Its a toss up between 2 8800gt

[MilkyWay]

Im stuck i found 2 really cheap 8800gt and i know that they perform better than the 3870.
I have a crossfire board but dont plan on using crossfire anytime soon so i guess im getting a 8800gt as its more economical.

Its the PALIT/Xpertvision 8800GT 512MB with a non stock cooler or the Sparkle SILENT 8800GT 512MB with obv silent cooling.
The Sparkle is about £147 while the PALIT/Xpertvision is around £137
I wanted these as i cant afford a 1gb 8800gt.
I wanted a card with a non stock cooler as the stock 8800gt cooler sucks.
I could get a normal Sparkle tho with the stock cooling.

What do you guys think?

 

[JRMBelgium]

Just buy the PALIT/Xpertvision.

PS: The 8800GT 1GB is a waiste of money. The 8800GT would need 512bit in order to use that memory properly.

 

[ShadowFold]

Two HD 3870's are usually better than two 8800GT's due to better scaling. But if you want good Nvidia brands get a Palit, and yea the 1gb is a rip off just get the 512's.

 

[JRMBelgium]

Two HD 3870's are usually better than two 8800GT's due to better scaling.

That's true.

In more than 90% of the tests, Crossfire scale more better than SLI. In 60% of the tests, CrossFire scale up more than 50% performance compare to single card. But in only 40% of the tests SLI can scale up to 50%.

It wouldn't be dumb to buy a 3870, overclock it to 8800GT performance and then start saving for another 3870...

 

[OnBoard]

If that sparkle is the coolpipe 3 version, it sucks more than the stock cooler ECS has one with Accelero S1, no reason to go sparkle. And Palit should be nice, I've been just waiting for it a month..

 

[Xaser04]

Two HD 3870's are usually better than two 8800GT's due to better scaling.

They may scale better but the 8800GT SLI setup will still be faster (going by the techreport review of the HD3870X2 which shows the 8800GT SLI setup to completely trounce everything in most of the benchmarks)

EDIT: Sorry I forgot the link:

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13967/6 (COD4)
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13967/7 (HL2:EP2)
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13967/8 (ET:QW)
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13967/9 (Crysis and UT3)

 

[Wile E]

Just buy the PALIT/Xpertvision.

PS: The 8800GT 1GB is a waiste of money. The 8800GT would need 512bit in order to use that memory properly.

No, 1GB isn't a waste of money on high res gaming with games such as Crysis. Crysis easily uses more than 512MB of vram. And the bus width isn't gonna effect how much ram it can use.


I say get the Palit card. I love mine so far. Mine loads to about 60C OCed. If it's the Palit I'm thinking of, it also has 3 phase power, which is better than the reference design. Do you have a link to the exact cards you're looking at?

 

[will]

The Sparkle is about £147 while the PALIT/Xpertvision is around £137

whoa where did u get those prices?! thats a gd deal for a gt in the uk!

 

[JRMBelgium]

No, 1GB isn't a waste of money on high res gaming with games such as Crysis. Crysis easily uses more than 512MB of vram. And the bus width isn't gonna effect how much ram it can use.

You are not going to like the facts:

Compare 1024MB and 512MB, it is actually no gap between them if we ignore some sick games like PT Boats. You may notice there is average 10.47% boost in the test. But without PT Boat it only lead 5.5%, and that's only on settings with unplayable framerates...

And you only see a difference on 1920x1200 with 4xAA on Crysis! That's unplayble on every computer man...

Are you willing to pay extra money for a card that ony performs better at settings that are completely unplayable?

The bottom line is that the stock GeForce 8800 GT 512MB is simply an outstanding performer, adding another 512MB of memory just doesn’t yield the performance boost people expect...

1024MB would require 512bit ( in fact, 640bit would be eaven better ) to work properly.

 

[MilkyWay]

Sorry still have to add on shipping but i found one for £147 including shipping and vat the others although cheaper excluded vat meaning it ended up not worth it.

The sparkle is a passive cooler and its a heat bucket that could boil water its way over 100c.
The palit/xpertvision tho has a better cooler comes with tomb raider a hdmi to dvi connector and other cables its cheapo and has a better cooler that is quieter and cooler. Not bothered about heat staying in the case and not being exhausted because my x800gto dosnt fan air out and neither does the stock 8800gt thanks for telling me that the 1gb wont be worth the extra money i was worried for a minute that i was spending less for nothing.

Oh and just wanted to ask if it would be much of a bottleneck on my pc if its a few frames then not botherd although i have a Crossfire board i dont plan on using crossfire it was just worth the price £45 i paid for the mobo. I dont want to buy a 3870 if its a weaker card than the 8800gt i just wanted a 3870 because it was cheap but since i can get the 8800gt for £147 then it a better deal.

