Graphics Future-proofing: 7800GTX or x850 Pro?

Well, I have a post in the hardware forum and it involved whether the 7800 GTX would be worth the buy now, or if I should buy the x850 Pro now and upgrade within a year or 2. I figured that if I bought the 7800 GTX I'd be safe for a solid 2 years, and I could even throw another 7800 GTX in SLI mode in my PCs down the road.

The idea also crossed my mind to run ATI's Crossfire technology, but I can't seem to get anything for sale. If the time comes before I buy, would a master x1800 Pro and a Crossfire board be a better solution, with a regular x1800 Pro added later on?

 

Or you could go for the x1800 now, and pick up the master board later,
damn I'm helpful today

 

Id just get the X800 series card because it can run everything out there now at decent resolutions; you should only have to replace it in a year, in which case, the 7800 will be much cheaper then

 

Even though it will be cheaper in a year, he will still have to pay for 2 graphics cards.

It's all up to how much money you want to spend right now. I'd save up and go for the big bang now and get the high graphic performance you want, instead of buying a lesser card now, and a better card later (the two combine would pretty much equal buying one good one now anyway). Maybe in a year, you can get another 7800GTX and go SLi with it.

 

This was what I was leaning to but later in the post I was reminded of Crossfire...it's just that I could buy SLI now or wait a little bit and get crossfire later. I'd get a Crossfire board and Master card now but it's hard to find 32 of them.

 

if it were me, id just got 7800gtx now, theres little point in trying to plan ahead in this game tbh.

 

if you really want future proofing, i'd wait for the new 512MB 7800 GTX. It looks like its gonna have a rather huge memory/clock speed increase + the additional 256MB memory. Should last a while.

 

Agreed. Though the Crossfire boards look like they'll be better than NF4, SLI is by far the superior technology at the moment. You can't go wrong with a GTX.

 

agreed, nVidia is the way to go right now, if you do want to go crossfire im retty sure you need a new MOBO too

 

Most likely will need a new motherboard, unless your board is one of the select few that can support both SLi and Crossfire, such as the Asus P5WD2 Premium. Even though the P5WD2 can use both Crossfire and SLi, it only has full support for Crossfire. SLi mode works on it with older drivers. It's really just a matter of time before Intel chipset based boards fully support both SLi and Crossfire. AMD boards, well... You'll have to choose your chipset accordingly ATI for Crossfire, and nForce for SLi.

 

I would recommend the GTX. It'll have more resale value when you come to upgrade next, as well as offering superior performance in the meantime

SLI is much more mature than CrossFire, and we're yet to see how those rigs fare in real-life usage. ATI's drivers are pretty crap imo as well... nVidia's just seem to work better overall.

 

So I'm looking at Nvidia cards now.

In my "Advice for LAN Center PCs" thread over in Hardware and Overclocking, the issue came up that the config I picked out was "too fast" for LAN PCs. So...6800 or 7800? Do you think a 7800 is "too fast" for a LAN center PC?

 

You can never have LAN PCs being "too fast". If it's financially sound, get it. Buying as fast as you can afford means you don't have to buy again to keep up to date for longer, and punters are happier right now.

 

I completely agree. I've never heard of anyone complaining about getting TOO MANY FPS...and in any case, the systems are top end - why would you the customer even care?

 

If they're all going to be identical systems, then you'll be able to precisely tweak graphical settings so that they run at their best possible performance/quality ratio. I'd say that a reasonable number of people will be able to notice the graphical upgrade you can make from a 6800GT to a 7800GTX, especially if you're only working with 1280x1024 - it's the difference between medium-high settings and being able to literally turn EVERYTHING on in the latest titles.

And then if you're not having to upgrade the graphics for a couple of years, and then that upgrade consists solely of nearly doubling your potential performance by adding a (now cheap) second GTX, then brilliant. Gotta be better than staying at the non-cutting edge by constantly upgrading. And remember, with 20 machines you're looking at a higher probability of failure the more upgrades you make, so you actually want to keep the amount of hardware going through them down as low as possible.

 

Exactly my thoughts. I'm in the process of examining the video cards with mhz vs. $ between the 6800GT and the 7800GTX, and I'm sure in the long run I'll be better off with the 7800GTX in the system to begin with. Adding a 7800GTX in 2 years means I pay MUCH less than building a completely new system every other year. Ok, my thoughts are finished with this, I just needed to ping ideas and get some feedback.

Any more ideas are extremely welcome, I could use all the help you want to give

 

Well, the GTX is faster, so by all means...

 

Yeah...I didn't know if Crossfire would be a good idea at this point, which is originally why I included the x850 Pro. That way I could add a Crossfire Mobo and Master Card later on. Looking at it now, there's no garauntee at this point that the x850 Crossfire solution would be a better price vs. performance purchase.

 

What about the 7800 GT? Its cheaper than the GTX and delivers nearly the same perf.

 

Surely there's a conflict of interest when bigz isn't saying telling us to eat Ramen for a month so we can get the latest and greatest Still, fair point. Probably my next weapon of choice. Definately so if I can be fairly sure I can clock it up to a GTX equivalent.