Video card upgrade

Boav · 08-17-2007, 10:24 AM

Before I ever found this website, I bought a system from VelocityMicro about 16 months ago.
After spending a bit of time reading the information here, there are things I would have done different with that system. I got dual hard drives and put them in a RAID 0 configuration, got 2 Nvidia 7900 cards in SLI, water cooler for the CPU, things like that.
The wife is now using that system to play VG, and yesterday my wife calls me and says that the monitor is saying "No signal" and the isn't working anymore. I get home and take a look at the machine. We do a bit of troubleshooting ourselves and then call VelocityMicro. After a very quick conversation with Tech support (One of VelocityMicro's strongest points), it is determined that one of the video cards is shot. The tech says they don't carry the 7900 anymore, so he is gonna have to upgrade me and send two 8600 series cards. I tell him I would prefer one 8800gts (320mb) to two 8600 cards, and that it should be cheaper for the company that way. He says that he would need to run it by his supervisor for approval, but since that would actually be cheaper for them he was pretty sure the supervisor would okay the deal.

Did I do the right thing? Should I have gotten the two 8600's rather than the one 8800?

edit: Just called VelocityMicro on the phone, they said the original tech was in error - the 8600 was not a suitable replacement (performance wise) to the 7900. So they are sending me two 8800gts (320 mb) to replace my 7900's. Heh, now I am thinking about only putting one in the old system, and building a new rig around the other.

rhagz · 08-17-2007, 10:51 AM

You lucked out. The 8600GTS is probably closer to the 7900 in price/performance. The 8800GTS is closer to the 7950.

SLI is pretty much a bust. It's buggy, unsupported and in many games just doesn't work. With an 8800 you don't need it at all for DX9 games and since VG doesn't even know what the letters S, L or I mean.. then you should break them up into 2 systems.

Boav · 08-17-2007, 02:36 PM

Yeah, I did luck out a bit.

But I am still wondering if my original position was solid.
Would one 8800GTS (320MB) be a better solution than
two 8600's (or even two 7900's)?
Again keep in mind that my wife uses this rig almost exclusively
to play VG. She uses her laptop for everything else.

Boav

rhagz · 08-17-2007, 02:38 PM

Like I said, VG doesn't use SLI.. so one better card will always be superior to 2 weaker ones since you are only using 1 weaker one anyway.

Slide · 08-17-2007, 02:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boav

Yeah, I did luck out a bit.

But I am still wondering if my original position was solid.
Would one 8800GTS (320MB) be a better solution than
two 8600's (or even two 7900's)?
Again keep in mind that my wife uses this rig almost exclusively
to play VG. She uses her laptop for everything else.

Boav

An 8800 is substantially faster than SLI 8600. I think they should have given you a single 8800GTX tbh.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html

rabb1t · 08-17-2007, 02:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boav

But I am still wondering if my original position was solid.
Would one 8800GTS (320MB) be a better solution than
two 8600's (or even two 7900's)?

As rhagz has said, one more powerful card is better than 2 less powerful ones. In this case the single 8800 GTS is way better than two 8600s.

I can't seem to find any direct comparisons, but know that even in the best-case scenarios you only see about a 40% gain from the second card in FPS speed. And, in some cases, there will be zero gain at all from the second card. If you look at this article at AnandTech you can quickly see that even +50% to the 8600 GTS wouldn't match the 8800 GTS w/320 meg.

There are really only 2 situations you'd want to consider dual card...

1- You expect to get a second card for free, or you have such a small budget at any given time you need to keep the up-front costs as low as possible.

2- You have such a large budget that cost really doesn't matter and you can afford two of the best cards every generation.

It is often far better when upgrading to get a single more powerful card and sell the old card to recover some of your cost. If, as I mention in example 1, you don't have that higher up-front cost to buy a more expensive card and then recover some of what you spent compared to adding a second low-cost card, then SLI might be a decent way to get more power.

rabb1t · 08-17-2007, 02:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Slide

An 8800 is substantially faster than SLI 8600. I think they should have given you a single 8800GTX tbh.

Many places will try to dazzle you with the dual card aspect.

