Cheap New GeForce 8800 GT Challenges $400 Cards 402
J. Dzhugashvili writes "What would you say to a video card that performs like a $400 GeForce 8800 GTS for $200-250? Say hello to the GeForce 8800 GT. The Tech Report has tested the new mid-range wonder in Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Team Fortress 2, and BioShock. It found that the card keeps up with its $400 big brother overall while drawing significantly less power and — here's the kicker — generating slightly less noise."
Worth upgrading my GeForce 7950 on my box? (Score:3, Informative)
My current computer specifications can be found here:
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt [zimage.com] (I do not like to and want to OC; doesn't help when I have physical disabilities since I can't open my case to reset CMOS, fiddle with the hardwares, etc.). I use the latest NVIDIA drivers (including betas), 1280x1024 native resolution on my 19" LCD monitor (helps to use lower native resolutions since I don't need larger one
Is it worth getting a newer video card (e.g., 8800) to help the newer games' FPS like Crysis, World in Conflict, C&C3 (not too choppy like the first two), etc.? I do not want to upgrade my motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc. at this time. I am not sure where's the bottleneck is. Video card? My CPU? Something else?
Thank you in advance.
Re:Who the heck is buying these cards? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:half price (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Help me understand. (Score:3, Informative)
It's hard to imagine they're more per unit on the GT than the GTS, but sales volume will definitely make up for any shortcomings in that area. I have to hope that there's still some compelling reason why a user might decide to buy a GTS instead of a pair of GT's for SLI mode, particularly while motherboard support for PCIe's latest version has yet to really penetrate the market. I -think- my X38 based board has it, but since it's not an nVidia board and they haven't opened SLI up to other makers, it's largely useless.
However, this would be an excellent time for nVidia to start letting Intel use SLI on chipsets. They're going to get steamrolled by ATI in a generation or two if the AMD/ATI partnership continues to open up specifications, release better drivers, and jack up performance.
Re:Overkill? (Score:3, Informative)
Nice looking card (Score:5, Informative)
1. Single slot cooler instead of a dual slot like all the other high end cards made over the last 2 years
2. One 6 pin power connection instead of two like all the other high end G80 cards
3. Power consumption. According to the article (yes I read it), Nvidia rates the power consumption of the 8800GT at 110 watts.
4. Supports PCI Express 2.0 (backwards compatible with PCI Express 1.1)
5. Relatively cheap. I always found $200-300 to be the best price range for a video card (the high end G80 cards on the other hand cost $500-800 [newegg.com])
Re:Money, nerds whatever. (Score:2, Informative)
Does it have dual link dvi HDCP? 8800 GTX did not! (Score:3, Informative)
Which really boils down to one thing.... and its not entirely nvidia's fault. Its this entire HDCP DRM encryption mentality. This is EXACTLY what happens to consumers when these huge corporations impose such unfriendly, incompatible schemes on us. I paid for the best video card at the time, and it was $600, Nvidia said it supported HDCP and was ready for Vista. BOTH... were lies.
Real street prices (Score:1, Informative)
"What would you say to a video card that performs like a $400 GeForce 8800 GTS for $200-250? Say hello to the GeForce 8800 GT.
I'd say, according to Newegg, a "$400" 8800GTS can be had for as cheap as $319 [newegg.com] (after rebate), and the "$200" 8800GT is selling for $269 [newegg.com] or more.
Re:$200-250 is NOT cheap! (Score:5, Informative)
CPUs: 5 years ago, ~$1k was top, ~$300 mid-line, ~$125 low-end. Today, same.
HD: 5 years ago, ~$700 was top, ~$200 mid-line, ~$80 low-end. Today, same, maybe a bit lower.
RAM: 5 years ago, ~$500 was top, ~$200 mid-line, ~$100 low-end. Today, same, maybe a bit lower.
Video: 5 years ago, ~$400 was top, ~$150 mid-line, ~$50 low-end. Today, it's gone up. ~$700 top, ~$300 mid-line, ~$100 low-end.
However, I would argue against the OP: From a market standpoint the reason video card pricing has increased is because the customers are more willing to spend more on a video card than the other components. Certainly GPUs have increased in complexity to where they've equaled or surpassed CPUs in circuits thus increasing manufacturing costs, but ATI and nVidia wouldn't have pushed GPUs to that point if the public weren't willing to buy them. It leaves the folks who can only afford a $150 video card feeling as if they have a smaller penis because the high-end is now $700 instead of $400. But as you point out, any low end card out today would smoke the high-end cards from 5 years ago.
Now if we can just get the game developers to write code which will run at acceptable FPS on mid- to low-end video hardware...
Re:Installing in a Mac Pro? (Score:3, Informative)
Afaict you can put a card with a PC bios in and it will work in windows but it won't work in the bootloader or OS-X.
why buy a desktop machine that's upgradable if you can't upgrade it?
Lets see, the mac pro is the cheapest mac (the xserve can do some of theese things too but it is even more expensive than the mac pro) that
* supports a matched pair of monitors of your choice (the mini doesn't support multiple monitors at all, the imac has one of it's two monitor outputs hardwired to the built in monitor)
* supports more than two monitors
* supports monitors requring dual link DVI
* supports more than 4GB of ram
* supports more than one internal hard drive
* supports more than two cores
* has expansion slots to add additional interfaces
Re:$200-250 is NOT cheap! (Score:4, Informative)
Nuff said.