Conclusion--The 8800 GT Is Less Expensive And The 8800 GTS 512 Is Faster
If you have good cooling for your case, you might want to get the GeForce 8800 GT because it gives you slightly more 3D performance and costs about $140. If you prefer a card with a double-slot cooler, you might want to try to get one of the last 8800 GTS 512 cards. They’re available for roughly $179. Because all the models that were mentioned already support physics computation with the PhysX driver, the 9-series doesn’t offer any significant advantage.
To be honest, the 9600 GT will only be interesting once the 8800 models are taken off the market. This is simply due to the small price difference, particularly of the special models of the GeForce 9600 GT that are in the same price range.
If you’ve already decided on the newer GeForce 9-series card, you certainly won’t be disappointed by buying one. Almost all games can be run smoothly with resolutions of up to 1920x1200. Only in Crysis will you have to lower your expectations or reduce anti-aliasing in more complex games.
If you prefer a lot of performance, you should go with the super-quiet Sparkle Calibre. If you can live with a little less speed, but want to have HDMI and DisplayPort, you should buy the Palit Sonic version. The MSI Hybrid Freezer is a nice gimmick, but you can get a 9800 GTX for the same money. If you are interested in having a silent HTPC, you might want to take a look at the Asus card; the cooler is solid, and only under full load conditions does it require a slight air flow.
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"Under permanent load we measured temperatures of up to 103 °C"
Not what you would call fit for purpose as a GPU, unless is also marked as a space heater!.
Why don't we have any ATI 4670 ? reviews or comparisons or benchmarks ? Who is interested in the Green cards anymore ? Especially when the conclusion is, buy another model green card. Seriously is this site sponsered by Nvidia ?
where's the GTX280 and the 9800GX2???
Blimey, I'm surprised my 8800GT compares so well with that list (SM2.0
of 5457, SM3.0 of 5704, overall score 11762 (CPU limits the overall
scores as it's only an AMD 6000+). toms must be using a pretty naffy
8800GT to only get an SM3.0 of 4984 (oh yeah, just stock clocks -
who the heck buys that these days?), especially given the X6800 being
used is 25% faster than mine. Speaking of which, if one is going to
bother testing with games like Crysis, why only use a dual-core? Surely
it makes sense to use a good quad-core so that one can be sure higher
resolution tests are not limited by CPU issues?
Overall, just more proof that the naming scheme for the 9xxx series was
crazy. Why does NVIDIA keep releasing so many different overlapping
variants with names that make no sense? The number of different names
is laughable.
Re other cards like the GTX280: maybe they haven't included more since
one can always infer other comparisons based on the various VGA charts.
The only thing I wish they'd stop doing is using MS FSX which is really
badly written (suffers terrible slowdown without the full PCIe speed
as it reloads textures constantly).
Also, has anyone ever done an analysis of exactly what Crysis is doing?
Sites are so fond of using it as if it's the ultimate benchmark because
it hammers gfx cards so hard, but how do we know it's not just
inefficiently written instead? No way to tell. How many polys per frame
typically? Not seen this mentioned anywhere. I did send this question to
NVIDIA but nobody replied. I think I would have more respect for Crysis
performance results if I could be sure it was getting more out of the
cards compared to other games, but I have to say the movie demos I've
seen don't look that good compared to, say, Stalker Clear Sky which
is said to have over a million polys/frame (a rather rough measure to
be sure, but better than nothing).
Ian.
I was sold on this unit until I read that. I really don't understand why some RAM sinks couldn't be used. As a consumer I really don't want to be looking at the temps all the time wondering if the chips are going to overheat.