8800 gt 512mb VS 9600 gt 512mb

Was wondering which offered more bang for the buck now?

Buy what you can afford. The 8800 GT is faster than the 9600 GT by enough to justify its price. Players who run at higher resolutions, or want their card to last a bit longer, should go with the 8800 GT, but the 9600 GT is fantastic for anyone that needs to stay under $200.

It just depends on the price difference. Prices vary so widely. If the difference is $50 or more I would go 9600 gt. $20 or less and I would go 8800gt. IN between is more a gray area.

I just snagged a 9600 GT OC from eVGA for my "alternate" machine and I have to say I'm quite impressed. For the price its a really nice card plus you can always do SLI on it if you ever need "more". I also chose it for the "noise" factor... many reviews say the 8800 GT is quite loud were as the 9600 is very quiet (my own personal opinion).

But like everyone else here says, it depends on what you can get by price. If the 8800 GT is relatively close to the 9600, grab that instead.

PAR

If price is your concern, check out the Redeon HD 3870(can be had for about 160) or the 3850. The performance of the 3870 is on par with the 8800GT, often the same, maybe a few frames slower, but for a much lower price.

Check out the Extreme Tech test, I always have liked their price to performance chart. Basically the ratio of price to FraPS.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2219910,00.asp

One of the other things to keep in mind, is to look at the power consumption. People with sub 500 W, sometimes 600 W, powersupplies(with highly clocked dual or quad core systems) may find that at peak load many of the high end video cards are above their output. One of the HD 3870 and 50's benefits is low power consumption.

That is also general advice for anyone making the upgrade. Don't forget about the power.

many reviews say the 8800 GT is quite loud were as the 9600 is very quiet (my own personal opinion).

It absolutely is! (The 8800 noise). The fan gets a bit loud when using it heavily.

There's a PNY 9600gt on Amazon for $111 shipped AR.

I was under the impression that PNY products were substandard?

I had a PNY Ti-4200 back in the day and it never gave me trouble. I also had a 4gig SD card in my n800 from PNY, no trouble.

I don't know that it's substandard, but it's certainly not a well-known brand.

How is ATI's driver support these days? That 3870 is tempting. My current 8600GTS has trouble running WoW at high settings since I got my new 1080p monitor.

My PNY GeForce Ti-4400 card died in less than a year. That does color my perception of them.

Lester_King wrote:

How is ATI's driver support these days? That 3870 is tempting. My current 8600GTS has trouble running WoW at high settings since I got my new 1080p monitor.

For running games at 1920x1080, I would suggest going the 8800 GT route. The higher the resolution, the less cards like the 3870 and 9600 GT can keep up with the 8800 GT.

It also really depends on the games. If you are playing a lot of open world or RTS games, with a lot of characters, scenery, on screen at once(Oblivion, Company of Heroes, an MMO), often the ATI cards are giving better performance because of the higher memory Bandwidth. If you are playing more Shooters, Nvidia tends to have an edge.

If you are going with either, forget stock drivers, and get yourself the Omega drivers. these community driver packs are always better, and updated more often.

I don't know that we see benchmarks bearing that out. Techspot pit the 9600 GT with the 3870 and Company of Heroes was the only game where the 9600 GT beat the 3870 in both DX9 and DX10 performance.

When Anand compared the 8800 GT against the 3870, Oblivion was the game where the 8800 GT had the most significant performance increase. The only tests where the 3870 ever edged out the 8800 GT were some specific tests of shooter games (lowest-res COD4 and HL2, specifically). Of course, those were 1-2% while Oblivion was 20-35%.

As for that ExtremeTech price-per-performance chart, it's kind of useless given that it treats the 8800 GT as a $270 card and the 3870 as a $220 card. That was true in November 2007 but is nowhere close to the truth now. The cheapest 3870 on NewEgg is $170, the cheapest (512MB) 8800 GT is $190 (and for decent brands, it's $180 and $200, respectively). Turn the $50 price difference into $20 and ExtremeTech's "price per performance" graph would look a whole lot fatter in the 8800 GT's columns.

If you run Linux, nVidia drivers are the way to go. I actually turned a 3870 back in and got the 9600 simply because ATI's linux drivers suck so hard.

Might be a consideration if that is something you have a need for =/

PAR

Legion speaks the truth.

The 3870 looked nice until I saw this. $180 shipped for an eVGA 8800GT is pretty stinking awesome.

If I was going to move up to it from my 8600GTS should I get a new Power Supply? I only have an Antec 350w now.

Lester_King wrote:

Legion speaks the truth.

The 3870 looked nice until I saw this. $180 shipped for an eVGA 8800GT is pretty stinking awesome.

If I was going to move up to it from my 8600GTS should I get a new Power Supply? I only have an Antec 350w now.

Oh absolutely... I snagged a nice Antec "Green" 550W... *very* quiet and not too expensive. But power supplies are very important in a system and 350w will not do for that card along w/ anything else in the system.

Make sure you factor in the noise. Before I started really getting into building my own systems I would never thing of how loud stuff could get. The 8800GT is way too noisy for me. Its a great card but I could never handle the noise. Same with my main machine, I have 2 GTSs running in SLI but I HAD to go water cooling due to them damn things being SO loud uuuggghhhh.

