Draft Build for gaming rig

[Svaneyk]

Ok here's what I have so far. I'm hoping to pull the trigger and place an order with Newegg tomorrow. I'm still not sure on the RAM and I'm still on the fence regarding the MOBO. I really was looking for a smaller boot drive but scanning through Newegg it seemed like the Seagate 500gb 32bit cache SATA drives were the best for price/performance. All comments are welcome.

Graphics Card – 8800gts 512mb
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16814130312

HDD Boot/Storage – 2 x Seagate 500gb SATA 32mb Cache
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822148288

DVD Burner – Lite-On 20x Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106072

CPU - Intel Q6600 Wolfsdale
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16819115017

MOBO – Still on the fence here:

EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16813188024

Or

ASUS Maximus Formula
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131227

RAM – Not sure which would be the best here:
Corsair 2gb DDR2 1066MHz Desktop kit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145033

or

Corsair 2gb DDR2 800Mhz Desktop kit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145177

PSU – Corsair 620W
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139002

Case – Antec 900
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...pk=antec%2b900

Keyboard –
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16823126034

OS – Vista 32 bit home edition - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832116152

[shadowpr]

Unless you plan to overclock, I would get this ram: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145175

or you could get a 2x2gb pack.

For a mb, I would stick with the P5K-E unless you actually plan or getting sli or crossfire.

If you're just looking for a gaming rig, and don't do a lot of multitasking, then look at the E8400 instead. It's a faster dual core.

Rest looks good.

[Khalil]

Looks like a good rig but I would get an Asus motherboard instead of that eVGA. Quad core? Do you really need it? Those Core2Duo dual cores will out run any game on the market. Save money on the CPU and buy an 8800 GTX. Games relay far more on the GPU than the CPU

[discodanman45]

I say scrap the SLI boards for Intel builds. That video card will have enough power to get you through a few years of gaming. The monitor resolution is what you need to pay attention to when you buy a video card. A 1680 x 1050 monitor will not take advantage of top of the line video cards. I don't see the need for SLI for your build, unless you are planning on having a large and high resolution monitor. I would get the ASUS P5K-E and not worry about SLI.

The q6600 is a good price right now, and the dual cores will not save you much money. I think that cpu is a good investment and has great OC'ing capabilities.

[Svaneyk]

I forgot to link the monitor: Samsung 226bw 22" lcd widescreen.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...amsung%2b226BW

Regarding the ram. I won't be OCing initially but down the road I may mess around with it when I'm less worrired about the warrantee. Forgive my ignorance but what is the difference between the ram you linked and the DDR2 800 I initially picked out?

Regarding the graphics card: from what I've read on this forum, the 8800 gts 512mb uses a newer chip technology than the gtx and it's performance isn't that much lower.

I'm sticking with quad core for a bit of future proofing.

I'll take a closer look at the p5k - e. Certainly the price is right.

Any recommendations on a more appropriate boot drive or is the one I listed fine?

Thanks for all the input.

[shadowpr]

That hd is fine.

The difference in ram is that the one you picked is a cas 4, while i suggested a cas 5. It saves you 16, and will still work and be stable from the get go. Heard that cas 4 could cause problems initially.

[Svaneyk]

Originally Posted by discodanman45 I say scrap the SLI boards for Intel builds. That video card will have enough power to get you through a few years of gaming. The monitor resolution is what you need to pay attention to when you buy a video card. A 1680 x 1050 monitor will not take advantage of top of the line video cards. I don't see the need for SLI for your build, unless you are planning on having a large and high resolution monitor. I would get the ASUS P5K-E and not worry about SLI. The q6600 is a good price right now, and the dual cores will not save you much money. I think that cpu is a good investment and has great OC'ing capabilities.

The only real issue I'm seeing from customer feedback on the P5K-E is that if you have a larger graphics card (8800gts etc) they don't fit well and end up covering one or more of the SATA connections. Anyone have experience with this?

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by Svaneyk The only real issue I'm seeing from customer feedback on the P5K-E is that if you have a larger graphics card (8800gts etc) they don't fit well and end up covering one or more of the SATA connections. Anyone have experience with this?

