What kind of PCI-E Video card works best?

I am buying a new amd 64 3400 with 2 gigs ram

What Pci-e card have people had good results with?


Thanks

Kurt Ludd

HEY KURT!!! THRILLED to see your question because I recently found myself in a similar situation.

It's been over a month, and my Nvidia 7800GT is treating me fabulously. It's not just any 7800GT either, but a factory-overclocked one by eVGA. Great company with their service. I chose this card after looking at a lot of other ones (including 6800GS) because I spend so much of my First Life on Second Life, the price was right, and it's just an all-round star performer. (If you really want to stretch you can go for a 7800GTX, but that was a price premium not worth it to me because I don't run at superhigh resolutions, and at this point, SL is very CPU-bound so you'll do yourself better with allocated $$$ getting a fast main processor.)

The 7800GS is new too and may be a good bargain choice, but I haven't tried one for myself...

I wrote about my experiences here in case you're wondering how it all came together for me. I stepped into this explicitly hoping to clarify some of the ambiguities about "what will run SL" well, and also with the hopes that my experiences could help other Resis.

All the best!

I'd say if you're on a budget go for a XFT brand 6800GS or a 7800GS. They have higher clock speeds then the GT models, though, their extra pipelines are disabled. The XFT ones come overclocked (not no wimpy 25mhz like most others, but actually 50 - 80mhz faster on the GPU & 150 - 250mhz more on the VRAM) with room for a bit more overclocking. The stock overclocked XFT 6800GS performs just as well as the 6800GT according to benchmarks and when overclocked a bit further the 6800GS performs as well as a non-OC'd 7800GS. Hooked up in SLI they get even more disgustingly fast. When someone finds out where on the cards you have to mod to unlock the extra 4 pipelines people will be searching like mad for them because they'll out perform their GT cousins for less money.

I got a Nvidia Quadro FX540 with 128m and with my althalon 3200 i get mostly 35/40fps. I upgraded from a PCI Geforce 5400 giving 5 fps. What a difference!

What if you're not on a budget? ... what is the best card avalable for sl?

Well, if you're NOT on a budget, go get yourself an SLI motherboard if you don't already have one and get two 7800GTXs. If you're so loaded that I should be kissing your butt and begging for loans, get the 7800GTX 512MBs and an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard. I can tell you my bottleneck is my A64 X2 4400+, because once everything is loaded on my screen, I run 8x SLI AA and 16x AF in populated areas and rarely fall below 50FPS.

When your bottleneck is a $500 processor, you have a good system.

Edit: I have 2 7800GTXs in SLI config on an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard and 2GBs G.Skill PC 4000 memory.

Dual overclocked 7800 GTX cards in SLI mode with watercooling to deal with all the heat.

umm that they said, nvidia 6/7 series :>

Theres a new 7800 out with passive heatsinks , wonder how it performs and how hot : p

( Asus GeForce 7800GT TOP SILENT 256MB GDDR3, PCI-Express, 2xDVI-I/ViVo/HDTV )

lazy google search > http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=2419

"EN7800GT Top Silent is overclocked. The GPU is only modestly overclocked at 420MHz, but the memory – which coincidentally happens to be 1.6ns compared to 2.0ns on most 7800GT cards – is clocked at 1.24GHz, that’s 240MHz over stock speeds."

Kinda impossible to run this with sli tho o.o

I just asked for this: GeForce 7800 GTX 512

thanks for your help

I would only be running the system for 6 hours a day at the most - usually 4 ... maybe heat won't be a problem then?

Heat only gets rediculous if you're in SLI, because a bit of a "heat tunnel" forms between the cards. I'm going to have to go to watercooling because even with 7 50cfm fans in my tower i still get heat spikes over 120 degrees on my video cards.

If you've got 1 7800gtx 512, it won't be quite as quick as 2x7800gtx 256's but for SL purposes you won't see much difference. I suggest EVGA or XFX brands.

I ditched a XFX card for asus, noisy buggers, ~.~, just a note those Asus cards come with 3 or 5 years warranty , i forget , my motherboard has 3