GT 8600 vs GT 730

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matt167

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My Win XP gamer ( built mainly for OG Doom 3 ) has a 256mb 8600 GT which I bought for $13. It works well enough but Doom 3 actually has framerate drops to 30 FPS when monsters are around. Holds 60 fps with nothing going on, and a swinging/ flickering light will render about 45 fps. I have resolution set custom at 1366x768. I bought it thinking it would be enough for Doom 3. Also apparently it draws nearly 50 watts? Really Doom 3 remains buttery smooth through everything and without Fraps, I wouldn't know any different.. But it does get toasty

Would a GT 730 be a better card? As I understand it, it's the last gen with XP support. I dual booted it though, so it actually has Win 7 as main OS and I use it as an internet browser/ youtube watcher. I'm thinking I could re play the Bioshocks and Singularity, ect on the Win 7 side and use less power than my main rig ( which is a power hog ) while holding good visual settings.. As far as the computer. It's just a leftover Optiplex 755 with a E6750 and 4gb of ram. It's not Windows XP era hardware, it's just supported hardware.
 
So 1gb 730, 630 or 430 is basically a lot better. The only plus with the 7 series card, is the driver is still current correct? What about GT 440? appears to have the same 96 cores and 128 bit interface just slightly faster. The most I plan to squeeze out of it are 2007-14 Unreal engine titles, so a driver from 2015 or so should be adequate.
 
How could the 8600gt be struggling that bad in Doom 3? I played that old game maxed except AA and texture setting at 1024x768 with a 6600gt and 60 fps so the 8600gt should not be dropping into 30s at 1366x768 as the 8600gt is well over twice as fast.
 
Yeah, the 440 should be good up to a point. Older driver will still support it. Newer driver should cover the 700 series still.
 
misterbobby said:
How could the 8600gt be struggling that bad in Doom 3? I played that old game maxed except AA and texture setting at 1024x768 with a 6600gt and 60 fps so the 8600gt should not be dropping into 30s at 1366x768 as the 8600gt is well over twice as fast.
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I'm not sure. Everything is set to high except AA, and Vsync is enabled. Watching the framerate and when the monsters come, you would think it's in the programming to do it. Only monsters do it, like Imps. Zombies effect nothing. But the second you see them the frames lock at 30 fps. Once they are dead, it goes back to 60 frames.. Under a flickering/ swinging light, it locks to 45 frames until your out from under it. I can see developers doing something like this at release since the game was so demanding.. My copy was bought at release and I am running no patches now that I think of it. A core 2 Duo at 2.67 ghz and a video card multiple times better than what was required should do ok.
 
I've gamed at 720p using a GT610 2GB, the results were actually quite impressive considering the cost of the card!
 
Snagged a brand new 1gb EVGA ( 96 cuda core/ 126 bit bus ) GT730 for $40
 
Good deal. Where did you find it?

You inspired me to dig through my parts and I found both a GT430 1GB and an 8600GT 512MB. Tried doing a quick bench yesterday but the 430 isn't stable. For the portions it did complete the 430's fps was ~3x higher.
 
Ebay, with picture proof it's boxed in cellophane still..

Uingine Tropics pushes single digits at 1920x1080. dropping the res causes weird colors so the 8600 I have may be no good.. 3dmark '05 runs about 30 fps in most of my testing..

An E6750/ 4gb running across a PCIE X16 1.0 slot won't bottleneck it much will it?
 
Cool. Ill have to run benchmarks complete on the 8600 and then the 730 so we can finish the comparison. Its not far off an 8800 though so should be good numbers
 
Unigine Tropics under Windows 7 X64 scores a 249 at 1920x1080 at high. dropping resolution makes colors funky ( card related probably ). dropping quality does little. That is with the GT 8600.
 
Unigine Tropics scores a 449 with the GT 730. I forgot to mention I also ran 3D mark '05. 10,500 on the 8600 and 14,499 on the GT 730. Seems like 32- 96 shaders scales as I would expect. It is a PCIE 1.1 slot so it might have a bottleneck there, but I'm happy with it.
 
durability/design of the 730 should be overall better (depending on amount of Vram and such of course) I peg ~10% better (if "the right one" as far as Vram type at least).