The difference between the GTS and the GTX is like night and day check out the Nvidia specs on their own website http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce8.html 22.4GB/sec in bandwidth, thats like having an 8500 helping the GTS along

[Svaneyk]

Originally Posted by Khalil The difference between the GTS and the GTX is like night and day check out the Nvidia specs on their own website http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce8.html 22.4GB/sec in bandwidth, thats like having an 8500 helping the GTS along

Granted the GTX is a higher performing card. Not sure that extra bandwidth is worth double the cost at the moment. The quote you shaded though was regarding my concern that the PK5-E MOBO's are cramped when it comes to the larger video cards. I'd still like some feedback on that if anyone has any firsthand experience with this.

Thanks

[Svaneyk]

Originally Posted by Svaneyk Ok here's what I have so far. I'm hoping to pull the trigger and place an order with Newegg tomorrow. I'm still not sure on the RAM and I'm still on the fence regarding the MOBO. I really was looking for a smaller boot drive but scanning through Newegg it seemed like the Seagate 500gb 32bit cache SATA drives were the best for price/performance. All comments are welcome. Graphics Card – 8800gts 512mb http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16814130312 HDD Boot/Storage – 2 x Seagate 500gb SATA 32mb Cache http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822148288 DVD Burner – Lite-On 20x Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106072 CPU - Intel Q6600 Wolfsdale http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16819115017 MOBO – Still on the fence here: EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16813188024 Or ASUS Maximus Formula http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131227 RAM – Not sure which would be the best here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145175 PSU – Corsair 620W http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139002 Case – Antec 900 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...pk=antec%2b900 Keyboard – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16823126034 OS – Vista 32 bit home edition - Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832116152

Ok I updated the RAM. I'm still looking for an answer around the P5K-E question and if anyone has had an issue not being able to use one or more of the SATA connections when installing a large graphics card.

Thanks for the advice.

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by Svaneyk Ok I updated the RAM. I'm still looking for an answer around the P5K-E question and if anyone has had an issue not being able to use one or more of the SATA connections when installing a large graphics card. Thanks for the advice.

Its a full ATX board, looking at it I dont think you will have any issues with any card fitting. It has 6 SATA connectors and Looking at the pictures of the board you will be able to use 4 of them even with 2 cards.
I just measured an ATI 1950XTX which is in front of me and it is at 9.4 inches and that is a whopper of a card.

[Svaneyk]

Originally Posted by Khalil Its a full ATX board, looking at it I dont think you will have any issues with any card fitting. It has 6 SATA connectors and Looking at the pictures of the board you will be able to use 4 of them even with 2 cards. I just measured an ATI 1950XTX which is in front of me and it is at 9.4 inches and that is a whopper of a card.

Thanks for the response on that. Now one last question on the p5k -e. The specs indicate that this boards memory standard is ddr2 1066. Does this mean I have to use ddr2 1066 or can I use the ddr2 800 memory I've currently got listed?

[Khalil]

Nope, you can use 800 and 667 with it but theoriticaly you will get best performance with 1066.

Here is the link to the Asus page with all the specs http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?mo...11&l3=534&l4=0

[alex530]

I would recommend not getting Vista Home Basic. Go with Home premium. You'll get the Aero features, among other things. Here's a link explaining the differences.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2068721,00.asp

Also, you could save some money by getting an OEM version rather than the retail version of Vista.

[Khalil]

Vista's aero is a cool feature but a memory hog, I found Basic games a lot better than Home Premium due to use of less memory by the OS in Basic.

[dad25]

Svaneyk, how did this all go? Did you build your system with the P5K-E and an 8800GTS? I have been looking at a similar build with that MB, but I am looking at the GIGABYTE GV-NX88T512HPV1 GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit card. It is shorter than nVidia's reference card and I suspect that it will not block any SATA ports. I am also considering the Q6600 for price/performance and to take advantage of 4 cores for video editing. I'd love to hear what your decisions and experience have been.

