Which Graphics Card - Good Buy?

[Penquin]

I like to run my games at max settings and lately my pc is falling a bit short. Far from 100fps in some of the latest titles. Splintercell DA at max setting is about 15-25 avg with some indoor areas running at 45fps. Oblivion's outdoor areas at max setting also running at about 10-25fps, indoor areas running nicely though at 40-50fps. Both games forcing me to turn to down settings to keep playing at an acceptable 40fps avg. Everything is running at stock speeds.

Why would running a 8800 series be waste with a single core cpu? I don't think there any games out there currently that's designed to make use of dual cores.

 

[Brawler]

I stand to be corrected but dont the new Nvidia drivers make use of both cores of the cpu? i might be talking crap but I read that somewhere maybe shockG can tell us.

There will be a big improvement, depending on the game but not that huge, ven the AMD dual cores struggle, Core2Duo makes a massive differance with 8800's

 

[Gnome]

I presume this is just a spelling mistake but the 8800 gts 320mb version doesn't perform close to the 8800gtx it just like the 640mb 8800gts is about 25 % slower at all resolutions. 8800gts 320 is about the same speed as 640mb version untill you go higher than 1600x1200 then the extra 320mb starts counting in certain games.

It does actually perform very close when overclocked.

Note that I used the word overclocked.

Feel free to look at this benchmark

That is a card that is sold overclocked, anyone who knows anything about overclocking knows that these cards that are sold as overclocked versions can still be pushed quite a bit further(usually), so it might even perform still quite a bit better.

There must be a reason nVidia asked manufacturers to lay off overclocked versions initially?

 

[stefan9]

It does actually perform very close when overclocked.

Note that I used the word overclocked.

Feel free to look at this benchmark

That is a card that is sold overclocked, anyone who knows anything about overclocking knows that these cards that are sold as overclocked versions can still be pushed quite a bit further(usually), so it might even perform still quite a bit better.

There must be a reason nVidia asked manufacturers to lay off overclocked versions initially?

Yes but I wasn't aware that we were talking about overclocked versions. It does get close at the lower resolutions but it still struggles at the higher resolutions.

And just for some info guys theres no reason to buy a factory overclocked you are paying extra for what you can do yourself by using rivatuner or atitool.