Im getting a graphics card

Uhg... correction. I am actually running a 6600GT 128MB.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814125175

This is a significant difference... the GT version is somewhat faster. Don't let the card's memory throw you a curve. It is important, but the chipset is the primary consideration. Regardless, the card you are looking at is going to be a huge improvement over your onboard graphics.

I just picked up an eVGA nVidia GeForce 6800 PCI-E. (256MB)

Its working very well for me in SL, vitually no graphics-related lag issues. Of course if I maxed everything out I would still get them. I cant remember exact cost, seems like it was someting like $168 on newegg, this was actually about a month ago... with the newer 7900 series, this price may have gone down since then.

Definitly worth a look. Although, from a personal perspective, if you want an entry-to-mid-level pure gaming card, I would suggest starting with a 6800GT.

Its only a 128MB card, but the clock and memory speed is considerably faster.

I believe that it has more pixel pipelines as well, but don't hold me to that.

Otherwise, yeah that card you picked out is quite good... I am a little concerned about Gigabyte however, I would recommend either XFX or eVGA, from my past professional experiences. (Cheap, and good warranty coverage).

I run a 5900 Ultra GOLDEN SAMPLE. Gainward are the kings of video card makers and that site only has one crappy GF4 Gainward card.

But the main performance enhancer for my system was an extra Gig of RAM bringing me to 1.5Gb DDR333 =P

Gainward who?! Whats a "golden sample"?

Im pretty sure you were talking about Matrox when you said kings of video card manufacturers... Seriously look up some of the specs on their professional card lines. Not for gaming, of course, but still... Wooooaaahh!

Gaming cards, I'm not talking professional OpenGL/Programmable shader cards for VFX work.

If you haven't heard of Gainward then you don't know of te Golden Sample card that take any card of the same type and trances it. Golden Sample card are made of better components have been tested to be stable at higher speeds.

Google Gainward =P

You also consider having a look at this roundup of current graphics cards: http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2006/test_geforce_7600_gt_7900_gt_7900_gtx/18/#abschnitt_doom_3
Though it is german, the charts should be readable by everyone. Important for sl is the doom3 test, as doom3 uses opengl and we will likely see the use of more opengl features in the future.
I don't know, which resolution you use, but important for a new card could be to being able to have anti aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) on as this gives you better quality. So, look at this chart e.g. 1280x1024 AA AF on the above mentioned page. Don't forget at this point that testing cards is always done with a top nodge system to avoid the bottleneck of a slow cpu and lacking memory. Furthermore as sl still uses much software rendering a fast cpu is here important as well.
Interesting in this review is also the noise level of your card. I wouldn't wanna have katrina under my desk all day long. Therefore see here: http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/hardware/grafikkarten/2006/test_geforce_7600_gt_7900_gt_7900_gtx/26/#abschnitt_lautstaerke
Lautstaerke means noise level. There are two charts for this. One with Idle(Windows) means 2D windows use, the other is "Last" and means full load in 3D mode.

In addition to gainward and golden sample. Other card manufacturers produce higher clocked cards as well and I assume that there is no reason why these cards shouldn't work as stable as others.

Regards,
Leff.

Im not really gonna be playing lots of gfx intensive games. Also, I dont want something that runs really hot, so I have to add a case fan which would make it noisier.

The thing with Gainward's golden sample is they've been tested from the normal production pipeline and thus are selected as being more stable at higher speeds (There's always variances in the production of some things). I usually prefer GS as I know it's a good solid card that can take whatever I throw at it. Other manufacturers don't tend to offer that stability, my old Asus had serious heat issues with even slight overclocking even if the 4400 was apparently a vary overlcockable GPU.

As for anti-aliasing, no-one puts that on unless they're running a serious peice of hardware, and to me there isn't much advantage in doing so other than halving your framerate. With the slowness of the Secondlife client already, i doubt AA and AF are gonna help. And those charts are by GPU, I don't see any mention of manufacturers, unless they're using ATI/Nvidia stock.

Can't help that I run mine windowed at 1280x960 =P

If you aren't in the pricepoint for gainward, then asus aren't that bad.

Sorry if I'm getting preachy about gainward. I do totally love thier cards, I always look for gainward wen upgrading.

It's fine if you love your card and think gainward is the best one. But others, as XFC and eVGA have discovered this market niche too and also provide higher clocked modells. And higher clocking with propper cooling and better board parts is quite fine but a total different thing to overclocking of a normal clocked card which is of your own risk.

And for anti-aliasing and filtering. AFAIK these things are mainly handled by driver and gpu hardware. And if your 5900 can't provide enough performance at your resolution for this, then of course it's much slower. That's what all these charts say. Higher quality slows down your card. And if you run sl with 1280x960 windowed and the full screen is probably even larger, than your card seems already to be running at it's limits. The question is, how much is the performance penalty to pay and how much quality do you gain by this. And newer cards show it has become acceptable to turn these settings on.

