Best GPU for gaming, on a budget?

[malice19]

the SP's are different. Imagine the tiny little, basic cores (SP's) as cpu's for a moment. Now imagine an Atom or P4 against Core i7. In other words, you can build the SP's to any spec you desire, and in this case Nvidia and ATI went down different routes - the SP's on the ATI cards are not as powerful but they use more to compensate. Neither path is better, its just a different way of doing things.

At the moment you can find the 4890 for £165ish and it's comparable to a GTX 275, which i think answers which one you should go for

Cheers mate, You explained that well! In my language (IT/Hardware)

[DanceswithUnix]

going by these numbers: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3140&p=13 the difference between a 7950 GT and an 8800 GT is quite low really. 8800 GT is single slot.

Still, i do agree with you somewhat.

Interesting, according to this site the 7950 is 61W and the 8800GT 512MB is 78W which is more than the 8W difference that Anand saw (though I usually trust Anandtech to handle basic measurement).

Still, from that list the 9600GT is the same power consumption as the 7950. Problem is, will the 9600GT be enough of an upgrade to be worth spending money on? If you get an 8800GT and it turns out to be more than the PSU can handle, then you are looking at a 300W PSU upgrade for the Shuttle and that isn't cheap.

For my Wife's Shuttle I got a single slot 4670, but the fan is quite small and 2 wire so it took some manual tweeking to get the noise acceptable. The 4670 is a 70W part, so slightly more than your 61W 7950GT.

Can you tell us what else is in the Shuttle (cpu type etc) to give us some idea how much power you are already using?