pouët.net

hey,

my system has a 3 years old graphics adapter. it's a GeForce 6600 (I think from a retailer called club3d). With the recent demo releases i often saw performance bottlenecks. I'm a bit confused by the massive diversity of graphics adapters on the market. I personally always liked Nvidia and would like to buy a newer model. but what graphics adapter to buy? I want to spend at most 100EUR. any thoughts on this?

grtx,
\twh

8800 GTX. Very good for its price. Don't even think about getting ATI, they suck.

Really? I am quite happy with my new ATI card :)

i just checked my official hardware dealer , seems 8800 GTX are no more for sale. 8800 GT, GS and so ok but no GTX....

ati 4670. Nvidia sucks at the moment.

ati sucks for drivers , if i remember you must install NET framewrok and CCC which is a big gaz factory
and for linux its sucks also :(

i see no problems with their drivers

a 9800GT should cost about 120e these days

ATI 4670/4850. But if your system is 3 years old, you'll very probably be CPU-bound anyway...
ATIs drivers suck, but there's no need to install the CCC. I always used the free ATItool. Also very recently AMD open-sourced their R600/700 drivers, so there should be some progress concerning OS 3D drivers. The proprietary drivers are ok (as in "working more or less").

Geforce 9800s are ok too...

Don't even think about buying an old 8800gts/gtx, old power hungry tech etc.
Get some 9600gso/4670/9600gt/4830/9800gt. nvidia drivers suck, but you'll run more demos on them..

nvidia drivers sucks? :P

the nvidia control sucks donkey balls. it seems to be made for complete idiots now, which always confuses me and prevents me from finding anything... not much better than the CCC.

There was, and always will be, only one sensible graphics card: the CGA!!!!oneone

I think about buying a 9500 GT... any comments on that? It's around 50 EUR. What is the 9x-series vs. 8x-series about? Some kind of generation?

What I like so much about Nvidia is their driver-concept. One archive - all cards. What do you want more?

If you don't want to spend too much, get a 8800 (it's still a very good card imo) or a 9600 GT.

Reall avoid the 9500 GT, it's utter crap.

yup...9500 is crap !
and nvidia-drivers really really sukk but the only thing i need them for is after installing an OS to set the standard-screen-resolution,haha.
what all others said...8800 or 9600...but dont get one of the GS-versions ;)
xfx does a good job...providing good possibilities to overclock aswell.
get the xfx 9600 gt...its about 85-95€ !

can someone explain me ?

excellent. thank you guys!!

It would be funny to bump some year old threads about hardware recommendation.

can you has PCI-Express?

I just saw that the Geforce 8800 GT is PCIe. I have a MSI K8N board with AGP. That obviously does not work then. What's now the right alternative?

The G92 based 8800s are fine, but they have all been renamed (8800gs->9600gso, 8800gt->9800gt, 8800gts->9800gtx(more or less)) for 5+ months now, so generally you wont find them, and I would really stay away from the G80 based compared to more modern offerings. One of the 9600s would be a good choice within the price bracket, and you'll probably be too cpu bound with more.
"nvidia driver concept: One archive - all cards" - say what?! thas was 3+ years ago, now nvidia drops regular support pretty fast. Try go to this page and select different products: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us (it's not even that bad right now, as the 178 was unusually widespread). For instance even my half year old 8600 wasn't supported in the much hyped "bigbang2" driver.
And saying they suck is a way to get the trolls out :) but some things i don't like:
-a pretty regular bsod reason
-bending/breaking standards (like in "we know better", intentional bugs or whatever you'd call it)
-irregular updates, meaning running betas most of the time (they are improving atm, but as said often only for the very latest cards)
-and ccc over nv control panel any time - again you live in the past (ie the reputation from the first half? year of slow and bloated CCC on slow and bloated .net))

Better compatibility comes from more aggressive developer relations (now including demo boxes;), not the drivers.
All that said, the competition has hardened because of the now quite even marketshares, and more or less all cards are selling at competitive prices now, so if you prefer nvidia, it's perfectly fine buying that, you won't pay overprice for the mindshare anymore. (as when they still tried to sell 9800gtx for 40% more than 4850)

AGP -> then I would consider replacing the motherboard.
If you stay it you should buy an ati card, as you won't get anything newer than a 7600/7800 otherwise, and while the 7800 may offer a half decent performance, it would imho be quite stupid not to buy a SM4 card (and a more modern architecture etc). I would go for the 3650 - the 3850 is almost twice as fast but don't throw too much money after that old rig on something you can't use when replacing the motherboard.
Ohh.. and btw.. the driver support for the AGP cards is said to be considerable worse, as they're not really official offerings..

crap. And I thought it was as easy as replacing the graphics card. now I can check prices for mainboards too. Hopefully I must not replace the processor. It's an Athlon 64.