6600GT Vs 6800nu, best bang for buck?

[daniel_owen_uk]

Cheapest GT is £250 though, so that gonna have to have some serious bang.

[Mblaster]

The 6800 won't softmod to 6800GT, because it uses slower memory, but the softmod willl get you a nice increasee in performance, I'd go with the 6800nu out of those two cards.

[Marcos]

Any idea how much performance i could gain with the softmod? Any comparison benchmarks?

[Bruno]

If your happy to run your games at 1024x768 then the nu will run everything just now with high settings fine, it's as soon as you go up a 'res' then things start to slow. I've got the Glacier 6800nu and for the money it's well worth it. I'd say go for that and maybe sell on in 6 months and get a 6800 GT or better once they drop in price.

[davidstone28]

For bang per buck, I'd say that they're pretty much of muchness.

The LOW 6800 for £170 is great value for money, and the BFG GT £255 is great performance for the money.

If I had to plump for one, I'd say the GT simply because of the extra pipeline and shader, which makes a noticeable difference at high resolutions / high detail / high AA/AF settings. However, things swing back in favour of the 6800 if you're planning to junk your motherboard in the near future and do the whole PCI-E thing or you're running at lower resolutions / lower settings or have a less powerful PC.

Both the 6800 and GT are highly overclockable but I've tried unlocking the pipes/shaders on the 6800s, and of the cards that I've tried, you can't seem to run then at 16x1,6vp without major artefacting.

[Marcos]

I need to run at 1280 on a 17" tft native res. And i think i want at least 60fps with good detail on HL2

[alterion]

in that case it deoends ion wether you want aa and ainsotropic or not... with it you'll need a 6800gt or x800 pro but without it i think.. (but i may be wrong) that both your cards will do this. i seem to remember reding that the performance difference is minimal between them on HL2. look at the hexus front page and if you scroll down a bit some site like anand tech is bound to have benchmarks

[Marcos]

I did want AA, but as im on a budget i suppose dropping to 1024 and running scaled will have a similar effect to AA on a TFT

Seems like the 6800nu will do

[davidstone28]

in that case it deoends ion wether you want aa and ainsotropic or not... with it you'll need a 6800gt or x800 pro but without it i think.. (but i may be wrong) that both your cards will do this. i seem to remember reding that the performance difference is minimal between them on HL2. look at the hexus front page and if you scroll down a bit some site like anand tech is bound to have benchmarks

On my 6800 at 1280 x 1024, HL2 detects 4xAA and 8xAF as recommended settings.

[Marcos]

On my 6800 at 1280 x 1024, HL2 detects 4xAA and 8xAF as recommended settings.

Awesome , what kind of fps do you get?

[Purple]

dont worry about half life 2 - i have a Geforce 4 4200ti - i run it at 1280, on full everything but water, dont notice any slow down as i said GF4 a 6800 will blow the pants off that and include pixel shaders

i would get the 6800, with the softmod option its got to be the right way, if you get 6600 (with SLI) you are going to be pissed off with it being slower than you expected until you get a second one, in a year (madness)

edit: no AA mind

[davidstone28]

dont worry about half life 2 - i have a Geforce 4 4200ti - i run it at 1280, on full everything

You must have a magic card - on my oc'd Ti4200, the game absolutely chugs at 1280 with any sort of AA or AF.

[davidstone28]

Awesome , what kind of fps do you get?

With cl_showfps 1 enabled, on average, high 60s to low 70s fps. Sometimes climbs to well over 100 when just walking or running around, lowest I've seen are high 40s when there's lots of action going on in the screen. Still creamy smooth though as it only drops to that rarely and then only for a split second or so.

One of the BIGGEST factors to game speed at those settings is system RAM. It really isn't playable with 512mb - there's far too much disk swapping / virtual memory caching causing the game to pause with my system setup. IMO, you must have 1gb (I had to buy another 512mb to play this game properly at 12x10 with reasonable detail settings).

My specs:
3200+
1gb RAM running in dual channel (have tried it with 512mb)
6800 (have tried it with Ti4200)

[Marcos]

Ok thanks that sounds perfect for me

[davidstone28]

Just be aware that there's quite a major stuttering bug affecting HL2 which really spoils the gaming experience. Might be better to delay buying it until they release a patch in the couple of weeks or so, so you can play without detracting from the experience.

[Marcos]

Just be aware that there's quite a major stuttering bug affecting HL2 which really spoils the gaming experience. Might be better to delay buying it until they release a patch in the couple of weeks or so, so you can play without detracting from the experience.

I wont be buying it for, i would say, 3 months, i have other games to catch up on