Newish Video Card Time

My old Geforce FX 5700 conked out on me the other day, resulting in me relying on an even older 5200 with a busted fan. I've been looking around for a new card, but I have been having a bit of trouble deciding. I would like to stay around 150 bucks, give or take 20. I figured you guys would know which card would be the best in this range. I do not have PCI express, so I will be needing to stick with an AGP 8x. I am not a very hardcore PC gamer, but I still enjoy playing games smoothly. The game I play the most these days seems to be City of Heroes, which played fine with the 5700 with 256 mb of Vram. I was looking at 6600GTs and Radeon 9800 Pros. The Radeons have a 256 bit interface over the 6600's 128. I also noticed on newegg that the 9800 Pro has 256 MB over the 6600 with 128 MB around the same price. However, the 6600 GTs seem to clock higher and are newer than the 9800. The 6600GT has 8 pipelines, but I am unsure of the 9800 Pro.

I may overclock this card in the near future, but for right now I am mainly interested which would be better out of the box. However, if you could include any details on how well these cards overclock, I would appreciate it.

I have long been a follower of Nvidia, but at the moment I could care less. Please give me some suggestions, I would like to resume my gaming as quickly and affordable as possible. Thanks.

Oh, here are my CPU and memory specs. I planned on using this money to buy more memory, and a new graphics card in the next few months. But I need a new card ASAP, so I am willing to forgo the memory for now.

2.8 ghz P4 @ 3.0ghz - 856 MHz bus
512 MB PC3200 @ 428 Mhz (kingston hyper x)

9800 Pro has 12 pipes I believe, 9800 Pro is a pretty decent card, i think you can find a GeForce 6800 for around that. I think the 6600GT will be a little better than the 9800 Pro though. It seems like its not as good but it definately holds its own. If I were you I would go with the 6600GT or the 6800 which you can open the pipes and OC.

Yes, there seems to be a 6800 with 128 MB of Vram for $189 on Newegg. It appears that you can uise RivaTuner to unlock the 4 pipelines and an extra shader. What kind of cooling do you guys suggest if I do go this route? With a new heatsink/fan, I'm probably going to spend over 200.... but this could be worth it.

for a 6800, the NV Silencer 5 Rev. 2, by Arctic Cooling, would be an excellent solution, quiet, ~$33 bucks, and cools very well.

Or if u want a higher priced Air Cooling solution, find out about Consumer9000's company called STATIS, makes some VERY high quality card cooling solutions, but much priceyier than the NV5

I myself would recommend the NV5 because it's cheaper and still does excellent, while not dumping the heat back into ur case (no offense consumer I still love ur stuff!)

The 68nu is a good card. It will game very well out of the box. No guarantee it will unlock of course. I have the leadtek version (now in my sis in laws computer), Out of the box the temps were around 48° idle and 63° under load. I kept the stock H.S. and used AS5, Idle dropped to 42-43° and load temp dropped to around 58°.
I am using the 68gt in this computer. Again leadtek, However I went with a Zalman 77cu to see how much it would help with temps. Out of the box I was getting around 55° idle and 68° under load. With the Zalman it is down to 49° idle and 63-64° under load. So while leadtek is known to have good heatsinks, The Zalman still seems to be an improvement. At least in my case it was.
I got lucky and my 68nu unlocked perfectly, It also overclocked very well, Around 410-860 with no artifacts, Honestly though I just ran it at stock speeds most of the time since it played the games I liked just fine at stock speeds.
If the 68nu unlocks it is an awesome deal for the money IMO. The difference between my 68nu and 68 gt is not that noticeable at all. If it doesn't unlock it is still a very good card that will play most games pretty well. I think the combination of the 68nu and a nice aftermarket cooling solution will do you quite well. You may not need aftermarket cooling also, Depending on how much you want to O.C. the card.

marro255 said:

9800 Pro has 12 pipes I believe, 9800 Pro is a pretty decent card, i think you can find a GeForce 6800 for around that. I think the 6600GT will be a little better than the 9800 Pro though. It seems like its not as good but it definately holds its own. If I were you I would go with the 6600GT or the 6800 which you can open the pipes and OC.

Click to expand...

^ 9800pro has 8 pipes

You can pick up a 6800NU and unlock the pipes on it for about $180.

Would the card still unlock with the stock cooler? So that in the case that it didn't work, I wouldn't bother buying an after market one?

Frozenwings said:

Would the card still unlock with the stock cooler? So that in the case that it didn't work, I wouldn't bother buying an after market one?

Click to expand...

Yes, Unlocking the card is a softmod done with Rivatuner, You can try it and see if it unlocks, If it causes artifacts you can just set it back to stock settings. The cooling has no bearing on whether or not it unlocks, The cooling will just help with overclocking the card. Here is a link to the guide for unlocking the 68nu with rivatuner.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=364465

Thanks, I believe I will invest in a 6800. I appreciate all the info guys.

Alright, I've reached another dilemma. I can get a new 9800 Pro with 256 MB of ram and a 256 bit interface for $120. I was already set on buying a 6800 for $189, but again the cheapness in me broke free. The 9800 has another 256 MB of ram, which is probably much needed on my system which only has 512 MB of ram. I was also checking out benchmarks, and surprisingly the 9800 doesn't seem to do too much worse than an unlocked/un-OCed 6800. Again, I don't play games like BF2, I have only really played City of Heroes in the past 6 months. That seemed to play fine on normal settings at 1024x768 on my 5700FX with 256 MB of ram. Now for the question, is 120 bucks a good price for this card? Will I notice a substantial difference in gaming? And there seems to be two different models: both are sapphires, the serial/model numbers are 100557-SR-RD and 100557-L-RD. Both have the same specs listed, but I figured they must have something different.

Now I know most of you will say to fork over the extra 70 bucks for the 6800, but I do not have a steady income right now. The extra 128mb of VRam is definately a plus since I will not be able to afford another 512 of Hyper X anytime soon. Thanks for the info again.

Also, how well does this card overclock? What aftermarket cooler should I invest in should I get this card? Thanks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814122212


the 256mb 9800 pro is a nice 8 pipe card for its time, i had one.

I would get the 6800le myself ...

for the price range +/- $20 nothing touches it I dont think

Yeah I've already looked into that, but I can't justify the 128 MB drop in memory from the 9800 pro for an additional 30 bucks. Perhaps I'm just setting my standards too high for my price range.

I think as long as you have a gig of system ram, the difference of 128mb and 256 is slim if any

plus you can unlock that card

yes, dont pay as much attention to the amount of ram in the graphics cards you are looking at but rather the amount of pipes/whether or not you can unlock the pipes and also the clock speeds. i would still take a 6800nu or a 6800le 128mb over a 9800 pro 256mb. the chances of unlocking the pipes are fairly good and the cards have a lot of new technologies in them. i dont think the extra 128mb in the 9800 pro jumps the performance TOO much.

blitzkrieg1110 is correct, I still have a 9800 pro 128mb and I also had a 9800 pro 256mb and they performed basically the same.

The 6800le has a 256bit bus which is more important also it has the new technologies even the newest X800's dont have.

HDR
SM3.0

The 9800 pro has 256 bit bus as well. But the 6800 still does beat it in the benches, I will admit that. I will more than likely save up for a regular 6800.