 

[trog100]

i have said this before.. if the card aint got the grunt to run the resolutions and settings that might need the extra memory its waste of time having it..

so 1 gig on a 8800gt is a rip off.. its always been used as a selling point and folks who dont know any better always fall for it..

i have a 1 gig grafix card sounds good to others who dont know any better..

trog

 

[JRMBelgium]

Oh and just wanted to ask if it would be much of a bottleneck on my pc if its a few frames then not botherd although i have a Crossfire board i dont plan on using crossfire it was just worth the price £45 i paid for the mobo. I dont want to buy a 3870 if its a weaker card than the 8800gt i just wanted a 3870 because it was cheap but since i can get the 8800gt for £147 then it a better deal.

You are lucky. I've build a PC last week with the 4600+ and the 3870 and it had about 9400 3DMarks in 3DMark06, overclocked it had about 9960 3DMarks.

8800GT should give you about 1000-1500 more in 3DMark06.

PS: The 4600+ was 8% overclocked. ( simple bios setting on the Asus mainboard )

Is there a bottleneck? Not really. Will the card run much better on faster CPU, offcourse!

Your next upgrade should be a Phenom CPU

 

[MilkyWay]

Yeah go phenom! Like i said i got a MSI Crossfire Platinum K9A for £45 which was a superb deal!
Id rather max out this board i got than buy new parts for a new one. Id have to redo my whole system if i wanted a Intel cpu and the Phenoms out later this year seem good not as good fast as the Intel stuff but still a good upgrade from a x2 4600+.

Hmmmn not botherd about 3d marks or benchmarking general just want to know if it will make my games run faster and look nicer. Which it will obviously do.

 

[Wile E]

You are not going to like the facts:

http://omploader.org/vYmlp

Compare 1024MB and 512MB, it is actually no gap between them if we ignore some sick games like PT Boats. You may notice there is average 10.47% boost in the test. But without PT Boat it only lead 5.5%, and that's only on settings with unplayable framerates...

And you only see a difference on 1920x1200 with 4xAA on Crysis! That's unplayble on every computer man...

Are you willing to pay extra money for a card that ony performs better at settings that are completely unplayable?

The bottom line is that the stock GeForce 8800 GT 512MB is simply an outstanding performer, adding another 512MB of memory just doesn’t yield the performance boost people expect...

1024MB would require 512bit ( in fact, 640bit would be eaven better ) to work properly.

But if you revisit the results, they're all over the charts. That tells me there's an inconsistency somewhere in the tests. And a faster memory interface won't help the 1GB. It's not the bottleneck, the gpu is. If you strapped the g92 GT core and 1GB of mem to a 1024bit interface, it wouldn't make much of a difference at all. Ocing hasn't been taken into consideration either. Upping the gpu clocks will relieve the gpu bottleneck some, and I'm willing to bet the gap between the 512 and 1GB will start to widen.

The only tests I'll trust are by trustworthy members of this forum. Unfortunately, I don't currently have a high res screen, so I can't run my card for comparison.

And yes, the 1GB is worth it to me, as I'm a benchmarker more than a gamer. Doesn't matter anyway, mine didn't cost me a dime.

 

[JRMBelgium]

The only tests I'll trust are by trustworthy members of this forum.

You think that he is going to fake 50+ bechmarks? He doesn't gain anything by doing that...

You didn't have to pay for yours, but don't recommend people to waiste their money because you chose to ignore the facts...

 

[Wile E]

You think that he is going to fake 50+ bechmarks? He doesn't gain anything by doing that...

You didn't have to pay for yours, but don't recommend people to waiste their money because you chose to ignore the facts...

I didn't say he faked it. I said it was inconsistent. I never implied it was intentional.

Now, he spent all this time benching, but why didn't he do the benches with overclocking? I'm willing to bet the difference are more noticable at higher core speeds.

 

[Wile E]

And to point out the inconsistencies I mentioned, if the 1GB card can pull ahead that far in PT Boats, why not other games? At 1280x1024 4xAA, it means the difference between playable, and unplayable.

Perhaps drivers come into the equation as well, or game bugs, or any number of explanations.

 

[JRMBelgium]

And to point out the inconsistencies I mentioned, if the 1GB card can pull ahead that far in PT Boats, why not other games?

Because the other games that he tested didn't use more then 512MB. That can't be to hard to understand...

It's not because Nvidia released 640MB and 768MB cards that you have to beleave that games actually require that amount of memory.

PT Boats is just the only game that needs more then 512MB to store the textures.

And about those inconsistencies, you do know that the 8800GTS 320MB was somethimes faster then the GTS 640MB in games that didn' require more then 320MB, don't you?
Not all cards are exactly the same. There are some benchmarks where the GT 512MB is 0.x% faster then the 1024MB version, but it would probably not be the case if he ran the same benchmark again.

Somethimes when you run 3DMark you get 15212, another time you get 15199, does that mean that the card was slower? Offcourse not...

