so was the GTS a G92 or the older generation? i'm trying to understand why the GT is doing better for you. i'm looking around at video cards again because i'm finding my 8600GTS can't do quite as much as i'd like with morrowind (i'm using several graphics enhancers).

from what i read, the GTS 512 should do a bit better than the GT 512. though, to be fair, i only see a single GTS clocked up to 700 (at $460!), whereas i'm finding several GT's at that speed.

edit:

so i'm shop-browsing around. the gigabyte card you got is about $280 on newegg (btw i saw your review ). the GTS's seem to retail for about that range if they're not super-OC'ed, but come with a double-wide stock cooler instead of the aftermarket zalman. the best-rated VGA cooler on newegg is a $30 zalman, and that might give me the cooling i need to OC a GTS to above 700 (BFG has one at 700, but it costs like $450!). of course if i'm gonna OC myself, there's another $20 spent on unlocking the options. so i'm looking at spending $50 more and OCing myself if i got for a GTS. some of the reviews i read also noted that the GTS does a bit better at higher resolutions, and considering i like to run at 1920x1200 when possible, that's a noteworthy difference for me.

my big dilemma is whether i want to spend a bit more and do a bit more work for what could turn out to be marginal gains. so that gigabyte card has been put on my watch list (one final perk of getting a gigabyte VGA would be the matching PCB color... )

There are 8800GTs, some with nice coolers, available for well under $200 if you shop around and look for rebates.

I don't know why so many people seem to be married to Newegg, there are often better deals to be found. Ncix's service is second to none and they pricematch

i wouldn't call myself married to newegg, but i do use them as a touchstone, so to speak. i figure their prices are reflective of what deals i can find on a per-product basis.

also curious if you OC'ed the PCIe bus at all to get that benchmark?

Some of these vendors are pretty shady and I've been through a few of them. It's hard to find online vendors as reliable as Newegg. I don't mind that I'm not getting the best price possible. I'm willing to pay a little extra knowing that the item is properly represented and will ship promptly. If there's a problem, I can RMA it with little fuss. Too often I've tried to save a few dollars and ended up spending twice as much in the process.


The GT is the newest revision chip. It's built on a smaller process and has a higher core speed. The GTS has 96 stream processors and the GT has 112 (the GTX has 128). One of the reasons I got such a performance increase is that my old GTS was an early model with a 500 MHz core clock. The new card has a 700MHz core clock. In my experience, the core clock has a fairly linear effect on performance and going from 500 to 700MHz is a pretty big jump.


The only overclock I'm running is on the host clock which gives me an increased FSB, memory bus, and CPU core frequency. The PCIe bus is stock. I generally don't overclock the GPU core. Makers tend to run them on the edge anyway and the risk of stability problems and shortened lifetime isn't worth it to me.

Generally speaking, I like that the GT is single wide. The Gigabyte card is even more light and compact. The Zalman cooler works better than the monsterous cooler they put on on the GTS/GTX to boot. Those double wide cards are just way too big. They can be a real pain to fit. The first motherboard I tried with the GTS didn't work because the card covered the SATA ports. The second one had a lock on the PCIe x16 slot that was inaccessible due to the width of the card. I think it's pretty ridiculous that makers are putting out cards and boards that are not physically compatible. It's like a left hand, right hand situation.

actually, there's a G92 version. i should have specified GTS 512. it's got 128 stream processors and a stock core clock at 650 (compared to the stock clock speed of the GT G92 of 600). it's biggest gimp is the memory bus speed being stuck at 256 bits.

check it out.

I got a NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS (512 MB) in May last year for about $100.US funds!! it does OK on 3d but 2d unfilled shapes it does very poor !!! APG 8X Just in case some one ask !!!

AT that time i was building a duel core amd PC and bought 2 PCIE
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS (512 MB) also but never got the PC up because of 2 bad MotherBoards in a row !! by the time i sent both back and a life issue i ran out of funds so the duel core PC is still not done.Yes a (SLI MotherBoard !!)

But Yes there are better Video cards out there now !!!   

Hehe, these GPU makers are coming out with new chips so fast, you have to watch 'em like a hawk to keep up with what's happening. But yea, I was thinking in terms of the older GTS. The new one looks a lot better. OTOH, when I first looked at the GT cards, most of them were on backorder. I imagine you'd have to wait a couple months to see the new GTS cards widely available. You pretty much just have to go for whatever is available at the time you're ready to buy. If you start doing the "waiting for what's around the corner" thing, you'll always be waiting for what's around the corner

The new GTS didn't have much of a supply problem like the GT did. There's nothing really new about the G92, it's just a die-shrink and slight refresh of the old cards. nvidia doesn't have anything really new in the pipeline right now, ATI isn't pushing them very hard. Even the upcoming 9000 series is just more rehashed\renamed 8800s.

hehe ain't that the truth (the 9800s are slated for later this month or early next month). however, nVidia and its partneters produced a lot of GTS G92's and they're not really that hard to come by (compared to the GT's around xmas). they're also not as bulky as the GTXs and Ultras, though they've still got a larger footprint than the GT.

