Video card recommendation

  • Thread starter Thread starter Thomas Jarboe
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Thomas Jarboe

Hello to everyone.
I have a ATI Radeon x1900GT Video card that I am looking to upgrade. I was
wondering, what would be a worthy upgrade? I'm looking at either ATI HD
2600 series or the geforce 8800 Series. The motherboard I have now supports
SLI so I'm looking more towards NVIDIA.
Thanks
Thomas
 
Well if you intend at some point in time to buy a second video card for SLi
operation then go with the 8800 series card. But if you intend to stay with
just one card pick up a new ATI 3750 far better performance then the 2600
series cards and the power consumption is far lower and the price is as well.
The 3700 series cards are Direct X 10.1 certified cards and the top of the
line card only costs around $250
 
personally,im stickin' with nvidia - ive run my ati cards in crossfire mode
& my nvidia cards in sli mode & i dont think ati comes close to nvidia. if u
decide to go with nvidia,just make sure u do ur homework & buy from a
reputable manufacturer such as EVGA,XFX or the like. dont know ur tech level
or where u shop for pc stuff,but if ur not doin it online ur takin' a
beatin' in the pocketbook 95% of the time when it come to video cards.

in case u dont,i highly recommend newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com. - like i
said,do ur homework,the newegg site is an excellent resource for customer
reviews & things u need to know ahead of time before u spend ur cash,such as
the size of the cards & all the specs - i find its worth it to just quickly
browse thru some of the reviews. actually im upgrading to a 8800 series card
myself very soon,but gonna get a 640mb card which should do me well for a
while with the DirectX 10 series of games that should be getting more
support now,plus i like to run at high resolutions cause i have a 20"
widescreen.

good luck
 
Thomas Jarboe said:
Hello to everyone.
I have a ATI Radeon x1900GT Video card that I am looking to upgrade. I
was wondering, what would be a worthy upgrade? I'm looking at either ATI
HD 2600 series or the geforce 8800 Series. The motherboard I have now
supports SLI so I'm looking more towards NVIDIA.
Click to expand...

I've just moved to a Radeon 3870 from a Radeon X1900XT. Crysis is playable
at very high at 1280x720. :-) And now all my other games are back to
running silky smooth at 1920x1200 maxed out.

I won't be buying another nVidia product for the foreseeable future, not
thanks to how terrible their drivers have been and how they stung everybody
by dropping support for the GeForce 5xxx series and nForce 3 boards -
despite saying they would support them.

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/
http://www.windowsresource.net/

*Remove nospam. to reply by e-mail*
 
The Geforce 8800GT 512MB cards look very good for the price. You can
overclock them and get similar or better performance than a 8800GTX.

But, depending on what resolution you game at, it may be overkill, and
may not see much of an improvement by going SLI.
 
Thomas Jarboe said:
Hello to everyone.
I have a ATI Radeon x1900GT Video card that I am looking to upgrade. I
was wondering, what would be a worthy upgrade? I'm looking at either ATI
HD 2600 series or the geforce 8800 Series. The motherboard I have now
supports SLI so I'm looking more towards NVIDIA.
Click to expand...

Deffo go for 2 x Gainward Bliss 8800GTX you'll not be disappointed
 
Thomas Jarboe said:
Hello to everyone.
I have a ATI Radeon x1900GT Video card that I am looking to upgrade. I was
wondering, what would be a worthy upgrade? I'm looking at either ATI HD
2600 series or the geforce 8800 Series. The motherboard I have now supports
SLI so I'm looking more towards NVIDIA.
Thanks
Thomas
Click to expand...

I got an Evga Nvidia 8800 GT (superclocked non-requitred but go for the
overclocking for $50 if you want) and its just amazing
 
Uba-Pook said:
I got an Evga Nvidia 8800 GT (superclocked non-requitred but go for the
overclocking for $50 if you want) and its just amazing
Click to expand...

I got an 8800GT, nice card, thinking of getting another for SLI, but I still
believe SLI is a major ripoff. I'm playing Lord of the Rings Online, and
while the game looks phenominal in DirectX 10 mode with this card you loose
about 40% of your framerate vs. DirectX 9. I am playing Bioshock in Dx10
mode at 1650x1080 (LCD 16:10 monitor), and it looks great. Framerate dips a
bit here and there, but it could be CPU related (high end core 2 duo), who
knows.

If you want to stick with ATi, wait for the 38x0 series, I'm hearing amazing
things about these cards and they cost less than the 8800gt's (Faster too).
ATi should be winning the video card war, but nVidia is taking more risks,
getting to market first so they are winning, but I love ATi for keeping
pricing competitive! If ATi ever went away we'd be screwed. :)

X1900 isn't a bad card, no directx 10, but directx 10 isn't all it's cracked
up to be. Looks pretty, but... well if you want it, i doubt i'll be able to
stop ya. :) Have fun shoppin.
 
Andy said:
I got an 8800GT, nice card, thinking of getting another for SLI, but I still
believe SLI is a major ripoff. I'm playing Lord of the Rings Online, and
while the game looks phenominal in DirectX 10 mode with this card you loose
about 40% of your framerate vs. DirectX 9. I am playing Bioshock in Dx10
mode at 1650x1080 (LCD 16:10 monitor), and it looks great. Framerate dips a
bit here and there, but it could be CPU related (high end core 2 duo), who
knows.