Not sure what's up with the Tom's link you put in. I'm seeing a default comparison between the ATi x2400 XT and Nvidia 6600 GT? Even with the correct cards Tom's chart doesn't do SLI.

Slide · 08-17-2007, 02:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rhagz

You lucked out. The 8600GTS is probably closer to the 7900 in price/performance. The 8800GTS is closer to the 7950.

The 8800 is closer, the 8600 is weak sauce - it's a midrange mass market part and he bought a leading edge gamer machine. 2 * 8800 GTS is not a bad upgrade and I wouldn't complain - but a GTX would have been a better deal.

rhagz · 08-17-2007, 03:07 PM

Depends. Monetarily they are about the same. 2 GTS will cost about as much as a GTX.. but getting 2 GTS's under warranty to power 2 computers is much more convenient than getting a single card then having to buy another single card.

Slide · 08-17-2007, 03:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rabb1t

Many places will try to dazzle you with the dual card aspect.

Not sure what's up with the Tom's link you put in. I'm seeing a default comparison between the ATi x2400 XT and Nvidia 6600 GT? Even with the correct cards Tom's chart doesn't do SLI.

Think thats just their defaults TBH, the main point being the 8800 is far and away better than an 8600, and even last gen cards like the 7900 / 1900 beat the 8600 fairly and squarely. I agree SLI / XFIRE is just marketting rubbish, it's never a good idea to add a second card to upgrade performance - the only justification for it is if you have $2K or whatever to spend on top of the line graphics cards and dont care about being behind the curve again in 3 months time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rhagz

Depends. Monetarily they are about the same. 2 GTS will cost about as much as a GTX.. but getting 2 GTS's under warranty to power 2 computers is much more convenient than getting a single card then having to buy another single card.

Good point, but for a single machine the GTX is gonna be better overall. I guess he probably has the power to run the twin GTS's anyway - they dont seem to draw much more than my old ATI x800 did.

evilsofa · 08-17-2007, 03:21 PM

The 8800GTS 320MB is twice as fast as a vanilla (unoverclocked) 8600 GTS.

One thing to remember about SLI is that you only get the texture RAM of one card, so two 8800GTS 320MB in SLI will have only 320MB of texture RAM, not 640MB like you might think, so it's not a great card to run in SLI.

As things are now, one 8800GTS 320MB is faster than any other non-8800 card (besides the ATi 2900xt) in SLI or Crossfire. Since the 8800GTS 320MB is down to $250 on newegg, for SLI/Crossfire purposes all cards over $125 are ruled out as being too expensive, and cards less than $125 can't come even close in performance even operating in SLI.

The only time SLI makes sense is with the 8800GTS 640MB or the 8800GTX, and you only need that much GPU power for running 2560x1600 on a 30" screen.

The 2900xt in Crossfire is very bad in both performance and power requirements. AMD is making lots of happy noise lately about how they're going to have motherboards that can Crossfire 3 or more cards, but they had better do some major improvements to their cards and drivers for that to make any sense.

rhagz · 08-17-2007, 03:24 PM

Actually the 7950 GX2 is faster than an 8800GTS in some situations, though you would be hard pressed to find one. It's basically SLI, just on a single card.

evilsofa · 08-17-2007, 03:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rhagz

Actually the 7950 GX2 is faster than an 8800GTS in some situations, though you would be hard pressed to find one. It's basically SLI, just on a single card.

I actually managed to find one, here, for $395. Not worth it.

rhagz · 08-17-2007, 03:50 PM

You can get 'em all over ebay for less. But you are right, not worth it. I'd take a GTS 320 over it simply for DX10 and the lifetime warranty.

Loopy · 08-17-2007, 04:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rabb1t

Many places will try to dazzle you with the dual card aspect.

Not sure what's up with the Tom's link you put in. I'm seeing a default comparison between the ATi x2400 XT and Nvidia 6600 GT? Even with the correct cards Tom's chart doesn't do SLI.

Toms hardware has separate charts now one for Dual/Quad video and the other is Desktop Graphics. But you can still compare, Pick the card on the Desktop chart you want to compare select the benchmark and check the numbers, then go to the Dual chart select the SLI cards you want to compare making sure you use the same benckmark.

8800GTS 320 (Dark Messiah)

8600GTS SLI