hey all,
I am sticking to window xp as I am not fan of window vista.
what worry me is that if I buy the graphics cards and install in. would force me to get window vista because graphics cards saying it is "build for window vista"
this is the graphics card I want
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Gainward-GeForce-BLISS-8600GT-1GB-Graphics-Card-PCI-E_W0QQitemZ260193579843QQihZ016QQcategoryZ3762QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD4VQQcmdZViewItem it will work fine with XP, nVidia's drivers will be ok.
What I have to wonder is, why on Earth would you want a (relatively) slow graphics card with so much on-board RAM? I hope you're not under the misapprehension that a 1GB 8600GT is somehow going to be faster than a 256MB 8800GT. It will, in fact, be quite a lot slower.
They are all the same card. I'm not sure if there is any 3rd-party gain in the 8800 series. Having said that, I believe all 3 of these are the cheaper end of the scale - they are not big 3rd party names to me.
The choice will probably come down to what is included in the bundle - free games, utilities, etc.
I see....would u go for cheaper end of the scale or big 3rd party name?
For the 8800GT, I'd go for an OC2 model, such as the BFG.
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?44724 he uses DX9.0c so it does not mather that much in the end.
OK in the end it does not mather anyway, the geometry shader unit performance is a bad joke (at first I thought its just the DX10 programming skill. But during researched on iso surface representation I struggled over an implementation with SM3 and SM4 + geometry shader implementation ... and the SM3 one is 4 times as fast which to me means that the geom shader stuff is currently primary for advertisement jokes, not for performance or any real usage ...)
DONT buy a 8600 dude, its REALLY poor. Get the 8800GT. Use Your Brain.
Get 8800GT.