For me, the concrete chipset is important. What label is on it, well, boardpartners get the chips and a reference design and build their own stuff with that. But a card by any manufacturer from stock should be stable and perform mainly quite the same (if it is clocked the same). If you don't go for a real cheapy it's not that important what name is on it. I personally have ordered a 7600GT by XFC that is slightly clocked above the reference clock. Thats fine for me, a card quite fast, is already clocked faster and can be turned on even more (hopefully)... and gives good performance results with quality settings on.

Regards,
Leff.

Meh, screenshot for no reason



Wii!

I am getting a GeoForce 6600 for 149 hope all goes well in installation.

Well, Frys wanted $180 for a PNY brand GeForce 6600.

I'll order the Gigabyte brand one off Newegg for $100. Dont see what the difference is....probably not woth 50-80 bucks to me.

So, in order to soothe my urge to buy something, I bought 1GB of Kingston RAM for $89. Now I will have 1.5GB. I was surprised how cheap it was, when I checked at Crucial.com, it was going to be $179. Crucial is a much better brand of course, but I doubt it makes much difference here.

Well, I went to Frys, and they wanted $180 for a PNY brand GeForce 6600.

Im going to order the Gigabyte brand one off of Newegg for $100, Im not sure what the difference would be if any, but I doubt its worth 50-80 bucks.

Anyhow, to satisfy my urge to purchase something for my computer, I bought 1GB of Kingston ram. Its something Ive been needing, cause I have to watch how many programs I have open at once, especially if im using photoshop, and Firefox is a memory hog, neverming the RAM issues with SecondLIfe. . My computer takes dual channel ram, so you have to have RAM in pairs, but my computer accepts two pairs, so now I have 1.5GB of RAM. Only cost me $80 too, which surprised me, although I know Kingston isnt the best RAM, I think thats mostly if you are going to overclock though. When I checked on 1GB of ram at crucial.com, it was going to cost around $170, but I know Crucial is prolly one of the best, so whatev. Works for me

Im gonna be all set here once I get that card

Kingston is actually excellent. Where I work, we use it in all of our builds, and I htink there have been maybe 3 bad pairs in the last 5 years. And this is from hundreds of pairs. So enjoy.

Would you recommend that I deleate norton and any ad blocker (Since it seems mearly disabling these programs does not work) in order to install a graphics card?

No.

Ok thanks

my question is , where are you getting it? I saw just recently a local store trying to sell an NvIDIA GeForce 4400 for $75.00 , ??

Over at www.pricewatch.com/Imagestore.com though, I was able to track down a GeForce 6200 and it works great and only for $75.00 (including shipping).

So I'm jsut curious asto WHERE people get thier vid cards at ( I've got to get another for the second monitor on this system)

To debate about higher clocking/overclocking is not really useful as everyone has it's own understanding of the money he wanna spend and the risk he wanna take for an improvement.

And for anisotropic filtering i will state it with wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_FX

That is what I actually meant. Never geforce cards provide a better tradeoff (quality *and* performance) with filtering.

And just give it a short look on af filtering you might wanna know and more to see:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1157434,00.asp (This address might give you an err 500, just reload and it should work fine). What use has a huge drawing distance if everything not viewed from the right angle is blurred.
If you wanna have that you might consider buying a new gainward card ...
In my eyes, as I am spending bucks on an upgrade, of course, I want it all... =)

Regards,
Leff.

I don't have the money to push at a top-of-the-line card. All i know is I've never had a problem witha gainward card, even overclocked. I'm just surprised when i say Gainward I get blank faces from people who are talking about all manner of "awesome" cards.

I played Doom3, Half life 2 and other various games on this card with almost max settings with no problems, so it's good for me for now. The main problem with SL is CPU usage, so if I want to boost SL's performance I'd look at the CPU.

I always prefer to talk about specific chipsets. These mark the basic power of a card. I read about gainward and their old stuff looks pretty impressive with double coolers in company colors who really stay quiet or specific water cooling. But nowadays their cards on the website look pretty much the same as other higher clocked cards. It's hard to decide what they mention on their website is still valid or a marketing speak of gone days.. . Overclocking of geforce based cards has in my eyes become quite mainstream with a good overclocking potential of the geforce chipsets and improved tools or builtin driver capabilities.



In the tech issues area there is a thread that collects performance rating for card specs. I will go there as soon as my new ordered parts arrive and report how the new stuff performs.

Regards,
Leff.

Circuit City 149.00 for eVGA (I think thats their name) NVidia Geoforce 6600

newegg.com has great prices. I get my parts there if I can't get them through work. And sometimes the newegg prices are lower than *cost* at work.

Yay! Came today.

eVGA Geforce 6800 PCI-E 256MB from newegg for $124

OMG, its amazing!

Ive goe from 8fps with my graphics settings set at the lowest settings to 30-45fps with them at medium, and everything is so smooth!

Yay!