PAR

My EVGA 8800GTS (first generation, either 640 or 768MB, don't remember) is very quiet.

Malor wrote:

My EVGA 8800GTS (first generation, either 640 or 768MB, don't remember) is very quiet.

Yea I have the 1st Gen also... 2 XFX and man, those cards are so incredibly loud. Its like I had a B52 under my desk.

PAR

With video cards go with EVGA or BFG. Both great companies. EVGA step up program is also nice.

I'd say go with the 8800gt.

I snagged a 9600, it ran great for a day then hit all sorts of serious video issues, I researched it and it turns out that there's a fairly widespread issue with power management on the card. I returned the card and picked up an 8800gt instead, and no problems since then.

I recommend the 8800 to avoid the tech issues with the early runs on the 9600.

Who did you get your 9600 GT from, Farscry?

Farscry wrote:

I snagged a 9600, it ran great for a day then hit all sorts of serious video issues, I researched it and it turns out that there's a fairly widespread issue with power management on the card. I returned the card and picked up an 8800gt instead, and no problems since then.

I recommend the 8800 to avoid the tech issues with the early runs on the 9600.

Yea I got an eVGA 9600 OC and have been running it for a couple months now no issues. Love it actually.

PAR

Just picked up the EVGA 8800 GT Overclocked 512 MB at NewEgg for $159.

$234 - $25 instant rebate - $20 promotional rebabe - $30 mail-in rebate = $159.

Seems like a steal to me.

Copingsaw wrote:

Just picked up the EVGA 8800 GT Overclocked 512 MB at NewEgg for $159.

$234 - $25 instant rebate - $20 promotional rebabe - $30 mail-in rebate = $159.

Seems like a steal to me.

Beats the $169 one i saw at zipzoomfly!

*Legion* wrote:

Who did you get your 9600 GT from, Farscry?

I buy video cards local so I can return them without hassle if I have problems (given my historically bad luck with computer parts), and unfortunately that restricts me mostly to BFG (yeah, I know) cards from Best Buy.

Does no one think that the 9600GT card will become better as drivers become better for it? The 8800GT is pretty mature at this point driver wise. When you look to the future past the point of the next released G200 chip series, which one of these cards will survive longer. I think that's a better question than the 10-15fps average that the 8800GT beats the 9600GT at this time on motherboard test beds that run 650i or 680i chipsets.

I would rather see the 8800GT put against the 9600GT on a 780i chipset motherboard with PCI-E 2.0. It would give me a better feel using more current hardware. I would also like to see an comparison of the 8800GT performance when it was released opposed to what it is today and see if newer driver versions increased the performance of it.

Actually I am also debating between the EVGA 9600GT 1GB card and the EVGA 8800GT 1GB card. Both obviously have 1GB of GDDR3 ram, 9600 is at 600mhz while the 8800 is at 650mhz. Both are PCI-E 2.0. But the 8800 is a G92 chip while the 9600 is a G94 chip.

I only getting this card to tied me over till the next gen coming out in August this year goes down in price to an affordable level sometime in 2009.

PCIe 2.0 doesn't matter, don't even worry about it. Essentially all graphic cards on Windows would run identically on x1 or x16. Bandwidth is not the choke point, not even vaguely.

I'd also suggest not buying on what might happen someday, but rather focus on what you can do right now. If you get later boosts, great, but don't plan on them. The 8800GT has improved so much largely becuase it was a brand-new architecture, and it took a long time for their driver crew to truly master the hardware. I don't think the 9600 is new in nearly the same way, and I don't think you'll see the same kind of improvements.

If you're gonna do a 1gb card, you might want a 64-bit OS. That's a quarter of the entire address space for 32-bit XP.

kilroy0097 wrote:

But the 8800 is a G92 chip while the 9600 is a G94 chip.

A higher number doesn't mean better. The G94 is actually a lesser chip than the G92.

The G94 is a G92 with half of the stream processors and texture units removed (64 and 32, versus 112-128 and 64).

The high-end 9 series cards, like the 9800GTX, use G92-based chips.

The G92 in the 8800GT is slightly different from the ones in the 9800 cards. It has only 112 stream processors versus 128, and of course is clocked lower. Otherwise, it's essentially the same chip.

You can pretty much think of the 8800GT as a "9800GT", because that's what it is - a lighter version of the 9800GTXs. It just lacks some of the extra side features (like HybridPower) that NVIDIA has decided is a part of all "9 series" cards.

Alright so then I guess I'll see about the 8800GT 1GB to hold me over till next year. It's about $40 more expensive than the 9600GT. Or I could go $100 more and get a 9800GTX. The difference in performance is quite a bit between the 88 and the 98 in this case.

You don't need 1GB in an 8800GT card. Benchmarks show little to no improvement by upping the RAM to 1GB, it's still limited by the GPU's performance. The only exceptions are a few very specific uber-high resolution cases (where the 1GB 8800GT does perform better, but neither card performs WELL).

Save your money, get a "normal" 8800GT to hold you over.

Thanks. Appreciate it.