I hate Nv with a passion (all the way back to the 8500 and 8600 because their "quality" was absolute trash, they really have not IMO did much at all in the amount of years since to get away from building "as cheap as possible" instead of "as best as we can") they have gotten far craftier about using fancy circuitry instead of beter Vregs and such.

had one 8500 (asus) worked perfect for ~2 years or so (till I upgraded and never looked back) but lacked a ton of grunt so most games were quite sluggish to say the least,
8600s (had 2) had mure grunt but were extremely poorly made (one was Nv direct, other was MSI)
primarily shit ass solder design (they knew about it, but refused to "fix it" gpu and mobo)
constant crashes, screwy colors on screen etc (well before the time I knew much about anything computer wise TBF)

dealt with this for quite awhile, often settling to use the onboard igp instead but that is own story (played oblivion on 6150LE much better then 8500 or 8600 which is CRAZY sad lol)..

along comes the Radeon 4870, have been a Radeon guy ever since (not counting the very few igp radeons or Nv ones prior to this)

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anyways, not sure about what games support what type deal, but, spec alone the GT 730 (if not using a gimped one) should at least be a better (virtue of being newer helps I suppose)

now if it "were me" the next step up (if you can find them of course, and not horrible price gouged) 750 or 750Ti which are much more potent than anything in 8x00 lineup, including SLI configs (does not hurt they are much more power efficient as well ~1/4-1/3 the power required if not quite a bit less than this if including SLI setups)

750/750Ti is not exactly "amazing" but compared to prior generations of Nv gpu, they really were a "well thought out" design, they really did hit their "sweet spot" just right in at least decent price, good performance for the power being used without being wasteful and belching out a volcano ^.^
 
750Ti was a good card with excellent power efficiency. Built at least one PC with it and that gamer used it all the way up to upgrading to a 1060 last year. Not bad.
 
Great to see some old-school gaming and tweaking going on. (y)

I'd move into the gtx650/750+ if you can afford do it as those cards are much faster and won't be but maybe $20 more (750Ti would be perfect since it doesn't even need additional power):
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/198/geforce-8600-gt
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1988/geforce-gt-730
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/894/geforce-gtx-650
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1986/geforce-gtx-750

Another route would be to upgrade your processor to an e8600 (to maximize thread performance) for $15:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core2-Duo-E6750-vs-Intel-Core2-Duo-E8600/942vs957
 
I plan on going to an e6850 at least. Only have single slot room so that is the limitation. Single slot 750\ TI are hard to find.
 
Gotcha. Yeah even a single slot gt 730 might be a bit tough since a lot of the ones I've seen are passively cooled so they take up 2 slots. I wonder what the fastest 1-slot card you could get for your setup would be? I was curious so I searched through the techpowerup gpu database and came up with these:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/3187/geforce-gt-1030-ddr4
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2954/geforce-gt-1030
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2561/geforce-gtx-745-oem
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/b3048/elsa-gtx-750-ti-sp
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/3135/radeon-r7-350
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2615/radeon-r7-250xe

You weren't kidding that single slot 750 Tis were hard to find. :eek: I would say nearly impossible as that Elsa card is not available anywhere I could find in the US. :cry:
 
Yup. The Geforce GTX 745 is interesting, being roughly 1/2 of a GTX 750 TI. When I was looking for single slot 750 TI's a couple years ago, they could be found. I don't remember the brand but they had like 8 display ports on them. Were selling then for about $120
 
matt167 said:
Yup. The Geforce GTX 745 is interesting, being roughly 1/2 of a GTX 750 TI. When I was looking for single slot 750 TI's a couple years ago, they could be found. I don't remember the brand but they had like 8 display ports on them. Were selling then for about $120
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Thank you for the additional details. :)

Looks like both Dell and HP made OEM versions of these with part numbers M302N and 759938-001 respectively. They seem to be running near the $50 shipped mark now.
 
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