geforce 660 in older mobo

H

hipsterdoofus

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 2, 2009
Messages
157
I'm in the process of upgrading my whole system, just doing a little bit a month. Was going to go ahead and do a video card since i figured I could use it immediately, but now I'm not sure.

My current mobo is this (don't laugh)

And I am currently running a geforce 8800 GTS. I was planning on upgrading to a 660 ti and was wondering if that would run on the pcie port on that machine until i replace the mobo in another month or so.

I saw this in some minimum requirements:
Pci express®
or Pci express 2.0-compliant motherboard
with one dual-width x16 graphics slot. for a 2-way/3-way nVidia
sli configuration, you need an sli-ready motherboard with one
dual-width x16 graphics slot for each graphics card.
Click to expand...
 
Bottleneck, yes...depends on game, especially on games that recommend quad core cpu's
 
Well I intend on buying (together) mobo/CPU/RAM and probably and SSD and then separately buying video card. I thought it was an easy decision to buy the video card first since I figured it would help out even this older system....but I'm having doubts. Essentially I will buy one batch of stuff this week, and the rest of it maybe end of November.
 
You will be fine to get a 660ti now and then upgrade the rest of your system later. Why not get a 7950 though? They are on par with the 670, and are about the same price as the 660ti,sometimes less on sale. (not to mention three free games)

Of course you are free to choose whichever card you wish.
 
Anticommon, funny, I had actually had that suggested to me.

I'm not particularly tied to a brand. I had a friend suggest the Nvidia card to me because he's had good experience with evga before. He likes them because any returns are done in the US and are easy to deal with. From what I can tell though, the 7950 is a good card too.
 
hipsterdoofus said:
Anticommon, funny, I had actually had that suggested to me.

I'm not particularly tied to a brand. I had a friend suggest the Nvidia card to me because he's had good experience with evga before. He likes them because any returns are done in the US and are easy to deal with. From what I can tell though, the 7950 is a good card too.
Click to expand...

If you have no brand loyalty and just want a good card, get the 7950; for the same reasons as said above. It's far better than 660ti
 
Yeah that is the same deal I had seen on a 7950.

As far as a temporary upgrade - it doesn't seem worth it to me. I hope to have everything upgraded by Decemberish, so whatever I do right now would only be for a month or so. Was just hoping to break it up into 2 chunks but also get some immediate relief.

Also, if you are recommending the 7950, do you have a manufacturer you recommend? As I said, I've heard great things about evga so that is one reason I leaned towards the 660 ti. Also, one reason it isn't quite as important to me is that I heard the 7950 performs better at very high res - and I am not running high resolution at all.
 
If the motherboard has a PCIe slot (even if it is PCIe 1.0), you can plug a PCIe graphics card into it. All PCIe is backwards compliant. It will run, but it will not run at its full capacity. You will be both CPU bottlenecked and starved for bandwidth so don't expect miracles out of that setup.
jolli said:
Have you ever thought about picking up a cheap Core 2 Quad used?

A sixty dollar processor and a 7950 would be a large improvement until you can move to a new platform. You could always resell the processor when you are done and recoup most of your expense.

The hot deals forum has this listed currently and it seems like a great deal:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-na-_-na&AID=10440897&PID=3891137&SID=rewrite
Click to expand...
Not worth it. A Core2Quad will still CPU bottleneck any modern graphics card from last 2 generations mid range or above, and it would handicap that 7950 you mentioned. Yes, it will make a difference (it will still be slightly CPU bottlenecked), but it isn't worth the time, effort, or money when that same $60 could take a large chunk out of the cost of a CPU and motherboard upgrade. Also, bear in mind that even a lowly i3 would wipe the floor with a C2Q in any application using 2 threads or less due to the substantially higher IPC of the architecture and mhz. Anything using more than 2 threads would be a wash between the 2 cpu's. Most games today are using anywhere from 2-4 threads, so if its a CPU heavy game like BF3, then an i5/i7 or a top end FX 6xxx or 8xxx CPU is the way to go.
 
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hipsterdoofus said:
Also, if you are recommending the 7950, do you have a manufacturer you recommend? As I said, I've heard great things about evga so that is one reason I leaned towards the 660 ti. Also, one reason it isn't quite as important to me is that I heard the 7950 performs better at very high res - and I am not running high resolution at all.
Click to expand...

I've owned five AMD cards spread between XFX and Sapphire and never had one fail. As such, I can't comment on their support. I still have two XFX 5850's and an XFX 5450 in my closet, but sold off my Sapphire 6950 cards.

If your primary concern is support and would like to be able to quickly get someone on the phone, I'd stick with the EVGA GTX 660 Ti. Currently, it just isn't quite the performance value that the linked Sapphire is, but you are also likely to have the card well past the relevance of those few free games.

With EVGA you can also spend an extra 20 to 30 dollars to extend the warranty out to five or ten years, as well as become eligible for the step-up program. I did that on my GTX 660 on the outside chance the cards come down in price in the next few months.
 
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