[Khalil]

I would not waste my money on a Quad Core for gaming, GPU is far more important to a gaming rig than the CPU. Go with a GTX video card and the E6850 you will get much better gaming performance than going with the Q6600 and a GTS.
A friend of mine built a gaming rig with an AMD LE1640 Single Core CPU and an 8800Ultra video card that I bet you will out perform any Intel Quad with 8800GTS for gaming.
Better GPU = Better gaming

[Masaki 7-11]

Originally Posted by Khalil I would not waste my money on a Quad Core for gaming, GPU is far more important to a gaming rig than the CPU. Go with a GTX video card and the E6850 you will get much better gaming performance than going with the Q6600 and a GTS. A friend of mine built a gaming rig with an AMD LE1640 Single Core CPU and an 8800Ultra video card that I bet you will out perform any Intel Quad with 8800GTS for gaming. Better GPU = Better gaming

The 8800GTS 512MB compares very well with the GTX with less than 5% difference between the two, there isn't much point in getting an older more expensive video card when it won't make a large difference. Also keep in mind that games are becoming more CPU intensive with many of the newer games requiring a dual core as a minimum. RTS games are leading the way in quad core support, but other types of games are sure to follow with quad core support.

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by Masaki 7-11 The 8800GTS 512MB compares very well with the GTX with less than 5% difference between the two, there isn't much point in getting an older more expensive video card when it won't make a large difference. Also keep in mind that games are becoming more CPU intensive with many of the newer games requiring a dual core as a minimum. RTS games are leading the way in quad core support, but other types of games are sure to follow with quad core support.

Games still rely on GPU, and rely very little on CPU, we need to give people sound advice on these boards. I don't know if you have ever owned a GTS or a GTX but there is a heck of alot more than 5% difference between the 2 cards and the GTS definately does not compare to the GTX, I have tested them and know this for a fact. It would make zero sense for Nvidia to update a card and make it comparable to a card they still market for twice as much money, that would be self defeating.
In my opinion, when giving advice, it is best to give it out of personal experience and not from articles we read on the internet. That is why I rely on glc's advice because he only gives it from experience.

[Masaki 7-11]

Originally Posted by Khalil Games still rely on GPU, and rely very little on CPU, we need to give people sound advice on these boards. I don't know if you have ever owned a GTS or a GTX but there is a heck of alot more than 5% difference between the 2 cards and the GTS definately does not compare to the GTX, I have tested them and know this for a fact. It would make zero sense for Nvidia to update a card and make it comparable to a card they still market for twice as much money, that would be self defeating.T In my opinion, when giving advice, it is best to give it out of personal experience and not from articles we read on the internet. That is why I rely on glc's advice because he only gives it from experience.

I hope you're referring to the 512MB GTS which is based off the G92 chipset and not the 320MB or 640MB GTS which is based off the G80 chipset. The 512MB GTS has the same amount of Stream Processors as the GTX and higher clocks on the core, shaders and memory. The only thing in which the GTS is slower in is memory banwidth and size (512MB vs. 768MB and 256-bit vs. 384-bit) making it so that the GTX comes ahead in some games/situations and the 512MB GTS in others, either way the differences in results are small because on has an advantage in processing power and one has the advantage in memory.

Regarding your comment on experience, online articles have a very controlled environment for comparisons in which they use the exact same setups (minus the video cards in this case) and run the benchmarks on fresh installs of the OS for each card, often running the benchmarks multiple times to account for errors; something which can take many hours to do; have you taken such an approach to your comparisons?

Regarding CPUs in gaming, you will notice in virtually all RTS games that you have much better performance when using a faster processor, especially when comparing single core to dual cores on games that support multiple cores. On other types of games you'll still notice a large difference in performance when using different processors, especially when comparing single core to dual cores on games that support them (which is more and more common with games like Shadowrun and Crysis benefiting from dual cores.

