9800Pro Upgrade Advice

[petersondm]

Hi all,

I am selling an AMD 3200+, 1.5 Gig Memory and an ATI 9800 Pro to a friend of mine. He wants to upgrade to another GPU for this system without spending much more than $200. He is doing this to play BF2. I have suggested a few options for an APG card that won’t break the bank: The 6600 GT and 6800. I have read on this forum that the 6600 GT might actually perform better than the 6800! This Tom's Hardware Guide comparison of APG cards shows the 6800 doing a bit better:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/index.html

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

 

[DeathFromBelow]

6800 = $190ish
6600GT = $160ish

The 6800's advantage is that it will fare much better at higher resolutions with aa/af on. If he doesn't use aa/af, he probably won't see any difference between the two.

Personally, I would stick with the 9800 Pro for now. It can run BF2 smooth at 1024x768 with everything but textures and shadows set to high quality.

Has he had a chance to play on the system as it is? That might save him $200 for a better video card upgrade later on.

 

[E4g1e]

Hi all,

I am selling an AMD 3200+, 1.5 Gig Memory and an ATI 9800 Pro to a friend of mine. He wants to upgrade to another GPU for this system without spending much more than $200. He is doing this to play BF2. I have suggested a few options for an APG card that won’t break the bank: The 6600 GT and 6800. I have read on this forum that the 6600 GT might actually perform better than the 6800! This Tom's Hardware Guide comparison of APG cards shows the 6800 doing a bit better:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/index.html

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

In AGP, then sure, the 6800 is a bit faster than the 6600GT all around.

I've also noticed a discrepency in the ATi Radeon scores on that chart: It shows even a 12-pipe X800 Pro beating a 6800GT. Why? Because the nVidia cards were still using the 71.89 ForceWare drivers (Tom's mislabeled those drivers as the 71.98's), while the Radeons were running on the 5.6 Catalysts. And the 5.6 Catalysts are responsible for the drastically increased scores for Radeon X8##-based cards in AGP compared to the scores of those very same cards in PCI-e (which were still running the 5.4 Cats).