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Opinion of better card?
Topic Started: Sep 30 2005, 12:21 AM (318 Views)
g3b
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JUNIOR MEMBER
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Hi E-machiners! Finally decided to upgrade from intergrated grahics...Am looking at two cards a 6600gt or a 6800 (plain) both have 128mb of ram & are approximately the same price on newegg. Have already upgraded the psu to an antec 430, so power supply shouldn't be a problem. Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Thanks g3b
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Mullet Man
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Fear the Mullet
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The 6600GT and the 6800 are both awesome cards!
If I were you, I would go with the 6600GT because of the great reviews that card gets! The 6800 is great, but heard the cooling fans on them would fail now and then.
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g3b
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Hello Mullet Man...Is there a utility that will give me the aperture agp size for my e-machine, I checked the bios & it says 64mb, then I check a utility called cpuid.com & it shows an aperture of 32mb? Which one is correct? Am testing a 9600xt to put in friends computer with AU31 MB.

Thanks g3b
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Sentinel67
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g3b
Sep 30 2005, 05:21 AM
Hi E-machiners!  Finally decided to upgrade from intergrated grahics...Am looking at two cards a 6600gt or a 6800 (plain) both have 128mb of ram & are approximately the same price on newegg.  Have already upgraded the psu to an antec 430, so power supply shouldn't be a problem.  Any thoughts would be appreciated! 

Thanks g3b

It depends. What MOBO are ya running? If I missed it in another thread, my apologies. If it's a 4x AGP slot, it's kinda restrictive for either of those nVidia cards. Some 6800s, if memory serves, are two slot cards, you could be loosing the use of one of your PCI slots...somthing to consider. And, as Mullet Man said, the fans are hinky on some vendors models. Those are the nays. On the good side the vanilla 9800 has 12 pixel pipelines, as opposed to the 6600GT which is limited to 8. Since the advent of the 7800 cards, the 6800 variants have really dropped in price. You might consider a 6800GT, which has 16 pixel pipelines. If you do decide on the 6600GT, however, ASUS is makin' some pretty good cards these days...BFG is also a fine manufacturer, with a lifetime warranty... ;)
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Mullet Man
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Fear the Mullet
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BFG? Did you say BFG????
If you look at the specs in my sig, I got a sweet BFG FX 5500 256MB PCI card that performs quite well!
My etower will play the Battlefield 2 demo if that tells you anything! I also play games like Battlefield Vietnam, Forgotten Hope, Desert Combat, and Point of Existence!

I noticed a MAJOR improvement after installing my sweet BFG!

:luv:
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jdrober
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Proud owner of a BFH and not afraid to use it!!
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I have had Nvidia cards by both BFG and PNY and they have both been excellent. Although I would actually say the PNY's have out performed the other.
Reliability have been great on both.
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ethomas73
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The 6600GT vs. 6800 was a recent consideration/dilema of mine. I decided to go with an 128mb Apollo geForce 6800 (AGP) and I'll explain why.

The main considerations between the two cards:
Clock Speeds (Core&Memory) - Advantage 6600GT (500/900 vs. 325/700)
Pixel Pipelines (Base) - Advantage 6800 (12 vs. 8)

Through my pre-purchase research I gathered that the additional pipes will give better performance than the additional Mhz.

The final clincher for me, if your upgrading an AGP card, is that there is a good possiblity that you can SoftMod the NV40 processor on your 6800 to open 4 additional pipes and 1 additional vertex shader. This is comparable to the 6800GT. I was happy that my Apollo softmoded, and I opened the 4 pipes and 1 shader with no artifacts.

In summary: Considering the prices of the 6600GT and 6800 are relatively close these days ($145-$180): Heads-up I would choose the 6800 over the 6600GT, and if it softmods all the better! It's luck of the draw if you get one that's softmodable. (I used RivaTuner, some use Coolbits).

Note 1: Maybe I missed it but in my research I don't recall anything about the 6800 'fan issues'. Again, could be that I just missed it. With no case fan and stock cooling my Apollo runs about 60C idle and 70C after gaming for a few hours.

Note 2: lubner10 (from this site) has indicated to me that the difference in bandwidth between 8x and 4x AGP is minor. Please see: http://s2.invisionfree.com/emachineupgrade...?showtopic=2878

Note 3: Currently 3 of 4 6800 AGP's on Newegg are single slot cards.

If you couldn't tell, I'm giving advice for purchasing the 6800, but purchase whatever you'd like and 'game-away'. Good luck.




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Zeke
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6800GTs are essentially just a modded version of the 6800 (That I believe) supports both a better shadow rate and a better graphics card speed. IF you've got the money, go for it. But if you only have a 4x AGP slot, I'd recommend going with something a little smaller, like a 5600FX GT.
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g3b
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Thanks for all of your replies...(finally able to log-in---after about 5 tries, browser normally remembers passwords?) I have a FIC AU31 MB & am currently testing a ati 9600xt that a friend wanted. (They primarily do photo editing & some light gaming---the card should work fine, even though they have an oem psu (e-machine 300 watt). I have an 8x agp slot capable unit according to setup (dxdiag & utilities). Still have not decided on the video card...

The particuliar card I am looking at is a gigabyte 6600gt & an apollo or XFX 6800.
Thanks again for your replies! g3b
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