9600GT vs. HD3870: Which to get?

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Yeah I agree with SL on this.

Personally unless you're using it for HD video playback, I'd pay the extra money to get a card that's going to last me longer, and for that view the GF9600 doesn't stack up well. For you I'd say depending on price in your area, it's definitely worth $20-25 more for a GF8800GT-512

 

[dratsabizan]

Double lifetime.....if you sell it to another person, the lifetime can be transfered over to them! XFX and EVGA both do that. So if it registered to me and I sell it, they can register to them to get the warranty.

 

[blacksci]

Yep, gt is gonna beat either of those cards, no matter how over clocked it is.

 

[randomizer]

I understand that the 8800GT is indeed the best deal, but because of the numerous issues I've seen on these forums on it, I decided to stay away from it.

There are thousands of people on these forums and others, so if there is only a 1% chance that you are gonna have a real problem, you are likely to find 30-40 people with that problem already just because the sample size is high.

2/40 people will have issues because of faulty hardware.

6/40 people will have driver issues.

30/40 people will have issues because of a problem with the chair to keyboard interface.

 

[spoonboy]

One thing you can never do is compare the shader processors between Nvidia and ATI! The reason is because look at the 8800GTX with only 128 stream processors compared to ATI's 320 SP's on their 2900XT, HD3870, the 8800GTX kills the two with almost half the SP's. In the end it takes two 3870's (or one 3870x2) to beat one 8800GTX and remember that ATI has 640 SP's in Crossfire with Nvidia only having 128 SP's.

Your still missing the point, you cant compare the shaders because the rest of the gpu is very different in an ati or nvidia card.

The issue with ati cards is texturing power and fill rate. Only 3dmark06 feature tests and things like shader mark show you where the architectures stand in terms of pure shader power.

 

[spoonboy]

randomizer beat me to it, its an easy choice if you like AA alot and can't play a game without it. If not using AA don't bother you the choice is even easier.

Good point, Ive gamed with 2xaa nearly 95% of my pc-gaming time, as Ive had 256mb cards and couldn't be arsed to force 4xaa in the drivers if a game wouldn't let me select it (often the case with 256mb cards) and I had loads of fps to spare to soak up the impact. Now ive got a 512mb card im hard pressed to see any real difference while gaming between 2xaa and 4xaa except fraps telling me the fps has dropped. I'll take aa over hdr any day cos it does look nice, but then again I'd rather have more detail and a higher res than have 4xaa and 16xaf applied.

Cheers

 

[Evilonigiri]

30/40 people will have issues because of a problem with the chair to keyboard interface.

:lol:

Truthfully, this pc I'm building is for my cousin, and there's no way I'm paying extra for him. If he has the money, then he should go for it, but he really has a tight budget. I'll go tell him to save up some more.

 

[Evilonigiri]

Does the 3870 OC well? Every review I've read, they always use the Overdrive tool for the 3870, which has a limit.

 

[randomizer]

Does the 3870 OC well? Every review I've read, they always use the Overdrive tool for the 3870, which has a limit.

Cool it well and you can usually get 850-900. Volt modding will get you over 900 with a good chip. Overdrive is simply limited by a % difference from the BIOS clock speeds (usually within +/-50% for most similar programs), which if you change will also change the limits in Overdrive.