If you're going for a GeForce 8800 card, go for the GT; for the money, it's the only one that doesn't have a Radeon alternative that nets you better performance for the price; the 8800GTS 512, GTX, ultra, 9800 cards, etc. are all close in price to the Radeon 4850, which outperforms all of them, for a price of
around $180US, close to or even lower than all those other GeForce cards.
Meanwhile, the GeForce 8800GTS starts
as low as $120US, for about two-thirds or so of the performance capability, making it roughly equal to the 4850 in terms of what power you get for your money. (and in turn, both cards provide you the best power for your money right now, out of all cards out there)
So, for your budget, I would recommend one of those two cards. Note that the presence of an nVidia or ATi/AMD chipset in your system doesn't even hinder the use of a card by the other company; after all, both cards run fine with Intel chipsets, no? It's just that you can't run nVidia CrossFire with an nVidia SLi chipet, but you need that SLi chipset to use SLi. CrossFire can be run with an AMD CrossFire chipset or any dual-PCIe x16 Intel chipset that I know of.
Now, as for your confusion regarding the different suffixes, note that nVidia did NOTHING right to dispel that. On problem is that between the 8800 and 9800 cards, they use two distinctly different chips: G80 and G92. The latter can run at a higher core and stream processor clock rates, (612 & 1500 MHz maximum for G80, compared to 738 & 1836 MHz maximum for G92, an over 20% increase) but downgrades from a 384-bit to a 256-bit memory interface, yielding weaker memory bandwidth. Depending on the game and settings, sometimes this results in the newer and "superior" core actually performing worse. But as a GENERAL rule, the cards go in this order from strongest to weakest:
■GeForce 9800 GX2 (G92x2)
■GeForce 8800 Ultra (G80)
■GeForce 8800 GTX (G80)
■GeForce 9800 GTX+ (G92)
■GeForce 9800 GTX (G92)
■GeForce 8800 GTS 512 (G92)
■GeForce 8800 GT (G92)
■GeForce 8800 GTS 640 (G80)
■GeForce 8800 GTS 320 (G80)
■GeForce 8800 GS (G96, later re-named GeForce 9600 GSO)
rwayne :
The 8800 and 9800 series G92 chips are defective. Don't buy them. They have the same issue as with the Nvidia mobile GPU chips where as the soder material between the chip and the card becomes brittle from heating and cooling and can break. Read the article here:
Nvidia G92s and G94 reportedly failing
Last I heard from all the articles about defective nVidia chips, it was the G94 and G96, NOT the G92, that were problematic. So I'd remain skeptical there; I've not heard of any issues with the G92s, and people tend to be running those hotter, I believe, so the supposed defects should've shown themselves quicker on those.
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