If you want to stick with ATi, wait for the 38x0 series, I'm hearing amazing
things about these cards and they cost less than the 8800gt's (Faster too).
ATi should be winning the video card war, but nVidia is taking more risks,
getting to market first so they are winning, but I love ATi for keeping
pricing competitive! If ATi ever went away we'd be screwed. :)

X1900 isn't a bad card, no directx 10, but directx 10 isn't all it's cracked
up to be. Looks pretty, but... well if you want it, i doubt i'll be able to
stop ya. :) Have fun shoppin.
Click to expand...


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

zeffa
zeffastudio.com

hi ,
i need to upgrade my video card(s) about 1 year ago i bought a 256mb
ATI Radion and a 128mb nvidia (EVGA) . BOTH COST ME ABOUT $ 115.00 EACH .
from my glancing at the adds . a ATI or NVIDIA 512mb video card cost about
$ 80.00 to $ 110.00 . that is at least a card at my $price$ range . my
NVIDIA 128MB was just as fast as the 256mb ATI . ( i like to run 4 monitors
) . i can only aford 1 video card at a time and as you can see time = $ +
power < 6 months = a video card may be out dated by the time i get a 2nd
video card .

the question is ...
i was planing on a 512mb video card purchase . should i try to buget
hard and mabe get a little bit biger than 512mb video card ?
so when i get the 2nd card (mabe in 4 months) i'll have maching power ? i
don't play any games that need more than 1024 x 768 . my 4 monitors are to
run multible programs at once (audio and video editing) . i would just
would ike to upgrade once if posable ....

i thought !!WOW !! 512's and 1gb video cards . but that i think is a
econemy card now .

ADVICE FROM MY EXSPERENCES --- high dollar ATI cards are as good as an
NVIDIA card ,
--- !!! 2 things iv'e learned ---

#1 never by an NVIDIA VIDEO CARD UNLESS IT is made by the
" EVGA " NIVIDA company .

# 2 it is not always required but it doesn't hurt if you buy a video
card that is the same brand as the chip set in your north
bridge of your motherboard .

thank you for your earler coments . every bit of wisdom adds up .


zeffa
zeffastudio.com
(e-mail address removed)
 
--- !!! 2 things iv'e learned ---

#1 never by an NVIDIA VIDEO CARD UNLESS IT is made by the
" EVGA " NIVIDA company .

# 2 it is not always required but it doesn't hurt if you buy a video
card that is the same brand as the chip set in your north
bridge of your motherboard .
Click to expand...

Erm why to both?? I've used every video card manufacturer and they all do
the job, I've had cards fail through review testing and I can tell you EVGA
don't fair that well although they are do make nice high end cards, now if
you want a recommendation for vid cards then you can't go far wrong by
choosing a Leadtek or a Gainward card, both are very reliable and OC very
well.
And running a vid card the same as your chipset makes no difference at all.
 
If you have the money, I would suggest forgetting about SLI'ing cards and get
the nVidia Tesla C870. It's a 128-core GPGPU (general purpose graphics
processing unit) with 1.5GB of VRAM. If you have even more money, I'd suggest
moving up the line to either the D870 w/ 256cores/3GB VRAM or the best of the
best, the S870 at 512 cores/6GB VRAM.
 
But why would you need such an extremely powerful card?
I thought that 8800 with 1GB VRam would be more than enough even for all the
modern games.
 
vistauser said:
But why would you need such an extremely powerful card?
I thought that 8800 with 1GB VRam would be more than enough even for all
the
modern games.
Click to expand...

You don't, Gordon was just saying, if money is no object, these cards will
amaze you. Keep in mind you'll want a high end 30" LCD that supports those
high end 2560x1980 resolutions (may have those numbers wrong), not to
mention a computer with a couple quad core Phenoms in there.

8800's with 1gig? I assume you mean 2, 8800GTXs. There are reasons why a
"Tesla" single card would be phenominally faster than 2 seperate cards.
While in theory, 2 cheaper cards sounds like you're doubling your video
speed, you really aren't, there's a bunch of stuff I don't even know about,
but basically it's like running 2 Hard Drives in RAID-0 configuration, you
don't really get double the speed. It's close, but not quite.

SLI seems like a major scam (IMO), unless you're getting your cards for
free, why bother?
 
Dude. I've seen a computer with one of those tesla cards, and it's so
freaking fast! I so wish I had one of them. Also, another side of the tesla
series is that they're essentially a supercomputer cramped into a
card/tower/blades. with a C environment, it's like having a BlueGene inside
your very own computer.
 
There is a 8800 with a gig of VRAM

Andy said:
You don't, Gordon was just saying, if money is no object, these cards will
amaze you. Keep in mind you'll want a high end 30" LCD that supports those
high end 2560x1980 resolutions (may have those numbers wrong), not to
mention a computer with a couple quad core Phenoms in there.

8800's with 1gig? I assume you mean 2, 8800GTXs. There are reasons why a
"Tesla" single card would be phenominally faster than 2 seperate cards.
While in theory, 2 cheaper cards sounds like you're doubling your video
speed, you really aren't, there's a bunch of stuff I don't even know about,
but basically it's like running 2 Hard Drives in RAID-0 configuration, you
don't really get double the speed. It's close, but not quite.

SLI seems like a major scam (IMO), unless you're getting your cards for
free, why bother?
Click to expand...
 
He's right. Getting two cards do NOT double your speed. Even nVidia only
claims a 80% increase in performance, not 100%.
 
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