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Money and Graphics cards to spend it on...
Otar
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I have windows vista and I am in the market for a videocard that can run Mass Effect and Team Fortress 2 well. For Mass Effect it says the minimum video cards are NVIDIA GeForce 6800 (7300, 7600 GS, and 8500 are not good enough) or greater or ATI X1300 XT or greater (ATI X1300, x1300 pro, x1600 pro, 2600 hd, hd 2400, are not good enough). So I am looking for a video card to easily run Mass Effect and TF2. Any suggestions? Money is not a factor although it should be within reason... I don't need MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE RARG, I just want to be able to play these two games with most settings on high.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Otar on
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At the moment, I still think the 8800GT is the sweet spot, although the prices of them have gone up rather than down recently. Performance wise, it'll kick TF2 into submission (TF2 really doesn't need much horsepower at all) and it'll run Mass Effect with all bells and whistles no problem.
Of course, really you should list your PC specs and Monitor, as there's no point spending large amounts of money if you're just runinng a 17" monitor, and similarly if you have a 30" beast you might need to edge towards the higher end a bit.
Yeah, it's also on the P43 and P45 as well.
Honestly, wait about a month before you buy, new cards are coming out from both nVidia and ATI. Hands on previews are already being done on them.
~$110 after rebate is up? That seems pretty low to me.
But if he's willing to spend more money, yes - wait. The 4850 just came out, check the Tech subforum for reviews, and NVIDIA isn't about to let it go unanswered for long.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
That said, if you want to play today, here are some caveats:
--The 8800GT: be sure to get the 512Mb model and not the 256Mb. It's only a ~$30 difference, but makes a significant performance gain if you have a 19" or greater monitor. Checking dealnews.com, the price for a 8800GT has been around $150 after rebate at Newegg.com.
--The 8800GTS: again, be sure to get the 512Mb model, which features the G92 chip and is superior to the 8800GT, but about $30 more. Just to be confusing, nVidia released an earlier model with 320Mb and 640Mb configurations. Avoid these as performance is worse than the 8800GT.
Most review sites agree that the 8800GT is currently the best deal in terms of price/performance, and if your motherboard can support it, you can get another ~25% performance boost by going SLI if/when the price drops by buying a second card.
SLI is not worth it. You can't use multiple monitor setups, theres a good chance the game you are playing doesn't support it. Age of Conan doesn't as well as many others and the overall performance gain isn't worth the extra card, at that point you also have to get a PSU that can handle both. It's better to just save the money and put it towards the next card you get which will prob be twice as good as the SLI config you would of had.
also if there's one thats like that except extremely small and has 2 tabs, that's a pcie x1, and generally if you have one of them then you have a pcie x8/x16 slot.
edit: also, typed that stuff out before I went to wikipedia and searched "pcie" to get the images.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121253&CMP=AFC-C8Junction
That's pretty much the fastest I've ever seen a rebate come out on a new GPU, and at that price point it's pretty much a no-brainer over the 8800GTS.
This.
One hundred times.
It's amazing.
Epic Win.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Ugh, I HATE it when people say this. Really, it's a universal constant but if you keep waiting you never get to play a game.
I was looking into a nvidia 9600gt card, up in Canada they run you about $160 but it seems you can get an 8800gt for about that price anyways (least on sale) so might as well go with that if you're buying now.
You can create a profile for any game you want in the nVidia Control Panel, and subsequently use SLI with it, whether it's officially supported or not.
And some quick Googling disagrees with your Age of Conan claim.
You can turn on the SLI in the control panel but that doesn't mean it's going to work the software still has to support it...
As for AoC no it doesn't support SLI, I use an SLI configuration, the game gets a very minimal boost in performance just from the straightforward power of the card, but the game doesn't officialy support SLI and wasn't made to. It's like a game that wasn't designed for dual cores, you still may get a small performance boost from having two cores but it wouldn't nearly as good if the game had been built around the dual core setup.
yea, but see, it's not like we're saying "wait 4 months for the next card to come out." We are saying "Wait 4 days for the next card to come out.
I think that's acceptable.
T-Nation blog
No, no, 1000x no.
Just no.
more MB does not always mean better card. the 8500 is a piece of shit and anyone who buys one deserves to be taken behind a barn and shot.
Point taken, how about the 9600GT? Is it superior? I'm having a really difficult time trying to find out how to tell if a cards better or worse haha.
My 8800 320mb GTS runs shit in an awesome manner, and it's inferior to the 512 and 640 versions.
If you're having trouble discovering which card is better, google some reviews for some comparisons, or check out the official specs. More stream processors and higher clock speeds generally equals better, at least as far as Nvidia is concerned. I forget what ATI is referring to their pixel and texture engines as now.
EDIT: Yeah, CmdPrompt lays it out nicely right below my post.
PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
320MB\640M 8800GTS < 9600GT < 8800GT < 512MB 8800GTS (G92) < 9800GTX
We've had this discussion a lot in the computer build thread.
A 7900gt is a lot better then a 8500gt by miles. The best way to look at it is the first number in the model number represents what sort of software features it has. For example the 8xxx series brings DX10 and model shader 4. Then the second number represents the power that the card can put out. Thats the way I always describe it to. Sometimes things get a little skewed but I like to think thats the best way to put it.