Hi . my mates just given me. 2 evga e-GeForce 8800 GTX w/ACS3 cards as he has upgraded recently. he has had these for a few years. im on a mega budget and just wondering if its still worth building a system around these to card on a budget. im completely open to any setup idea's. ive been out of the building game for a few years and i just don't wont to see these go to waste. will they still cut it with today's games. cheers.
Those are fairly decent cards, I didn't get too much of a boost from upgrading from my old 9800GTX+ SLI setup to a single 560TI, the biggest difference was in the amount of Vram games could use. The 8800GTX has 768MB instead of my old 512 so that should help alleviate memory issues. You'll need a decent 600W+ PSU to make sure it doesn't buckle under the load, although if you use Vsync and Triple Buffering then you might just get away with a decent 550W. Any idea what motherboard you want to base it on? you'll get a little more headroom in high Vram situations if you can get one that can run both PCIe lanes at 16x. On the other hand an intel i5/i7 would give you a significant boost in graphical grunt over an Athlon/Phenom. Maybe a cheap 2nd hand 1366 based system would give you the best of both worlds.
was defo thinking a higher spec i-5. i ve one in my asus laptop and does a real good job in that department. havent a clue really for a mobo at minute. something that will take the i-5 and both these cards and like you say both PCIe lanes at 16x. (i take it it will give me more bang for my buck if both PCIe lanes at 16x). so these cards are still ok then.
8800GTX is very old hat, and will not cut it in todays games (despite what others have said). You've got two there, but with 2 very low end cards in SLI your going to get microstutter all over the shop and probably have to spend a fair old amount on a PSU that will be able to power them. My advice would be to sell both 8800s on ebay, and invest the money + ten or twenty pounds in a GTX 460. You say your budget is £500 - you can easily buy a decent rig with that!
Those cards aren't low end at all, they will still handle today's games admirably and in my experience Microstutter (at least with my old g92 SLI setup) is a rare occurrence, it only really affects games where one card is doing more work than the other like if you enable the Nvidia only features in Just Cause 2. Everything else is very smooth. Better to have yesteryear's top of the range than today's low end, someone once said It's the difference between going to battle with an experienced general or a new recruit. On the other hand if you can sell those cards for enough to get a 1GB 460 or the like you won't be losing out in performance, and you'll have DX11 features. Plus you'll have the extra 256MB of Vram to play with and having a board with 2 16x PCie slots won't be so much of a factor. You also won't need to spend as much on a PSU. Unfortunately all I5's only have 16 PCIe lanes built in to the chip so if you did decide to go SLI with Intel you would need an i7 Nehalem CPU like a 920 with a 1336 motherboard so as not to be limited to 8x. It would only really make a difference in situations where you were running out of Vram and the system needed to swap data back and forth from the system ram.
Depends on the game really. My old 8800gts 640 could play.. Portal 2 dirt 2 dead space 2 tomb raider underworld darkness 2 arkham asylum (physx off) Etc, maxed out @1680x1050 The games that I struggled in was because of my low cpu and memory, open world games like Assasins creed 2, arkham city. 8800gtx is faster and you have 2!
2 8800GTX SLi should actually handle quite well. Given that it's still got the grunt of about a GTX280 when in SLI mode. So you know, not bad at all.
Sell them. 500 will buy u a decent machine without trying to cobble a pair of 4 year old graphics cards in there and all the disappointment that will bring.
There's a big difference between 'low end' and 'top of the range from a few years ago' Like Eratum said 2 would be about as powerful as a 280, a 560TI isn't much more powerful than that. Still a Fermi based card would be better optimised and use less power if you had the option.
6 years ago to be precise. Its old, its slow, its power hungry, its a bad idea to base a system around it.
The problem here is that the extra dough going towards making sure the pc will power the 8800 SLI could be put towards a new graphics card. You would need a 650w PSU for the 8800 SLI, but you can get by with a 400-500w PSU if you go down the route of a 460. Also, you can get a cheaper case because heat will not be such a large issue and the amount of noise will be greatly reduced. I went from 2x4850 CF to a GTX 670 and aside from the lower power consumption, the lower heat output also enabled me to remove a jerry rigged fan from my case. Summa summarum, I would strongly recommend selling the 8800 and buying a newer generation card. That way you do not invest money in obsolete tech.
Also how does the age of the cards effect sli compatibility/profiles? They might be half decent with a game that sli works well in, be dreadful in games that dont.
Oh, and another argument. When one of those 8800 goes pop in a couple of months you will be left with some very very bad performance.
It can take a while for SLI profiles to emerge, but Nvidia has just stopped supporting pre 8xxx series cards in their drivers so they should get through whql a lot faster than they used to. Seeing as the whole G80/G92 architecture was so successful Nvidia re-branded them oh so many times I don't think Nvidia would drop them quite yet. Still Piccaro has a point, a newer card will last you longer, and you could SLI it in the future.
What resolution is your monitor? My recommendation would be to sell them and get yourself a decent single GPU. Something like a 460, 560 (depending on your res) They will be cooler, quieter, draw less power, perform really well at resolutions under 1200p and you would be less likely to encounter any weird sli issues. Good luck with the build.
choices choices both arguments seems to have there pluses. what realistically card these card go for on ebay.