9600GT vs. HD3870: Which to get?

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^ maybe 40 is not alot in USA. but 40USD in other countries is really big number.

ill give u my account number. 40USD for sure will help me to get some coolings for my case.
 


Anyone willing to benchmark that? 😱



I agree.
But,
I love 2nd place debates :kaola:
 
9600GT and HD3870 are pretty much equal. On one hand you have the lower priced but less featured 9600GT. On the other hand you have the 3870 which does cost a little more, but has better picture quality and is DX10.1 compliant. Performance wise though I think the 3870 has a slight edge, but it's not really worth the extra $30. You'll also probably never see or notice DX10.1 stuff over DX10.

So if you plan on keeping this card forever then get the 3870 and if you upgrade every year or 2 get the 9600GT. The best option is still to get the 8800GT, but it's a toasty boy and does cost a little more.
 



Two words. Chrome 400
 


Because the 3870 might end up being cheaper than the 9600gt, because it's faster with filters off and the posibility is there to crossfire it if you so want, if you don't already have a Nvidia mobo. If your the kind of person who wants to get their money's worth from your graphics card, you'll keep it for a long while, and you'll find that over time using high levels of AA&AF, or even any AA, will start to be something out of your reach. Come that day a 3870 will be holding up a little better than a 9600gt. In a years time most games will be crysis-like hard on your system, and a 3870 will look a little less sad than a 9600gt by then, in amongst rv770 and g200 cards.
 
Man spoon i sure hope in the next year we dont see crysis like games as far as taxing cpu and gpu. Especially as i just bought my card, and definetly dont want to upgrade it in the next year or two. Although i hear crysis is reaal perty, id hate to have to spend even more money on my comp to get playable framerates.
 
Does anyone know if RV700s are supposed to xfirex with RV670s?

That would make me strongly consider going with the 3870 if you could throw in a "4000" series later down the road for a little extra kick. If that held true, you could keep leapfrogging your cards with a hybrid setup until ATI or PCIe goes out of biznaz.
 
I think the bottom line is that we all should all be happy that regardless of motherboard (NVidia, Intel, AMD), and regardless of whether it is Crossfire or SLI, there are now two roughly equivalent upgrade options. E.g., prior to 3850/3870, you were at a cost disadvantage if you had an Intel or AMD Crossfire board. And prior to the 9600GT, the same would go for those with NVidia boards. Now both camps have access to roughly the same performance at roughly the same price.

That said, if what SpinachEater said is right (can xfire RV670 and 700), the AMD fanboys will have more economical upgrade paths.
 
Hello to Randomizer and GreatApe the videocard guru...
in my humble opinion the best bang for the hard earned buck today is spelled
A T I...
mis dos centavos...
 
I would have to agree with you Husky, with amd taking over ati, amd fanboys will probably have much to look forward too in the future, cuz i dont see amd optimizing there products to work together better then with the nvidia options. The only downside here, is we could see another apple in the making, if they decide to not support nvidia anymore in favor of the ati cards. And you have to admit, it probably wouldnt hurt there bottom end for both companies if they decided to go that route.
 
For w/e reason 9600GT's scale extremely well in SLI.

96sli_96gt.png



You cannot deny, that is EXTREMELY impressive. If 9800GX2 is anything like this, nvidia are going to walk all over amd.
 
Just making sure I'm not missing anything here. I read tons of reviews, with [H] showing some interesting results. I'm not going SLI/Crossfire so there's no need to address that.

Is there still an issue with the fan on the 3870?
 
It depends on the 3870 I think. I would go with the 3870. Its similar but a bit faster. Also its a bit more future proof. I think 320 shaders will be better in future games (that are more shader intensive) than 64. If the 9600GT had 96 or 112 I would't say definately 9600GT.
 
You know it doesn't actually have 320, it has 64 which basically can do 5 things each.


If it had 320 nvidia type ones it would rocket. Didn't you ever wonder why 320 doesn't beat 64 by 5times lol.
 
So it all boils down to price. I seen the 8800GT dip under $200, making it a great deal. However, I have a very limited budget of around $170, and if by chance I can find an 3870 that can fit my budget, I was wondering if it would be worth it.
 



Here is what I like to do. I don't know if it is legit or if anyone uses it for the "scaling performance" measurements but I like it for some reason. I take the SLI or xfire performance in FPS and divide that by 2 and then divide that number by the single FPS performance (is is a lot like what they did but a little different). Multiply by 100% and you have a number that represents how much guster you are getting out of each GPU on average or how much each GPU is contributing to the xfire/SLI FPS.

So for COD4 1680x1050 8xAA 16xAF as an example....[(96.26 FPS / 2) / (49.227 FPS)] * 100% = 97.8% So that says that I am getting 97.8% performance out of each GPU in comparison to the single GPU performance where 100% would be a perfect scaling and anything over 100% is breaking the law of physics :ouch: ....or just weird software issues...

But yeah...that is right up there with 3870s in xfire...(using that calc that I pulled out of my arse they get like 97% ish on the same settings)
 
That's not very accurate, SE. Isn't the theoretical maximum performance gain for SLI 80%? Obviously 97.8% is much higher...unless you're pulling random numbers from the air.
 
Don't see how its 80%. Max can be higher than 100% depending on situation as can be seen in those tests. Dunno how it can be over 100% but I'm guessing bottlenecked somehow. Max I would of thought is 100% but I guess not. Maybe in a certain area of a map it dont have enough power and just fails wheras 2 cards can get over the hill?


Duno.
 
It may just be me,but I always look at the warranties on these items too! EVGA,XFX being a couple of the companies offering LIFETIME(Even Double Lifetime) is a bonus also. That just goes to tell you that they will stand behind their product 110%. Does sapphire, diamond, visiontek, or gecube offer these warranties? Not that I have seen. It is just good to know that if something does and can go wrong,your not out all that money after a year of having the card.And have to drop another couple hundred dollars to game again. Just my Opinion.
 
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