Hey I was thinking of buying a graphic card and at this point of time am going for pretty much a complete overhaul of my PC.
My current config is
AMD Athlon 3000+ 2.1 GHz
K8 series motherboard
512MB RAM
NVidia GeForce 5200 ( How I hate to admit it)
Well my current plan is to buy the 8800 GT and change the motherboard to a K8 SLi-eSATA2 which supports my 764pin processor.
Also the memory will be cranked upto 1.5 GB
Do you think that this would be good enough to last me a year and half or so. Or do I have to change the processor as well. Also 8800 GT seems the winner and is it then a safe bet.

Now why would anyone want to ruin Jessica Biel by giving her a brain?

I think you need to address why the 8800GT out performed the 320GTS which out performed the 640GTS on page 4 under UT demo. Seems odd that the 320 would fare better than its beefier brother. I saw that and was left hoping that you would say something about that.

based on the Crysis scores, the GT is just begging for more memory. maybe someone will come out with a 1GB version ?

About EVGa step up program, i got a 8800 GTS 320 mb for 300$, so suppose 8800 GT comes out at 200$, will i get 100$ back or will i have to get 2 of em for 100$ ?

Crap... forgot to hit the reply button.

I bought a Dell recently, the Inspiron 530...

#148, To get a better response to your questions, you probably should ask in the fourms, but a quick response touching on some of the main points:

- your PS can supply 300 watts all the time, but handle short bursts of 460 watts. Dell chose to classify your PS using the more conservative rating (but that's not always the case when shopping for a PS).

- modern computers mostly run off 12Vs. Since this is a newer computer, the power supply is likely able to provide most of its power there, but the specs are likely printed in a label on the side of the power supply.

Without knowing how many amps your power supply provides in 12V, it's hard to answer your question.

The six-pin PCI-Express connector may be on your power supply. If not, the video card USUALLY comes with an adapter in the box to convert two 'regular' white molex plugs into the six-pin connector needed.

Sweet card, but the slide-show crack re: Crysis Demo left me scratching my head. What am I doing wrong, other than not turning the visual options to the max? Medium-everything at 1024x768 seems to run pretty well on a year-old Radeon X1950 Pro.....and certainly far better than I was expecting based on all the forum hissing.

So 30FPS is considered playable the days?, my how times have changed.

a Single 8800 GT is playable at the native res of a 30` display that very few people that game own?

Save the attitude my friend its not needed.

I just found it odd, I don't think i've ever seen any TR videocard reviews that weren't focusing on SLI running just that res.

Obviously it will run at the lower res, but I think people still want to see the numbers and not just assume. I guess its just me.

I must have missed it but why was the testing done at such a high res?

Nice card. Too bad they are ripping us off in Australia. The bastards want $375AUD for the damn thing!

Too bad these cards are going for $260-$310 rather than the announced pricing plan. I know, they will come down, but why announce prices that no one is offering? I'm sure it's still a good/great value. But no one is selling this card for anywhere near the $199 mark.

Any OC results? From other reviews I've seen the 8800GT was a hair from boiling itself with load temps near the 90C mark with the stock cooler, while the ol' GTS with its beefier cooler ussually sailed north of 600 Mhz from stock (20% OC).

The gal on the HSF shroud art is looking at me :-o
Run away!

Nice review. However, I would suggest using a slightly higher resolution and only going with 2xAA in Crysis as this is what I understand the majority of gamers (at least the ones I know) use for this game. (At the speed GPUs evolve lately, we can go to 16xAA next year ;-) )

Thanks for the review. IMO, this is what the 88xx series should have been when it released months ago (price, power, speed, etc). As it stands now, it's almost too little, too late. I'll wait until next year to upgrade.

The real losers here are the guys who bought either 8800GTS 320mb or 8600 GTS cards. If I was one of those folks, I'd be more than a little pissed about this offering from Nvidia.

Looking around various reviews - it looks like the 8800 GT keeps up well with the 8800 GTX pretty well, except when antialiasing comes into the equation? I'm trying to decide which card is overall best to get - obviously the GTX is faster and the GT is better value, but I don't know if the GT is fast enough for reasonable future-proofing.

NVIDIA ups The GTS to 112 SP's according to the Hard/Ocp

"UPDATE - 10/29/07-8:29am: A very interesting addendum to this. I just got off the phone with BFG Tech and NVIDIA has been doing some strange things lately. As of this morning, the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB (unsure on the 320MB) will have its stream processors officially increased to 112, the same as the GT. This should put the GTS back ahead of the GT as per the paper specs. However, the separation in the products is still going to be very small except for those of you wanting to run high resolutions with AA turned on. To do that you are still going to need a $400+ video card..or so. Our new spec GTS is on the way to us now and we will of course be updating you. Given the GT's faster clocks and possibly larger texture unit, we will have to wait and see. Undoubtedly though, the 8800 GT remains a stellar value at the expected price points."
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQxMCw2LCxoZW50aHVz...

>>>>"Speaking of memory, the card for which the 8800 GT is arguably a replacement, the 320MB version of the GTS, stumbles badly here. This is why we were lukewarm on the GTS 320MB when it first arrived. Lots of GPU power isn't worth much if you don't have enough video memory."

When a game like Bioshock runs the same on the 320MB GTS as the 640MB GTS at 2560x1600 4xAA, on an engine that uses it's own memory management system (as opposed to Managed DX engines), wouldn't it be smarter to assume that this is the texture evict issue rearing its ugly head again?

I thought it was 23.97?

No, film is 24 frames a second, but it gets slowed down a touch for home viewing (23.976 in NTSC regions) to make display/conversion on a 29.97fps standard TV easier.

By comparsion, PAL regions just speed everything up to 25 frames a second.

Ah. A sweet way to start the week for PC enthusiasts if you ask me. An avalanche of reviews for both Graphics and CPU's. AHHhhhh....

This sucks I had a new RC Heli all picked out to waste money on now I dont know what to do. The chopper is 3 times the money the 8800GT is but I kind of want a new video card too.

Nice card. However I am still happy with my 8800GTS 320MB version as it powers my 1680x1050 display at native rez for all games. I have not tried Crysis yet but I know my video card will weep. Plus I only paid $270 for it, so I am still pretty happy.

However a second gen 98XX (or whatever) will be in my next build.

I see this review got Slashdoted, congrats

does DX10.1 need new hardware or can it exist on current 8 series? coz i'd hate to get this one and the 9's are just around the corner and to find out only the 9's have DX10.1 support...

Good review, however your conclusion is slightly lacking in not pointing out that the AMD cards were the first to their respective process nodes, and were months late and far short of the clockspeed mark.

Definitely a factor I feel if you're adopting a wait-and-see attitude towards the chip.

I really thought Geoff would be writing this review after seeing the 6950 review released.

Newegg's got stock - $260 XFX:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150252