video card? Save for a US$200 video card, a US$300 second computer or reused parts, a KVM switch and use the best of both worlds. Seriously.
*opens box and sees two copies of original Half-Life*
I knew it had to be a typo...
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