Well, my bad then. The GT card I bought does have have a 700 MHz core clock. Comparing list prices on the eVGA web site, the 700MHz GT goes for $300, the 700MHz GTS goes for $370. So the GT is a less expensive card and I don't think the performance difference is all that big. I'd like to avoid those bulky double wide cards anyway. Like I mentioned before, the new card gave me a 20% increase in benchmark performance over the old GTS which is huge AFAIC. I feel like it was an excellent investment.

Did you sell your old card to recoup some of the cost? Even if that 20% in 3dmark carries over to gaming (I think 3dmark is pretty useless unless you like competing for 3dmark scores), 20% isn't nearly enough for me to justify a new card. More like 100% is necessary or I get severe buyer's remorse That's why I don't upgrade video very often unless there's a huge leap from one generation to the next, like when ATI came out with the 9700.

I just updated to a ATI Sapphire HD3850 on my new system. I ran
the new video card for maybe 20 minutes ... an it had a melt down ...

I had to get a RMA number and send it back. I sent if back and they where
going to send me a replacement, but that part number was discontinued.

Right now I'm using my spare Nvidia 7600 card .. I plan on getting a
Asus or try a new Sapphire again. Most likely it's going to be a HD 3870 X2,
what try still up in the air ..

Also, I need a new LCD monitor too ...

Sites that test with canned benchmarks (or even by running cutscenes) are showing the X2 crushing the 8800 Ultra. Sites that use real gameplay are finding it quite a bit slower. I think an 8800GT will give you about 80% of the performance of the 3870X2 and cost less than half as much. The GT is definitely the sweet spot for high performance/value right now. Save a couple hundred bucks and put that into your monitor fund

Hey, has ne one heard of a new windows OS coming in 09?

MS Vista was a mess ... hardware requirements is too high for MS Vista.
I figure Xmas 2009 MS will release MS Vista's replacement. Just like
Windows XP replaced WinME ...

ouch... one point of observation coming out of my monitor experience... i've got a Dell 24" widescreen running regularly at 1920x1200. people mistake it for a TV if they don't notice my desktop (far less likely with the new one and its many LEDs). however, i'm finding it difficult to run 3D first person games at this resolution with my current 8600GTS 512MB. morrowind is doing okay with all the mod'ed bells and whistles, but i'd like to turn them up a bit higher. i can either step down to 1680x1050, or step up to a better card.

that said, i think it'll be totally worth it to buy a better card if i can play at 1920x1200. it almost feels like cheating to have that much viewable area, and movies look absolutely great in widescreen. i would actually recommend a Dell monitor based on personal experience. mine at home works wonderfully; no dead pixels, lots of connection options, USB extention ports (4 USB + two multiple media card readers built in). they make a smaller version and now a larger 27" version if you really want to go for broke (well, if you really want to go for broke, get a widescreen HDTV )

edit: oh yeah my cheapie Dell monitor at work is still going--considering it's 6 years old, get's 8 hours of use 5 days a week, and is only starting to have a bit of image ghosting, i think that's a pretty strong testement. just don't ever buy anything else from Dell.



i've already got this set up ahead of time. one of the students i manage mentioned a while back he wants to upgrade his video card. so i told him i'd re-sell this one for 80% of then-current market value. the 8600's are going for about $180 still; i'll offer $150 and see if he bites at that number.



oh yeah, to be sure i'm still a little ambivalent. i'll probably go for the GTS version, just for the extra stream processors, but from what i've read on every review site, people are saying both cards are an equally great value. both cards are also equally overclockable. i've read of people getting 750+ MHz.

i've also read that the 9800's are coming out in the next week or two. they'll basically be two G92 cores and PCBs smashed into a double-wide card but sharing a PCI bus. not quite as elegant as ATI's double-core solution. the pricing would have to be really good for me to consider this option, but it should at least help shave a few bucks off the cost of other cards.



and i'll still be using XP for as long as i can  they'll still need 6 months to iron out the problems of this new OS, if this is indeed destined to happen.

