Replacement for an 8800 Ultra?

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mike0219116

Weaksauce
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Mar 5, 2005
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My 8800 Ultra finally giave up the ghost last night. What current nVidia card would be the rough equivalent the 8800 Ultra? Thanks.
 
Getting anything less than a GTX 260 is stupid. They're dirt cheap. Also consider a Radeon HD 4890 -- a little faster, sometimes a good bit faster, about the same cash.
 
A GTS 250 1GB may perform slightly less than an 8800 Ultra at high resolutions and AA settings, but is otherwise very similar in performance. A GTX 260 would be an upgrade. Both the GTS 250 and GTX 260 are reasonably priced compared to ATi cards right now. A 4890 or GTX 275 perform like two 8800GTX in SLI, but the 4890 costs $170ish while the GTX 275 costs $250.

Your 8800 Ultra may have a lifetime warranty, depending on who you bought it from.
 
based on my experience.

My 2 8800 ultras went out on me, called EVGA and they sent me 2 GTX 260s. I wasnt going to have it of anything less and they agreed. So depending what company and if you registered your products most likely you will get those. I know some people that got GTX 280s and 9800GTX+s...
 
Replaced mmy 8800 with an GTX260 and have not regretted it. Other than manually setting fan speeds in Rivatuner have had zero problems and runns everything just fine.
 
I'm thinking about upgrading my 8800GTX since it seems the next generation of nVidia cards is forever going to be over the horizon. I've reached the point where I have to bump some newer games (RE5, Borderlands, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Dragon Age, etc) down from 1920x1080 to 1280x720 to keep it around 60fps at max settings (usually no AA).

Would moving up to the 260 let me play those games at 1080p with max settings at 60fps, generally speaking? I'm trying to figure out if it the 260 would be good enough to hold me over until nVidia finally knocks the cobwebs off their release machine.
 
It depends, a gts250 (uber-g92 card) is a sidestep, on average.

A gtx260 (c192/c216) is a slight "guraenteed upgrade" - where it will consistantly perform better, but not by much.



IF you were to buy your own, I'd recommend an ATi 58xx card.
If you wished to stay nVidia, I'd recommend a GTX285 or just wait for the next nVidia card (looks to be March 2010).

IF this is a warrenty replacement, expect:

All others: GTS250 (a few cases of this on [H])
eVGA (and maybe BFG): GTX260.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. This BFG 285 seems reasonable at $379.99. But then there's this XFX 5850 for $309.99, but I'm not familiar with ATi cards and drivers, so I'm not sure how it compares. What do you think?

I'm not crazy about waiting until March, because I know I'll actually be waiting even longer. Assuming there are no further outright delays (which is certainly possible) I'm sure there will still be availability issues and the retailer price-gouging that comes with that. At best I might be able to get a Fermi card at a reasonable price by late April or May.

I think I would be better off getting a short-term upgrade right now and holding off until Q2/Q3 2010 for a major upgrade. Although, depending on the games that come out, I may not need it even then. It's going to take a while for DX11 software to take off, if it does at all (DX10 didn't exactly make a huge splash).

Or maybe my profit-sharing bonus is burning a hole in my pocket and I'm thinking about this too much.
 
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Put bluntly, that's a horrible price, and a poor choice at this point. $380 for a GTX 285? You could get a Radeon HD 5870 for that, and it'd be a hell of a lot faster with DX11 support and far, far higher resale if you're looking to upgrade in 6-8 months like you're saying.

That or a Radeon HD 4890 which would be as fast as or almost as fast as the GTX 285 in most titles and run you less than half of what the 285 would. Even less than that if you're willing to watch FS/FT here for a few days and buy used. Hell, there's a guy here selling a pair of Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-Xs for $100 each that are running near 4890 clocks. You could come out with a pretty substantial upgrade (A 4870 running 800Mhz core is about about 2x as fast as your 8800GTX) for $100 + shipping, almost 1/4th what you'd be paying for that 285.

Don't be a fanboy -- I had 8800 GTX Tri-SLI for a while and swapped out for a pair of 4890s. They're a hell of a lot faster. Nvidia really isn't on top right now. Go where the power is.
 
Yeah, I've been out of the video card loop for a long time and I can see that I've missed some pretty important changes. Thanks a bunch for the suggestions; it definitely looks like ATI is the way to go at the moment. It'll be an interesting experiment if nothing else, as I have never owned an ATI desktop card. That's not out of fanboyism though; my upgrade cycles just happened to fall when nVidia's cards were at their best.

The 4890 really does look like a winner, which seems odd to me... its core clock is quite a bit higher than the 5850 and only slightly lower than the 5870. Still, the price difference is huge and it looks like the 4890 would be a significant performance improvement over the 8800GTX, just based on the numbers. I'll look up some benchmarks and go from there.
 
With Tiger Direct 15% Bing cashback you can get an XFX 5870 XXX for ~$365.
 
Your reasoning is solid.
BUT......did your card have a lifetime guarantee??? If so RMA it.....you'll probable end up with a GTX 260???

I'd think about one or two ways to do this......

Look for a used GTX 280 or 285, you should be able to find one, and a good bit under the $300 dollar mark. I just sold a very nice GTX 260 superclocked for $135 and I thought I made out pretty well.

Or.........buy a new HD 4890, those are excellent cards and pretty cheap right now.
Or........buy a new 5800 series card. The 5870 is really a nice card.

ATI drivers can be a little wierd sometimes, and try your patience, but all in all pretty solid, just takes some getting use to.:D
 
How does the Bing cashback thing work? Do you have a link to the item that would should the Bing discount/cashback/whatever?

magoo said:
ATI drivers can be a little wierd sometimes, and try your patience, but all in all pretty solid, just takes some getting use to.:D
Click to expand...

As if nVidia drivers don't drive me nuts at times. I recall swapping mine like crazy trying to resolve rampant Fallout 3 crashes.
 
Rehevkor said:
How does the Bing cashback thing work? Do you have a link to the item that would should the Bing discount/cashback/whatever?



As if nVidia drivers don't drive me nuts at times. I recall swapping mine like crazy trying to resolve rampant Fallout 3 crashes.
Click to expand...

Here's the 5870 link, once you go to your cart, a 15% discount is applied, that's ~65 dollars off their retail price of 429.99, but it is the XXX edition for whatever that's worth.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...eywords=hd+5870&searchbtn.x=17&searchbtn.y=10

Tigerdirect is pretty good. I bought some of my Christmas stuff from them, good email updates and very quick turn-around. Shipping took 2 days due to my location from their warehouses.:D
 
any variant of GTX260 and up should work.. my 8800 ultra died after years of service and multiple RMA's with EVGA, now I'm running xfx 5870, quite a jump and eyefinity is not so bad either...
 
Don’t mess with the 9800 anything or the GTS250... you will be horribly disappointed with the same real life performance.

I recently upgraded from a 8800GTS 512 (g92) to a GTX260.. and I didn’t notice much improvement... It is faster, but nothing worth money IMO. (my GTX260 was a cheap upgrade for me, by brother pretty much game it to me)
 
I(illa Bee said:
Don’t mess with the 9800 anything or the GTS250... you will be horribly disappointed with the same real life performance.

I recently upgraded from a 8800GTS 512 (g92) to a GTX260.. and I didn’t notice much improvement... It is faster, but nothing worth money IMO. (my GTX260 was a cheap upgrade for me, by brother pretty much game it to me)
Click to expand...

:p:cool::D*

*now don't make me jealous!
 
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