Have an 8800 GTS how to upgrade

Buy a new card for more $ or buy another 8800 for SLI?

New card. That thing is old.

Whats your budget? Current system (create a signature?)? etc....

Haven't really set a budget yet but I'd say $200 or so. I really don't play a whole lot of video games anymore but want to be able to run BF3 without having to put it in stick figure mode.

I don't get off on framerates anymore, as long as its playable and look decent.

The system right now is in limbo as the board died (i think) and will be replacing it today (I hope), that said.

C2D E6600, had it OC'ed to 2.7ghz
4gig ram
yatta yatta

I'd recommend a GTX 560 Ti, but I don't know if that'll bottleneck your system or not. Either way, it's a great GPU to upgrade. It seems to have an awesome bang for the buck, but I can't attest to this myself as I've never owned one.

Definitely look into it. The GTX 570 is another option; however, this GPU is even more powerful than the GTX 560Ti, so it could bottleneck your system even more.

provided your system can take it the best card in that price range is the 560Ti on nVidia's side and the 6950 1gb on AMD's side.

Both are good cards but they have slightly different features that may make one worth it over the other to you.

+1 560Ti and see if you can overclock your cpu more 3.0GHz

What is your OS?

Hey, gonna side-jack here, sorry, but I'm in the same boat as the OP (and keeping things within a single thread seems to make more sense, especially for other users in the same boat). Currently got a 8800 GTS 640 and was thinking of replacing it so as to prolong the life of my current system (See New Rig) as much as possible. Being a student sucks balls money wise....I miss the days when I could splurge 350 euro for a video card.

Main games I play atm are Eve Online (multiple clients!) and World of Tanks. The 8800 gets sensitive when running 3 clients, so have everything on low. If I fire up a video in the background the whole thing locks up, so that kind of sucks. I'm looking to expand from the 3 clients to about 5, so any upgrade card I get would have to handle that (but still be within the power recommendations for the OCZ 520W PSU).

I don't really want to spend 200 euro on a video card for an older system. It seems a waste, so if anyone could recommend a decent upgrade for a resonable price that'd be awesome, thanks! I might even give any second-hand cards a look.

Here's a list that I usually use as a reference:
http://cdromland.nl/producten/20/Videokaarten

100 Euro = +- 133 USD

Edit: Current Monitor 24" Samsung SyncMaster P2470. I keep my Eve Clients in a 1024x768 Windowed Mode, makes alt tabbing between clients much easier.

wingman99 said:

+1 560Ti and see if you can overclock your cpu more 3.0GHz

What is your OS?

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I very likely will be building an Ivy Bridge system in the coming months, if that changes anything.

Another vote for the GTX560Ti here.... but what 8800 do you have, is it the G80 based 320/640 or the G92 based 512MB version? Either way, it is def. time for an upgrade, and a GTX560 will be a HUGE upgrade for you.

6870. And I wouldn't.
IMO once you hit about 4870 a C2D is really going to bottleneck the works. If you can hold a BUS speed of 500 or so, and a CPU speed at least 3.5Ghz, maybe you could be in business for a 5 or 6 series card. I still wouldn't.

Do you have a P45 chipset? Anything older it's going to be hard to squeeze that high a BUS out of.

6870 is marginally worse than 560Ti but given the prices today it is the smarter buy. Also given the bottleneck of the older system arcitechture here I don't think the slight difference between the cards would show up (perhaps 1 frame/second for the $50 difference).

Personally I'd track down something like a used 4890 for 70 bucks.

Tspek said:

I very likely will be building an Ivy Bridge system in the coming months, if that changes anything.

Click to expand...

I would not waste money on a cheap used 4890 video card because you are building an Ivy Bridge in the coming months.