Printable View
These two cards (PCI-E) are roughly the same price, and performance seems fairly similar.
Now, it is fairly probably that the system they will be going into will run Linux at sometime or another, so that is pushing me in the direction of nVidia, but I believe that ATi are improving in this respect.
If the performance is as similar as I believe it to be, then I'll probably be going for the nVidia part, but I just wanted to gather some opinions first.
Well, we had it confirmed by ATI that they r improving Linux drivers.
Also, wtf, i though they scrapped the x700xt!!
Anywat, I would go for the MSI or XFX extream gamers 6600GT. (The XFX probs)
i looked at these cards in a fair bit of detail about 2-3 months ago
6600gt came out on top, although sometimes only by a few frames or 3dmarks, no matter what anyone did to the x700xt (overclock, better cooling etc)
add this to the straight up fact that the 6600gt has shader model 3, something the xt doesnt have...making your games look much more pretty
like you said (i think) nvidia does have much more support on linux at the moment then ATI although they are working on it....honest
so the final thought is:6600gt=great x700xt=a little rubbish to be honest, but if you love ATI or just generally prefer the looks of an x700xt you should get it, perhaps you can even get it cheaper than the gt, but dont count on it as im fairly sure they are still almost 50 big ones more expensive
as far as i've read their performance seems to be very similar like you say. with nvidia having some obvious advantages -doom 3- and ati having their respective ones.
i'd say you're right wieghting it on the linux drivers, but i'll have to stop there as im not a user (...yet) myself.
Everything I've seen shows the 6600GT to be slightly ahead of the X700XT. Also, the 6600GT has shader model 3, and we already know for certain that it is well supported by Linux. Conversely, the X700XT is slightly slower, and does not currently, and possible in the future, have decent Linux support.
I would go for the 6600GT.
The 6600GT is a better card for gaming. I like the IQ more but I have had stability issues with them so I am suggesting ATI to my customers who use their computers for more than gaming. Also, the image quality is not always better on the nvidia cards.
I don't really care for the X700 series though. The best bang for the buck all around is the ATI X800 XL which is an incredible bargain! If you're running an A64 @2400MHz or a lesser machine the X800 XL is nearly as fast as an X850 XT PE because of CPU limiting bottlenecks.