OT: Deciding on a new graphics card

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Apparently, nvidias' geforce 9 series will be out tomorrow, which means the price of geforce 8 series cards will drop. My old card, being an AGP card, is rather unsuitable. My new card, which came with the motherboard, is small and cheap.

My new motherboards' best slot is a 'PCI Express x16', which is apparently fancy and new.

A card in the mid-range would probably be best.

Thanks.

[Ed Kolis]

PCI Express x16 is fancy and new? Hmm, funny, I have like a 3 year old machine with one of those... Unless you're talking about PCI Express 2.0 x16... that's apparently something different which I'm not familiar with

The GeForce 9 is coming out tomorrow? Darn, I should have held off on my order of a GeForce 8600

Here's the one I got - can't tell you how it is yet because it hasn't arrived yet, but I'll let you know when it does - should be later today, as according to the UPS tracker, it's "out for delivery" from the local distribution center as of today!

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16814150258

I also ordered a pair of 1GB RAM sticks, so that might also affect my performance, seeing as I'm currently at 1GB total, so don't attribute everything I'll be saying later on to the video card!

[Kana]

Best card for the money right now is just about any 8800 GT, or 8800 GT OC. EVGA being one of the best brands in terms of customer service and such. Do some research, there are plenty of sites out there with reviews.

http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-8800-GT-card-544.html

[PvK]

Eh, but the Geforce 8000+ series cards all have features which are for Vista only, not to mention the Vista sabotage features. So for those of us who have no intention of running Vista, the GeForce cards to consider are still the 7000-series. No?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Nope, no PCI Express 2.0...And they probably aren't compatible, either.

[Ed Kolis]

Well, I got my new video card, and while I wasn't impressed with the HD output (it was a vast improvement over my previous card's HD output but still not enough), I think that's more a factor of having a cheap HDTV, so I switched back to VGA like I was using before.
Now, to try out some games and stuff...
I'd say something about Windows Vista running a lot smoother now, but that's probably more a function of the extra RAM I added than the video card...

[Combat Wombat]

umm where did you hear series 9 was out tomorrow? Either way I would go with a:

Geforce 8800 GT 512MB
or
Geforce 8800 GTS 512MB(not sure this is released yet)

[Kana]

PvK said:
Eh, but the Geforce 8000+ series cards all have features which are for Vista only, not to mention the Vista sabotage features. So for those of us who have no intention of running Vista, the GeForce cards to consider are still the 7000-series. No?

I have a 8800GT and Win Xp. The only feature of newer cards that is Vista only is DX10 compatiblity. Yet they will all run DX9 or younger games just as easily.

[Fyron]

Ed Kolis said:
"PCI Express x16 is fancy and new? Hmm, funny, I have like a 3 year old machine with one of those... Unless you're talking about PCI Express 2.0 x16... that's apparently something different which I'm not familiar with "

PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0 are electrically backwards and forwards compatible, as will be 3.0 whenever it comes out. They tried to design the standard to be long-lasting, and able to evolve over time (unlike ISA, IDE, PCI, etc.). The only difference is that PCI-E 2.0 devices in 2.0 slots can run faster, with greater bandwidth.

PvK said:
"Eh, but the Geforce 8000+ series cards all have features which are for Vista only, not to mention the Vista sabotage features. So for those of us who have no intention of running Vista, the GeForce cards to consider are still the 7000-series. No?"

Vista sabotage features??? Rampant paranoia much? Nvidia and ATI (AMD) have absolutely no incentive to "sabotage" anything; no amount of money from MS would convince them otherwise, since they would lose so much more money from poor sales when word got out...

The 8xxx series cards are a lot faster than 7xxx, and 9xxx will be a lot faster still. 8xxx and 9xxx support DX10, yes, but they still do DX9 a lot faster than the 7xxx cards.

Narf:
The greatest consideration is how much money you want to spend. There are so many f*ing cards now that you can spend as little as $60, on up to $600 or more (not to mention retarded SLI setups). People thought that MS' efforts at market segmentation with Office and Vista were bad, just look at what Nvidia and ATI do...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

About $200 max - But there's probably a point where the money/bells-and-whistles ratio makes it inneficient to add more of the former.

So I could buy a PCE-E 2.0 card and it would work with the PCI-E 1.0 slot?