8800GTS good for me?

[wxkid23]

I'll make this quick

Current system-

FX-60 2.6 GHZ (I don't OC) 2gb ram, 7900GTX, Westinghouse 42inch 1920x1080

I have been out of PC gaming for a while but am going to be getting back in a bit (HL2, Crysis, anything new) and I have decided to go ahead and upgrade my 7900GTX to this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134037

From the benches I have seen the 8800GTS is best bang for the buck for high resolution and at well below $200 after rebate it's nearly 1/3 price of the lower 200 cards coming out. I have the budget if I really needed to to buy the 200 cards but id rather not if I can get good performance for much less until prices drop. Any input here?

Im going to be upgrading my MB and processor when Intel drops the prices on the Q9550 in a month or two and also grabbing an additional 2 gigs of ram. Will I see much of a boost of performance with the new card with my current system or will the FX-60 severely bottleneck it? I would like to play at 1920x1080 as much as possible but I can play at 1280 and stuff too.

Im going to be moving to Vista 32-bit at the same time from XP. Im going to also use the 7900GTX to drive a 3rd monitor while the 8800GTX drives the westy and another. I have read (I hope it's right) that you can use 2 video cards in Vista as long as they are the same manufacturer and same drivers (does the 8800GTX and 7900GTX use the same drivers?) if they are different manufacturers it simply won't work. Anyone have any ideas about this? I can't seem to find a definative answer anywhere.

 

[krupted]

i have an opty165 running at 2.7ghz, i think its close to what you have. as far as i know, it is a small bottleneck, but nothing to worry about especially since most new games rely so much on gpu. i think if you go sli or higher you start to see the need for a better cpu much more. i could be wrong on this, its just what ive tried to gather from various reading.

 

[krupted]

well, i now have the card and it seems the opty165 is much more of a bottleneck then i thought.

3dmark06 w/7800gt- ~4k
3dmark06 w/g92- ~9550k
3dmark06 w/g92 o/c'd 800/1000 (1800 shader)- 9550k
3dmark06 w/g92 and core2- 14k

as you can see, overclocking the video card with my s939 system does squat as far as 3dmark says. im not sure about actual games, but i doubt its much different.

a strong core2 is really what you need to get full potential out of this card it seems....

 

[sed8em]

Keep in mind 3dmark is not always predictive of what you will see in games.
If you are looking for better graphics in a game, unless you're running an Athlon XP or s754 Athlon, or early to mid P4, the GPU is generally the best way to go as far as an upgrade.

 

[Nenu]

A 2.6GHz AMD x2 is a fair bottleneck.
I was running one at 2.8GHz with an 8800GT and found reducing the gfx clocks to 80% gave me almost the same performance as at 100%.
Clocking the card higher than stock made near as no difference.

Moving to an E8400 gave me full performance and a proportional speed increase clocking the card to 120% of stock too

 

[Vycka]

well, i now have the card and it seems the opty165 is much more of a bottleneck then i thought.

3dmark06 w/7800gt- ~4k
3dmark06 w/g92- ~9550k
3dmark06 w/g92 o/c'd 800/1000 (1800 shader)- 9550k
3dmark06 w/g92 and core2- 14k

as you can see, overclocking the video card with my s939 system does squat as far as 3dmark says. im not sure about actual games, but i doubt its much different.

a strong core2 is really what you need to get full potential out of this card it seems....

Yep, been there, done that. My 8800gts 512 wasn't performing all that well until I OC'ed my E6600 to over 3Ghz. I even had a thread started about it, too bad not too many people figured out what the hell was going on

 

[krupted]

Yep, been there, done that. My 8800gts 512 wasn't performing all that well until I OC'ed my E6600 to over 3Ghz. I even had a thread started about it, too bad not too many people figured out what the hell was going on

you know I suppose after seeing all this, a 9600gt might have actually been the better match for my system. especially because whenever this upgrade gets downgraded to htpc status the system would draw less power with a 9600gt.

oh well. im not returning anything- all I wanted was to max out grid and it does that just fine. this g92 card won't see its full potential for awhile, I don't plan on upgrading my s939 system for two more years. maybe ill come across a cheap core2 cpu/board too....

 

[AndonSage]

Anyone have any ideas about this? I can't seem to find a definative answer anywhere.

I don't know about the "same manufacturer" thing in Vista, but I do know that the next generation of video cards are being released very soon... nVidia is releasing the GTX260 and GTX280 on June 18th, and ATI is releasing the HD 4850 and HD 4870 the week after. So I suggest waiting until we see actual performance from the new cards.