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by Masaki 7-11 I hope you're referring to the 512MB GTS which is based off the G92 chipset and not the 320MB or 640MB GTS which is based off the G80 chipset. The 512MB GTS has the same amount of Stream Processors as the GTX and higher clocks on the core, shaders and memory. The only thing in which the GTS is slower in is memory banwidth and size (512MB vs. 768MB and 256-bit vs. 384-bit) making it so that the GTX comes ahead in some games/situations and the 512MB GTS in others, either way the differences in results are small because on has an advantage in processing power and one has the advantage in memory. Regarding your comment on experience, online articles have a very controlled environment for comparisons in which they use the exact same setups (minus the video cards in this case) and run the benchmarks on fresh installs of the OS for each card, often running the benchmarks multiple times to account for errors; something which can take many hours to do; have you taken such an approach to your comparisons? Regarding CPUs in gaming, you will notice in virtually all RTS games that you have much better performance when using a faster processor, especially when comparing single core to dual cores on games that support multiple cores. On other types of games you'll still notice a large difference in performance when using different processors, especially when comparing single core to dual cores on games that support them (which is more and more common with games like Shadowrun and Crysis benefiting from dual cores.

Again you are basing the information you are dishing out on us from reading articles. You have yet to tell us if you owned either of these cards and have personaly tested them in same gaming environments like i have.
Bandwidth is the most important spec on a video card, any power gamer knows this. The GTX cards are still selling like hot cakes, if the 8800GTS half price card was as good then no one would be buying the GTX.
Please contact Nvidia directly and ask them about bandwidth. Again I am asking you to base your advice on experience, otherwise we can all simply paste links to articles from google for anyone who asks a question on here.

[Masaki 7-11]

Originally Posted by Khalil Again you are basing the information you are dishing out on us from reading articles. You have yet to tell us if you owned either of these cards and have personaly tested them in same gaming environments like i have. Bandwidth is the most important spec on a video card, any power gamer knows this. The GTX cards are still selling like hot cakes, if the 8800GTS half price card was as good then no one would be buying the GTX. Please contact Nvidia directly and ask them about bandwidth. Again I am asking you to base your advice on experience, otherwise we can all simply paste links to articles from google for anyone who asks a question on here.

You can't use experience for comparison purposes unless you have identical set-ups to compare the performance of the different video cards, which I'm quite sure most people don't have when they use experience for comparison purposes. If it is as you say that bandwidth is so important, take a look at the HD2900XT 1GB edition, it has highly clocked GDDR4 ram, a 512-bit bus, and 1GB memory, but it doesn't compare very well to the 8800GTX, so obviously bandwidth is just part of the equation. Another thing is that bandwidth becomes more important as you use higher resolutions since you have to refer to the memory more often, most monitors in the 22 inch and below range have more than enough bandwidth to work with. Monitors greater than 22 inch will rely more on bandwidth than the smaller monitors, but the faster speeds on the 8800GTS 512MB compared to the 8800GTX will still keep up with the performance of the 8800GTX. A clear example where Nvidia brought in a new video card for a lower price and lower bandwidth and greater performance is the 8800GT which has a 256-bit memory interface compared to the 320-bit memory interface of the 320MB and 640MB 8800GTS. The introduction of the 8800GT messed up the whole line of Nvidia video cards, what's there to stop the 8800GTS 512MB from doing the same?

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by Masaki 7-11 You can't use experience for comparison purposes unless you have identical set-ups to compare the performance of the different video cards, which I'm quite sure most people don't have when they use experience for comparison purposes. If it is as you say that bandwidth is so important, take a look at the HD2900XT 1GB edition, it has highly clocked GDDR4 ram, a 512-bit bus, and 1GB memory, but it doesn't compare very well to the 8800GTX, so obviously bandwidth is just part of the equation. Another thing is that bandwidth becomes more important as you use higher resolutions since you have to refer to the memory more often, most monitors in the 22 inch and below range have more than enough bandwidth to work with. Monitors greater than 22 inch will rely more on bandwidth than the smaller monitors, but the faster speeds on the 8800GTS 512MB compared to the 8800GTX will still keep up with the performance of the 8800GTX. A clear example where Nvidia brought in a new video card for a lower price and lower bandwidth and greater performance is the 8800GT which has a 256-bit memory interface compared to the 320-bit memory interface of the 320MB and 640MB 8800GTS. The introduction of the 8800GT messed up the whole line of Nvidia video cards, what's there to stop the 8800GTS 512MB from doing the same?

