8800 gt 512mb VS 9600 gt 512mb

the 8800. However, in orde rto future proof your system now, buy the 9600gt and then upgrade to dual sli later down the road. That way you get dx10.1 and the hardware processing for ageia physics. By the way, you can also do tri SLI even later on down the road.

Dwarfzilla_fuge wrote:

the 8800. However, in orde rto future proof your system now, buy the 9600gt and then upgrade to dual sli later down the road. That way you get dx10.1 and the hardware processing for ageia physics. By the way, you can also do tri SLI even later on down the road.

That's exactly what I would tell people not to do. It sounds great in the theoretical future, but when the time comes, it's almost always a waste of money to buy an older card to SLI than it is to replace the card with a newer single-card solution. Think about anyone who bought a lesser 7-series card and was planning on adding a second version of that card now. It would be wasted money.

PhysX may be interesting but we have to actually see something come out of it before thinking that it's anything other than a weak excuse to try and sell some more SLI cards.

There's no such thing as future-proofing with graphics cards. They just move too fast. This is probably deliberate.

Malor wrote:

This is probably deliberate.

Well I wouldn't expect NVIDIA and AMD to intentionally develop their technology slower, and competition demands putting out the fastest stuff before the other guy does.

NVIDIA has actually been moving the top end very slowly. The 8800GTX was tops for a long time, and the 9800GTX is barely any faster. Summer will see the first new NVIDIA GPUs that actually truly replace the 8800GTX.

That said, in general, it definitely moves fast, and buying lesser parts with the plan of doubling up on (what will be even further "lesser") parts in the future is no winning strategy. SLI is nowhere close to double the performance, but the second card doesn't come at a discount.

When i saw that mothers day sale for the 9600 i pulled the trigger even though i know i probably should've went with the 8800. 129 was too sweet to pass up.

Until honest physical benchmarks come out for the new G200 chip Nvidia based video card all speculation is simply speculation.

If you can't wait till later then buy which ever one you want because honestly you are just going to have to buy another video card in a year.

So be prepared to buy a stop gap now, know that you do not want to expand on it and save your money for a new graphics card in 2009.

The same can be said on motherboards and RAM right now as well. With Intel coming out with a new socket set at the end of the year that current Socket 775 or LGA 775 is going to be replaced with LGA 1366 or LGA 715 depending on the platform. So there isn't much we can do at this time. Either pay too much for something brand new in July/Aug 2008 for Video Cards or in Jan/Feb 2009 for CPUs and Motherboards and more money on DDR3 RAM.

So buy something decent now with the expectation of replacing it in a little over a year or two years. Save up till then to buy something brand new that will take advantage of all the new hardware that will be around till 2011 or so.

I still haven't made up my own mind on this issue yet.

*Legion* wrote:

That's exactly what I would tell people not to do. It sounds great in the theoretical future, but when the time comes, it's almost always a waste of money to buy an older card to SLI than it is to replace the card with a newer single-card solution. Think about anyone who bought a lesser 7-series card and was planning on adding a second version of that card now. It would be wasted money.

The reason why there is such a high percentage of pc gamers with new DX10 parts is because of the massive architecture upgrade that GeForce went through in the 8 series. nVidia completely revamped a their polygon and shader processors, which allowed for almost 20% performance boost on the same hardware. And most likely nVidia will not be revamping their architecture until a good 4 years from now, so in the coming years SLI will start to become more and more common, especially for people with 8 and 9 series cards.

And most likely nVidia will not be revamping their architecture until a good 4 years from now,

That's a pretty bold assertion you're making there. No architecture upgrades for four years, and everyone's going to be gluing together multiple cards instead. Do you have any evidence for this?

Malor wrote:
And most likely nVidia will not be revamping their architecture until a good 4 years from now,

That's a pretty bold assertion you're making there. No architecture upgrades for four years, and everyone's going to be gluing together multiple cards instead. Do you have any evidence for this?

Well since a brand new chip that hasn't been released to the retail market yet is coming out in July/August of this year, his statement is already false. It's not just a modified G92 or G94 chip. This is a G100/200 chip.

kilroy0097 wrote:
Malor wrote:
And most likely nVidia will not be revamping their architecture until a good 4 years from now,

That's a pretty bold assertion you're making there. No architecture upgrades for four years, and everyone's going to be gluing together multiple cards instead. Do you have any evidence for this?

Well since a brand new chip that hasn't been released to the retail market yet is coming out in July/August of this year, his statement is already false. It's not just a modified G92 or G94 chip. This is a G100/200 chip.

Sorry. I was talking out of my ass.

Most of I've seen you say so far has been similar; I'd suggest containing your enthusiasm and being really sure you're right about stuff. You won't get far here trying to baffle us with bullsh*t.