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OK, the whole money thing ain't working in favor of the 7800GT

So:
A 256MB X800GT, or a 128MB GeForce 6600GT?

Main games: Far Cry, Doom 3, Postal 2, Painkiller. Pretty much it.

On the one hand, I like nVidia....on the other hand, I have no clue about the performance of the X800GT card, and it does have 256MB....

I will get a 7800GT at some point.

I assume those are typos and you mean x800GT.

The x800gt gives better performance outside of doom3, especially when you crank up the resolution + aa/af.

Yup, typos...fixed.

X800GT. It's been a long day...

The problem is that the X800GT can be any one of R423, R430 and R480 cores. Of course the R480 ones will have the best potential. Unfortunately, so far only PowerColor is using R480 cores. And people hate PowerColor here...

I saw sites saying R423/R480 during the review but I figured they weren’t sure what it was yet since this card is pretty new. That is pretty stupid of ATI to introduce this. It's bad enough manufacturers deviate on the core/memory clocks but entirely different cores crosses the line.

Well, the card I was looking at is a Powercolor. Why don't people like them?
This will be a temporary thing, until I have the $ for the 7800GT. Then this card will go into a 2nd (non-gaming) system...but that may be awhile.

powercolor is known for beibng a "Johnny Cutcorners" using cheaper parts to keep cost, and stability down. I personally never pwned one, but from what I've read, its not good stuff.

For what ive read and heard about PowerColor's new reference card is good. Top of the line card and toeing the mark so to speak..they must have acquiesed to ATI's product liability or somethin...sposed to be good..why dont you be the Guinea

Hmm. A 3rd option: Leadtech 6600GT. The card I was looking at is the eVGA card, and clocked at 500MHz. The Leadtech is at 550MHz. The downside: about $50 more.

Worth it? Get the stock card?

Not sure I want to play guinea pig




...but I might anyway...

Nope...X800 all the way...and it should be a great card. (Coward)

The deal here is that ATI is using this X800GT moniker to dump rejects. With all the delays for this round of refresh of the R4x0 cores, we can probably expect this will happen. Therefore, they are enabling the same pipelines (only and using the same GPU clock (slower than X800 and X800XL of course), while varying RAM types and speeds to fill the midrange. The important thing here is that they all beat the 6600GT, which plays nicely into ATI's hands.

7800GT should be coming down in price very shortly, since this time ATI will happen to have all low, mid and high end RV515, RV530 and R520 released around the same time. Come the holiday season, nVidia will probably have to drop prices to compete. If you can just hold on a bit longer... may be just use an old PCI card and wait a bit?

if you go with the 6600GT i would go with stock speeds then spend about 30 bucks on a zalman vga cooler (vf700-cu?) and get some artic silver 5, then use cool bits and im sure youll be able to get a good stable clock well over 550... im using two gigabyte 6600gts in sli with stock coolers (although one day those will be changed) and with coolbits my "optimal clock freq" on my core is 550 when stock was 500

What Hoodie said. My MSI 6600GT is stock 500/1000 (core/memory clocks), but mine did 550/1120 right out of the box. These are not uncommon results, as far as I can tell.

The ATI card looks pretty attractive, though, particularly with 256MB and priced around $20 less than the average 6600GT. And even without an overclock, it looks to be a higher performance card.

sluggo

The 6600GT has SM3.0, FP16 HDR, Purevideo and (if you get the MSI) VIVO.

That's a lot of extras.

Well, the "deadline" for me ordering a new card was about 4:30 PM, today (it's 8:30PM now). I'm sick of using this 300MHz K6-2 that takes over 5 minutes to boot up & 10 minutes from power-on to 'net surfing. It is one slooow POS. I think the Athlon 64 3700+ will be a NICE improvement

As I said, I'll wait a bit until the money sitution improves and grab a 7800GT. Then this card can go into my 2nd system.

I decided that, since a) I wanted to save the most money possible, while still be able to actuall play the games I have, and b) since I already made my WinXP install cd (with drivers slipstreamed, and 465MB of crap removed), that I'd just get the eVGA 6600GT. It's good enough...especially until I get a better monitor (around the time I get the 7800GT).

Oh well. It was tempting to get the ATI card. Very much so. But, oh well. Maybe they'll come up with a good competitior to the 7800GT...

Coming from the machine youre on now...it will seem like "Back to the Future"

LicketySplit wrote:

Coming from the machine youre on now...it will seem like "Back to the Future"

Yeah, it'll be quite the shock to the 'ol system! But in a good way