Do you mean you're thinking of paying $150 for a second 8600 for SLI? This is a poor choice IMO. You can get a single 8800GT for under $200 that will outrun SLI 8600s.

no no. this student is going to buy my 8600GTS for, hopefully $150, though i'd be willing to go as low as $120. he plays GC2 so i hope he doesn't read that and i will buy a new 8800GT or GTS 512. the GT model that CraigHB purchased is actually quite appealing to me:

1) no mail-in rebate, so no waiting six months for money i might possibly get back;
2) standard PCB size, and the color will match my gigabyte MB
3) zalman cooler, which will remove my temptation to spend another $35-50 on an after-market cooler
4) it's already been OC'ed to 700 MHz, so i won't have to void a warrenty and spend hours fiddling with controls to find a good spot to OC my card (and spend another $20 to get NVware).

i think the gigabyte card is a better purchase for me. it'll save me time, energy and money, and it'll be a big boost over an 8600 regardless.

It's worth noting that the 8800GT reference cooler isn't *quite* as horrible as people are making it out to be. The main issue is that nVidia, for reasons no sane person can grasp, locked the fan at 30% in the driver settings. If you grab nTune off nVidia's website you can set it up to 50-60%, which is not appreciably noisier and keeps the temperature 5-10C cooler.

on another note, a new-ish HSF caught my eye recently, the XIGMATEK HDT-S1283. it's not pretty, and it doesn't look to be all that revolutionary, but it's got exceptionally strong reviews from frostytech and benchmarkreviews. what separates it from other similar designs (and other brands entirely, AFAIK), is the fact that its heatpipes come into direct contact with the CPU die, rather than absorbing head through a base plate. at $37, it looks like a great buy.

that, and a sound card, and i'll be done purchasing major components for at least a while. i'd still like to do a RAID support (again, when i bought the stuff for this PC, i lacked the foresight to get either XP pro or a MoBo with an ICH9R southbridge). if i knew i could re-sell my current MoBo for an acceptable price, i wouldn't be as hesitent to upgrade. they don't exactly seem to be hot sellers on ebay.

---

you know, i read that somewhere random and wondered about it a bit. i didn't see too much about it, and so i didn't think about it much. at least nTune is free

i wonder if they did that to keep the fan from drawing too much power? would there be any problem running the VGA fan (stock or after market) through a manual controller off primary power?

I realize that benchmark scores don't often reflect real world perfomance, but they provide a comparable reference. I don't have a problem with the expense because I can usually get a fair return by eBaying the old card. The difference was noticable for me. It did smooth out a couple games that stuttered slightly. It bugs me when games don't pan perfectly smooth. Then there's Crysis. I can't seem to totally smooth that one out, but it's noticably better with the new card.


I had a 7900GT at one point with a similar cooler. The fan was very loud at full RPM so I imagine the reason they're doing that is to reduce noise. The new card seems to run run the fan at full speed all the time which I thought unusual, but it's not terribly loud and keeps the chip relatively cool. I haven't seen it break 60C yet.


Hehe, it does match the motherboard which is kind of cool. I've been using eVGA cards for some time and was a bit hesitant to stray from them, but Gigabyte seems to make excellent products.

mmm @ Idle my 7600 GS runs 60C when testing it hit 79C  :NOTSURE: 

I personally think that is to hot !!!

I think factory overclocked cards are a waste of money. You're paying a big premium for little, if any return. A standard card will OC nearly as far as the factory OC version, and while the difference might be apparent in benchmarks, it's probably not going to be noticeable elsewhere.

From the HardOCP overclocked 8800GT roundup:

The real question is, “Do any of these OCed card versions truly give you a better gaming experience?” The fact of the matter is that we can’t see anything in all of our testing that proves that. While we did not directly include a comparison here, you can go back through the last 7 articles on this page to find some performance comparisons. We just can’t find any compelling gaming experiences to tell you that the OCed cards are better. You will surely eek out few extra frames, but these OCed 8800 GT cards are not going to facilitate a higher resolution or quality setting in real world gaming. Benchmarks will however show you another story. So it all depends on whether you are a benchmark monkey or a gamer, or where you lie in between.

It's hard to say from my own experience, but given the option, I'll take the higher core speed if it's not too much more. It does make a big difference in benchmark scores and that has to count for something. But generally, I don't pay the premium for higher clock speeds either. For example, when I bought my CPU, there was a big price jump going from the 2.66 to the 3.0 GHz. I bought the cheaper one. It runs well overclocked to 3.2 GHz (which I think is amazing) and I don't have a problem overclocking it myself, but for the GPU, I'd rather have a factory overclock.