Hey people, My trusty old XFX 7900GT has finally started to crap out and I'm not really sure what to replace it with, so I'm looking for some suggestions. Budget is pretty open, only condition is that it must be nVidia, I use a 7600GS for my second and third monitors and I don't really want 2 different graphics drivers making a mess of each other. I do lots of gaming and I want me some shinies! System specs: Gigabyte 965-DQ6 E6600 @ 2.8ghz 4x1gb Corsair Dominator DDR2-800 XP SP3 I plan to upgrade the rest of the system within this year but it won't be in the next few months. Should I buy a high end card that will potentially be bottlenecked by the rest of the system then use it in the new one or should I just buy something that WAS high end when I bought the rest of it (8800GT or thereabouts?) Cheers
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/04/04/what-hardware-should-i-buy-april-2009/1 Try the ATI HD 4830, GTS 250 or the cheapest HD 4870 you can find.
Nvidia drivers will have serious problems aswell with different series (eg. 7000 and 9000) GPUs aswell, so your only hope is to get another 7900 or ditch the second 7600 completely. As you need three screens, you might have to go for one of those quad-DVI Quadros.
I dithered over this one for quite a while before I realised I was scrambling my brain reading review after review. I wasn't looking to blow the bank and had it down to the HD4870 1 Gb version or the new 55nm GTX216 cards. I had a trusty Asus 7900GT that served me well and Nvidia was the approach I had become comfortable with. All the reviews counter Nvidias claims that CUDA will be a core factor in choice (it's not materialising yet) but I did consider it. In the end I went with a EVGA SC GTX 260 and have been pretty impressed with it. playing Warhead at 1920x1080 has been brilliant. The good thing about the 4870 and 260 cards is the price has dropped recently on the back of the release of the 295 earlier in the year and they will probably drop again given the 275 and 4890 have come on the market. When you look at a certain other websites Graphics charts you will see that the newer cards blow the 7900 cards out the water (indeed the 8800 cards had done that already) so you are bound to see vast improvements regardless. I'd say a 4870 or a GTX216 would get you good performance with some head room for the future, but if you wanted to splash some more money you could go for a 275 or an HD4890 and always SLI/Crossfire down the line for an added boost.
i agree with mm_vr, i currently have 6200 together with GTX260, and since 185 drivers, nVidia had removed support for all Dx9 cards, so now all im left is gtx260 and an unknown adaptor you best bet would be 9800GTX+ with something like 9400, as driver support will dry up very quickly if you go cross-generation. how about one of those dual-head-to-go adaptors?
Right. I've made up my mind I'll go for a GTX260 (216) and then when I build a Core i7 rig later I'll get a second one and SLI it. As for the second card... I'll cross that bridge when I come to it Thanks for the input. EDIT: GTX260 with a 9400GT, would that work?
gtx260 and 9400 should work fine, i've had gtx260 and 8800GTS 320MB and it worked fine without slowing down the machine. just try not to mix different capability cards, like Dx10 card with a Dx9 card.
Remember that you can't use 3 monitors if you're running SLI. (Or was that fixed already? I always forget.)