Companies tend to learn from their mistakes. I have tested on number of times exact hardware with several different video cards, thats where my experience comes. I have access to all the hardware I want anytime I want.
The HD2900XT has lower bandwidth than the 8800GTX so I don't see what point you are making here.

[Masaki 7-11]

Originally Posted by Khalil Companies tend to learn from their mistakes. I have tested on number of times exact hardware with several different video cards, thats where my experience comes. I have access to all the hardware I want anytime I want. The HD2900XT has lower bandwidth than the 8800GTX so I don't see what point you are making here.

Please check your information before posting a response; the HD2900XT has a memory bandwidth of 102.4GB/s compared to 84.6GB/s on the 8800GTX. Even though the HD2900XT has more bandwidth than the 8800GTX, the performance is a significant amount lower, perhaps a few generations ago (video card generations) the performance of the card could be determined by memory bandwidth, new video cards depend a lot more on their shaders than previous generations, so although memory bandwidth is still important, it doesn't make up all of the video card's performance.

References:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html (note how the 8800GTS 512MB has a higher texture fill rate than both the 8800GTX and 8800Ultra)
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=645

[Khalil]

Originally Posted by Masaki 7-11 Please check your information before posting a response; the HD2900XT has a memory bandwidth of 102.4GB/s compared to 84.6GB/s on the 8800GTX. Even though the HD2900XT has more bandwidth than the 8800GTX, the performance is a significant amount lower, perhaps a few generations ago (video card generations) the performance of the card could be determined by memory bandwidth, new video cards depend a lot more on their shaders than previous generations, so although memory bandwidth is still important, it doesn't make up all of the video card's performance. References: http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html (note how the 8800GTS 512MB has a higher texture fill rate than both the 8800GTX and 8800Ultra) http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=645

I thought the 2900XT had only 79GB/S bandwidth, where you getting the 102GB/s from? Your second link shows nothing. I find the ATI cards faster than the Nvidia for gaming, regardless of what websites say. I go with what i test myself, i owned a GTX and the 2900XT. I found the ATI to be a lot smoother and less laggy when playing with large groups playing EQ2 and Vanguard, specialy in instances. Like I said before you can't beat personal experience. Have you owned either of those cards and tested them on the same rigs? Please post about your personal experience with video cards you used not something you read somewhere online.

[Masaki 7-11]

Originally Posted by Khalil I thought the 2900XT had only 79GB/S bandwidth, where you getting the 102GB/s from? Your second link shows nothing. I find the ATI cards faster than the Nvidia for gaming, regardless of what websites say. I go with what i test myself, i owned a GTX and the 2900XT. I found the ATI to be a lot smoother and less laggy when playing with large groups playing EQ2 and Vanguard, specialy in instances. Like I said before you can't beat personal experience. Have you owned either of those cards and tested them on the same rigs? Please post about your personal experience with video cards you used not something you read somewhere online.

Just tested both links again and they are working fine, you might have to wait a bit for the page to load, the second unbolded paragraph in the second link shows the memory bandwidth for the HD2900XT, if that doesn't provide enough support for that information, you'll find the same memory bandwidth being shown on multiple other websites. Experience is useful for comparison when it comes to determining quality and support of a product, specifically when it comes to comparing brands, when it comes to performance, the best way to compare is to use online reviews and cross-reference them, it's quite common for various things to happen during testing which would bias the end results of the comparisons which is why it is useful to check online reviews since they run multiple tests to give a more accurate comparison. Have you run any benchmarks to compare the cards? When you compare cards do you use the same OS installation, or make a new one for each game? Have you installed the latest updates and drivers? I have yet to come across real life testing which gave radically different results than online reviews when using a similar setup.