 

[JRMBelgium]

Maybe you start beleaving me once you see other reviews.
Take the 2900XT 1024MB review for example:
http://www.ixbt.com/video3/r600-2-d.shtml#p18

The only reason why you see ANY difference is because the memory on the 1GB version is clocked at 2000Mhz...

 

[Wile E]

Because the other games that he tested didn't use more then 512MB. That can't be to hard to understand...

It's not because Nvidia released 640MB and 768MB cards that you have to beleave that games actually require that amount of memory.

PT Boats is just the only game that needs more then 512MB to store the textures.

People have logged Crysis using more, especially in DX10 under Vista.

Which leads me to another question, what were the in-game/bench settings? If he turned down some of the sliders, that's kinda tilting the scale toward the 512MB. If you don't max the game, it's not a level playing field.

Besides that, do you really believe that games in the near future won't have a use for 1GB, especially in DX10?

This same debate happened when 512MB cards launched, but they quickly fulfilled their purpose.

The 8800GT is a powerful enough card to use 1GB in the right circumstances. Throw in some OCing, and you'll have even more headroom.

 

[Wile E]

Maybe you start beleaving me once you see other reviews.
Take the 2900XT 1024MB review for example:
http://www.ixbt.com/video3/r600-2-d.shtml#p18

The only reason why you see ANY difference is because the memory on the 1GB version is clocked at 2000Mhz...

The gap grew with later drivers and newer games. (I also own a 2900XT 512MB)

 

[JRMBelgium]

Offcourse Crysis logged more in DirectX 10 on high resolutions, but is it playable? Nope!

I've already told you this, 1024MB only provides better framerates on settings that are unplayable. You like Crysis on 20fps, be my guest, you go play it on 20fps. I prefer 35fps...

By the time all games use about 512MB ore more, the 8800GT will not be powerfull enough...

No point in convincing you...I could show you 50 reviews but clearly you think that you have more knowledge ( without testing it yourself offcourse ) then all reviewers combined. All 1024mb reviews are biased, all the reviewers are pure evil, they don't want people to know the TRUE power of 1024mb...

 

[Wile E]

Offcourse Crysis logged more in DirectX 10 on high resolutions, but is it playable? Nope!

I've already told you this, 1024MB only provides better framerates on settings that are unplayable. You like Crysis on 20fps, be my guest, you go play it on 20fps. I prefer 35fps...

By the time all games use about 512MB ore more, the 8800GT will not be powerfull enough...

No point in convincing you...I could show you 50 reviews but clearly you think that you have more knowledge ( without testing it yourself offcourse ) then all reviewers combined. All 1024mb reviews are biased, all the reviewers are pure evil, they don't want people to know the TRUE power of 1024mb...

And again, what happens when you OC the the GT?

And what were the in game settings he used? Without that info, you have nothing to base your argument on. How do you know slightly higher settings wouldn't yield playable framerates on the 1GB, but not on the 512MB? The answer is you don't. The one game that did have settings that took advantage of the extra framebuffer, clearly showed the 1GB's advantage.

And you're right, you won't convince me by showing reviews with no info to back it up. Give all the details, and I can be persuaded much more easily, much more effective than smartass comment and rolleye smilies that clearly demonstrate your superior intellect.

 

[Threeflow]

1GB is a waste on the 8800GT. The vast majority of frame rate scores from the benchmarks listed above are well within the margin of error.

Yes, its true that the games will eventually take advantage of 1GB on the card (or at least more than 512MB)... but changes like that don't happen overnight, and by the time those sorts of games become commonplace, the 8800GT will be 2-3 years old and too slow of a GPU to handle them anyway, by then we'll have the 9800GT or 10800GT or what have you.

If you want to play Crysis at 1920x1200 at 19fps instead of 14fps, sure get the 1GB card. Who in their right mind would? Either of those frame rates are unplayable for a FPS game anyway. The two cards perform as close to identical as benchmarks can reveal at all of the playable resolutions.

1GB is for bragging rights only, but even then you'd have to be bragging to people who are as clueless you if you buy the card, else they would just laugh in your face.

 

[Wile E]

1GB is a waste on the 8800GT. The vast majority of frame rate scores from the benchmarks listed above are well within the margin of error.

Yes, its true that the games will eventually take advantage of 1GB on the card (or at least more than 512MB)... but changes like that don't happen overnight, and by the time those sorts of games become commonplace, the 8800GT will be 2-3 years old and too slow of a GPU to handle them anyway, by then we'll have the 9800GT or 10800GT or what have you.

If you want to play Crysis at 1920x1200 at 19fps instead of 14fps, sure get the 1GB card. Who in their right mind would? Either of those frame rates are unplayable for a FPS game anyway. The two cards perform as close to identical as benchmarks can reveal at all of the playable resolutions.

1GB is for bragging rights only, but even then you'd have to be bragging to people who are as clueless you if you buy the card, else they would just laugh in your face.

Then explain to me the spread on PT Boats. Admittedly, Crysis is a crappy game to use as an example. It's poorly optimized all the way around.