GEForce 8800 GTS for less than $100

Well, it finally happened. Happy days are here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127328

This was the main card I used to develop Leadwerks Engine.

I'd rather spend the money on beer and hookers.

Aren't these the cards with flawed chips?

Allegedly. Officially, only the G84 and G86 chips are defective, but a number of stories have alleged that the G92 (as here) and G94 are also affected. But yeah, it really looks as though anything with G8X or G9X chips in it is defective.

I have had mine for over a year, and had no problems.

I had many unreliable cards in history, but the last 2 ones are still alive and kicking ass: ASUS ATI AX800XTPE and ASUS nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.
You can't get any better cards today, because all newer cards have driver problems :)

Yeah, I'm thinking that the numbers of machines that HP and Dell are selling (which is where these stories come from) are probably a bit more statistically significant than one card.

Is that the card that's available in AGP? I'm probably one of the few people here with a Mobo that doesn't have a PCI-E slot :o)

big10p likes rugby players. :D

Same, although Santa has a new mobo/RAM/cpu for me.

So I'll have an AGP card to sell in a few weeks - haven't decided if its the 256MB 7600GT, or the 128MB Radeon 9600.

Well agp graphics cards dont sell for much even on ebay, my agp x1950 pro 512mb is worth about £30. my power supply died so ive had to put a 300 watt one in until i can get a repacement, this means ive had to put a less demanding card in my system. At the moment my system is pimped out with a Riva tnt2 32mb. ;OP

Just got round to buying the HD 3850 512MB AGP. Cost me £83 from e-buyer... Wish santa still came round my way.

whats the lowest priced card that would beat a X1950 pro 512mb these days?

I bought an AGP 3850 a while back Ross, I love it. It's delayed me stepping up to PCI-E for another year.

I heard the drivers are a bit picky? Someone on an amazon review, said there was only certain drivers that worked properly with it. Did you find that? Also, what power supply are you running?

Nvidia cards may be coming down in price, but aren't ATI currently holding the crown on the price-per-performance and performance-per-Watt ratios?

Aehm, yes, and what?

8800GTS = outdated product, not energy efficient, not available for notebooks, not available for AGP, not available for Mac, ... killer hardware for the masses, indeed!

I would say the best happening to gfx programmers these days are the 9400M/9600M/3650M chips if nVIDIA/ATI can get it into as many systems as possible and for the decreasing percentage of desktop systems there are the 9600GT and 4670 already.

For some casual reality check:

-> http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/

You are complaining about an 8800 being outdated, yet you want something that fits in an AGP slot?

No but as you're at it i never understood why there aren't more serious updates for the AGP slot because in a lot of cases the AGP slot/CPU performance is no problem at all. Choosing a better visual quality like higher AA, more advanced filtering, higher resolution, ... doesn't cost you any CPU performance at all but they need a fast gfx card with a decent memory bandwith on the card. In my opinion one of the faults nVIDIA did is that they left AGP too soon and ATI has driver issues on the platform.

Sure, the AGP hardly got saturated when doing most 3D stuff, but PCI express didn't replace AGP because it was too slow.

AGP got dropped because PCI express is so much easier (i.e. cheaper) to build into a motherboard (because you only need one interface). It also supported higher power profiles for attached cards and is way more versatile. Hence new PC's these days just have a bunch of PCI express slots, with PCI maybe included as a legacy slot (because most peoples old SoundBlasters etc. were PCI only).

The speed of AGP / PCI express is fairly redundant. The only large-scale transfers that go over the bus are when textures are loaded. After that, it's just DirectX/OpenGL communicating changes to the scene or new shader programs being loaded. The only impact the bus speed really has is making sure latency never becomes an issue.

But no matter what the real reasons for replacing AGP were beside of also selling new motherboards, nVIDIA contrary to ATI did the mistake not caring about the platform anymore whilst there are a lot of systems around which still have a fast enough CPU, which often was the argumentation (that the CPUs beeing available on AGP aren't fast enough for modern games) for not supporting the platform anymore and as i said there are tons of examples for how you can benefit from the latest gfx card generation in an AGP sytem and that the CPU/memory bandwith also isn't the real problem.

Same goes for the higher power supply in PCIe, somehow irrelevant as most gfx cards still need the additional 4pin power cable beeing attached. Only the slower mainstream products are satisfied with the power PCIe delivers. Now the 3850 is only one geneation behind and offers quite some bang for the buck, not so good power consumpten and ATI's driver support for AGP can be a pain. My GeForce3 stills works like a dream there with the latest nVidia drivers. Probably the best gfx card i ever bought, in respect of the time i used it in a reasonable way.