[Khalil]

When I compared the 8800GTX and the 2900XT I had the same exact rig with the same OS, same memory, hard drives, everything was the same.
I bought the GTX first, I was playing both EQ2 and Vanguard at the time.
Right away when I was out raiding with full 24 people raid crew I noticed as soon as we entered the instances the game began to lag, I always play games with all options enabled. When we went into the boss room, my computer lagged so bad I was casting spells and not even seeing the effects at all. I RMA'd the card back to Newegg and they sent me a replacement. A week later we raided the same instance with 24 people again and this time it was even worst. It was not connection lag it was Video lag.
I RMA'd the card again and got the HD2900XT, guess what, no lag, none and HD2900XT had less memory. 512MB on the ATI compared to 768 on the GTX.
The Nvidia card was an eVGA, the ATI was a Sapphire.
Had the newest drivers for both cards, I have built over 100 gaming machines so far. Get the picture?
btw please go back and read that article you pasted, it states

the Radeon HD 2900XT can produce a memory bandwidth of 102.4GB/s

Thats not the actual rating, I remember it clearly on the box that the card was in, it was 79. something, so overclocked it might achieve 102 however this website you are linking to is not a reliable source.
I can't find the bandwidth info on the ATI website.

[andper10]

Originally Posted by Khalil I RMA'd the card again and got the HD2900XT, guess what, no lag, none and HD2900XT had less memory. 512MB on the ATI compared to 768 on the GTX.

1. Here is a great reference for comparing video cards:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphi...=706&chart=277

2. And another great thing that comes out each month is Tom's Hardware's "best gaming video cards for the money". Here is the list from March: http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/...ics/page8.html .
As you can see, the 2900XT is actually 2 notches below the 8800GTX, while the 8800GT 512MB and the 8800GTS (512MB version) are only 1 notch below the 8800GTX.

As you can see from link 1, at 1280x1024 resolution (I happen to play most of my games at this resolution) in Battlefield 2142, the slightly overclocked version of the 8800GT actually has more FPS (frames per second) than an 8800GTX! So if they had a non-overclocked version of the 8800GT on the list, it would probably be equal to or maybe still slightly better than the 8800GTX in that case. I am not saying that is always the case, but your "personal experience" is completely relative. If you want to use personal experience, you had better at least run fraps and see how many fps you are getting in your games with different video cards, not just say "it lagged with this card and it didn't lag with this other card so the second card is way better than the first card". Here's a hint: just because a video card A costs twice as much as video card B, it does not necessarily mean that video card A has double the preformance of video card B.

Originally Posted by Masaki 7-11 The 8800GTS 512MB compares very well with the GTX with less than 5% difference between the two, there isn't much point in getting an older more expensive video card [8800GTX] when it won't make a large difference [compared to an 8800GTS 512MB].

Originally Posted by Khalil GPU is far more important to a gaming rig than the CPU. Go with a GTX video card and the E6850 you will get much better gaming performance than going with the Q6600 and a GTS. Better GPU = Better gaming

See this article:http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.a...no=483&pgno=11
"In DirectX 10, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB was 4.7% faster at 1280 x 1024. This lead increased to 5.2% at 1600 x 1200 and 6.4% at 1920 x 1200."

In that test, the 8800GTX was actually WORSE than the 8800GTS 512MB!
So, the issue is NOT:

Originally Posted by Khalil It would make zero sense for Nvidia to update a card and make it comparable to a card they still market for twice as much money, that would be self defeating.

The question is:
Why are YOU telling this guy to spend double the money on an 8800GTX for a very slight or in some cases NON EXISTENT preformance increase over an 8800GTS 512MB?

_________________________

Originally Posted by Khalil Like I said before you can't beat personal experience. Have you owned either of those cards and tested them on the same rigs? Please post about your personal experience with video cards you used not something you read somewhere online.

What good does personal experience do if it is not correct? The purpose of these forums is to help people build new computers. Suggesting that someone spend DOUBLE the ammount of money for an older video card that is actually the same as, or in some cases worse than a cheaper card is not helpful at all. Why do you think people on the internet post their tests? They post their personal findings for our benefit. You should read other people's opinions about video cards and see if they match up with yours and not just insist that you are right.

*I do think that there has been some misunderstanding about types of video cards being referred to. I did my best to clearly represent the type of 8800GTS that I was referring to. Yes, an 8800GTX is much better than an 8800GTS 320MB, but the newer 8800GTS 512MB is very similar to the 8800GTX for a LOT less money.