I'm feeling inspired by the low prices on some of these midrange cards currently on the market. Though I probably shouldn't do anything due to not having much dough right now, I'm putting my feelers out.

My 7900 GTO is getting long in the tooth, newer games are finally putting the crimps on it (Unreal Engine 3 and Crysis, for example). I've noticed that the 8800 GTS 320 (thanks Mcfly) has dropped below the $150 US mark, and that it has a rebate on it. My question is, since I've been out of the hardware market for over a year now, is this the card to pick up? I've done some looking around, and it seems to be faster then the 9600GT overall, and beats out the 8800GS, but I'd like to hear some opinions.

System specs are as follows...

AMD Opteron 165 @ 2.75ghz
DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D
2gb Mushkin Redline PC4000 3-3-2-8 1T
eVGA GeForce 7900 GTO 512mb @ stock
700w OCZ GameXtreme

thx

The card to buy is going to depend on the budget we're dealing with... how much money are you looking at spending?

Trust me, Crysis makes almost any videocard crumble. Even with my Quad Core, 4GB of ram, and a 8800GT 512MB, Crysis still chugs along rather slowly. At 1680x1050 I can play with everything on High, but the framerates are in the 20s. UT3 however, is no problem, I can run that fully maxed out at nearly any resolution. Remember, a 8800GTS 320MB is significantly slower than a 8800GT 512MB. My brother does however play Crysis on all medium settings at 1280x1024 with a Radeon X1800XT 512MB (which is still not a bad card even today). So if you do play at 1280x1024, you will probably be fine with a 8800GTS 320MB, any higher and the lack of video ram might hurt you.

Jim H said:

Apologies.

If I get anything, I can't do anymore then $150, maybe $175 ish maximum. The GTS 320 is very appealing because right now its $114.99 with rebates. Thats why I'm eyeballing that card.

Adam,

I don't have crysis, and I probably will never own crysis. I was just using that as an example of the kinds of games I'm running into bottlenecks with. The 7900 GTO just doesn't have enough power to push these games.

The highest res I'll be using for the foreseeable future is 1280x1024. my monitor won't go any higher.

I noticed:

8800GTS 640 for $199
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130317

8800GT 512 for $159
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130318

9600GT 512 for $149
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130334

Thats the ABSOLUTE maximum.

DarK_SlayeR said:
The Geforce 8800GT 512MB is the fastest of the group.

What now,

The G80 8800GTS 320MB is faster than the G92 8800GS 384MB ??? O RLY?

I may just save up another 40 clams or so and go for a 512MB GT.

I'm in almost the exact same boat, old bean!

Dark,

a good way to guage the relative performance between nVidia cards is to look at the number of stream processors and the clock frequency they are running at, its not 100% accurate since there are more factors than just the stream processors that go into the final real world performance but it should help you reach some sort of ball park figures.

take the stream processors and mulitply that by megahertz.

so for instance:

8800GTS 640 (96SP @ 500MHz) vs. 8800GT 512 (112SP @ 600MHz)

96 x 500 = 48000 vs 112 x 600 = 67200

48000 / 67200 = .714

so you could reasonably expect the 8800GTS 640 to be about 71% as fast as the 8800GT

Any reasonable way to incorporate the memory interface into that there function?

McFly said:

that is totally going to depend on the game or application and how it graphics memory intensive it is. which is why I said it was ball park sort of calculation.

Jim H said:

That's awsome Jim.

I found this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133215

Is PNY a good company? I've never used anything by them before. Always used XFX and eVGA for Nvidia graphics.

most of those cards are nVidia reference designs, that are identical regardless of manufacturer the only diffrence between that one and an evga or XFX model is the sticker on the heat sink.

Well sweet. Got one on the way for that price I can't pass it up

Which one are you getting? G80 GTS or G92 GTS?

the one linked was a G92

Well, my brand spanking new PNY 8800 GTS came yesterday. I loaded it up and ran 3Dmark06. 10,006 first run. I suppose thats good, not really sure what it should bench, though the AM 2.0 score was lower then a comparable system (by 500 pts) with an 8800 GT.

I'm quite pleased so far, Unreal Engine 3 games run really well (they were crap on the 7900). So far so good

You cheeky bastard!

DarK_SlayeR said:

sweet! You are being bottlenecked by your processor... I did have my 8800GT in a system with an Athlon X2 @ 2.6GHz and scored around 9500 after upgrading to the Core 2 Quad my score went up to 14600.

Just did a fresh reboot. When I ran the test before, I had just installed it and technically didn't bench it right. This time I got 10,327. I bet I could get close to 11k if I push my proc up to 2.88ghz (the highest I can safely run this chip on my current cooling, a 1.08ghz OC).

Jim H said:

I had a feeling. But I didin't build this rig 1.5 yrs ago to benchmark it. I built it to game the Opty is still hanging in there, don't need another mobo/cpu/memory setup for quite a while yet. I'm just glad that Unreal Engine 3 games run well now. I've had Rainbow Six Vegas for a long time but have never really been able to get into it due to the heavy slowdown from the GTO, and I wouldn't even have considered getting Gears of War or UT3 with the old card.