High Powered GFX card setup?

I just happened to be in a good position at the right time to "aquire" some higher end graphics cards. What would anyone reccomend to be a better setup?

Dual (2) 6800 GT SLI
or....
7800 GTX?

If I had the money I would go for the XFX GeForce 7800 GTX (PCI Express)

Should set you back about £450.

*NO* gfx card is worth £450 IMO. not when in a years time it'll be more like £150, which is better.

he said 'aquire'... i never heard him mention anything about money changing hands...

:)

and i have to, in all reason, agree with Cygnus...

they've got you boys by the... uuuuh, how can i phrase this... by the GPUs...

$500 for something that'll be obsolete before the next version of HL comes out...

git real...

--Mike

Yah, I have the option of aquiring either 2 of the 6800 running in SLI or either 1 of the 7800 gtx....not sure which will give a better output...

sorry neuro... i can't help ya on this... i think my son just sprung for the 7800 gtx... and he loves it...

but he had to turn the video down from 1600 by whatever to 1024x768 to get The Lost Coast to run fluid smooth...

i had to tease him about that...

--Mike

Hmm..thanks for the info Mike..unfortunately i dont have the option of aquiring 2 7800 gtx running in SLI dual setup.....otherwise I would get that right away. But I hear that the dual setup of 6800 is better than the single 7800 gtx...but only in certain cases. I dunno....

I think the benchmarks I saw had dual 6800 gt's (or maybe it was ultras) beating a single 7800GTX but not by much. And if you get a motherboard with dual PCIX slots you can get a 7800gtx now and when it starts to slow down a bit add a second one...

yeah, you don't need to have exact matching geforces for SLI anymore. So you can always add one later

I thought you needed at least a 6800 for sli?

A single 7800GTX would be far better than 2x6800's. if only because you can very easily upgrade to 2x7800GTX's at a later stage.

My 7800 cost in the region of £350 and it overclocks quite a way beyond the pre-overclocked versions of the GTX's which are on sale for >£400. That is with stock cooling as well.

It reaches 490 core and 1.31GHz memory without too much trouble. I run it at 485/1.30 though because it has got to last me a while :)

What Doom 3 settings can you have on a GeForce 6800GT?

I have max settings on a Radeon 9800 Pro with Doom 3 - albeit 1024 by 768.

yeah... that's a good question... at what res do you hi end guys /gals usually run... 1200x something? 1600x something... or is 1024x768 the norm...

man, i sound so outta touch don't i...

--Mike

I didn't think the 6800 could do SLI? IIRC only the 6600s and 7800s support it.

I meant Low - Medium - High or Ultra on a 6800GT

I run everything I can at 1600x1200 red. Even if I gotta turn the settings down a bit to keep that res.

thx K..

--Mike

I got a 6800 GT AGP8* recently and am very happy with it.

To go PCI Express means binning the motherboard and that was something I just wasn't prepared to pay out at the time.

Next time I upgrade it will be a new PC with PCI Express or whatever flavour of super AGP happens to overtake it =)

If I had the choice of 2 6800 SLI or a 7800...I would choose the 7800...because its newer and shinier ;)

You can only run with ultra detail on vid cards that have 512MiB of RAM, regardless of whether it's a 6600, 6800 or 7800.

Just for a laugh, I enabled it on my 7800GTX and it rendered the game unplayable due to the memory thrashing slowing everything down to a crawl.

Needless to say, I run at high detail 1600x1200. The only annoying thing is Doom 3 and Quake 4 being limited to 60fps maximum, so when I play it on an 85Hz display, it suffers from almost (but not quite) subliminal stuttering.

I can run Ultra fine @ 1024x768 on my GF6800 GT (would try higher but this 15" monitor wont handle anything above 1280x1024), only issue I come across is the sligt pauses between rooms due to the game caching all the geometry/textures through the GPU.

Anyhow, I'd go with the 7800, it should be faster with things like HDR & PS3.0 no? And as the others mentioned, can always SLI it up at a later stage.

How much does it cost for a GF6800 GT AGP 8x?

Thanks for the response guys....! Unfortunately the verdict hammer came down and the 7800 was given to someone else before I can snag it. But i'm still happy to "aquire" 2 6800 SLI...for now.

@Jono - you looking at anywhere between $300-$400...depending on where you get it.

Nope, you can also do SLI with the 6600 generation of cards. If you wanted a cheap setup dual 6600GT's in SLI would have been good value. You need a kickass CPU and Memory to make use of such cards. Try nvPerfMon. It analyses your system and identifies any bottlenecks in it.

7800GTX. SLI systems have their drawbacks (other than costing $$$) and they only accelerate some games - they do NOT make everything (like Blitz...) go 2x. Single 7800GTX would be better (faster) choice for general gaming and will cause you less (technical) problems.

[edit]

Oh, should have red the whole thread... well good luck with your SLI setup! :)

A friend uses twin 6800s (not sure on the exact models), but he reckons it's the 'best bang per buck' at the moment, runs all current games smoothly.

Why on earth would you overclock a £350 card? :) That should be playing everything smoooooooth!

I wouldn't touch the GF and prefer the X1800 or X1600 because of their reworked memory system and multithreaded way of working which will give them some boost above the NVIDIAs ... and its ATI who are not breaking every second driver release ;)

Tom: A 7800GTX and overclocked Athlon64 3700 do not play Chronicles of Rid@#!* without dropping frames. It seems to be the GFX card holding things back. It is a very pixel-shader intensive game though.

I agree about nVidia vs. ATi, but unfortunately it seems developers disagree. A lot of developers simply don't care enough about people having ATi cards to ensure that their games work properly with it (Knights of the Old Republic [and the sequel] and Civilization 4 for starters).

That's rediculous. It worked fine on my older generation GeForce, and equally fine on my X600XT. Don't you think it's the same issue with the bug that many people where reporting with Black & White 2 and pixel shaders (appearently there's a problem with shader model 3 [although I'm unsure whether it was nVidias or Lionheads fault], and switching to a lower version improves performance by a factor 5).

FlameDuck, why arn't you using DirectX 9.0c?

They are foolish for alienating 50% of people out there then. Nvidia and ATI share the market pretty much, and only catering for one of them is really foolish considering all the negative publisity this will get your company.

Anyway, I had more very good points here, but Im too tired to remember them. Just trust me, they were good.

"This game does not support any nVidia graphic cards."