Fastest Nvidia I can get?

Will a Geforce 6600 PCI express video card fit a pci bus or will i need a pci express bus? Also if i had to choose between an agp and pci video card, which one would you recommend?


I am also buying a new system and I want to make sure I am making the right decision.

one more question

Comparing a nvidea geforce 6600 agp, and an ati radeon 9200 agp , which one is better for sl? they both have 128 mb of memory. Would they both be ok for sl?

Ok that's it, I'm gonna spend all day thinking up wacky things to sell on ebay to Golden Palace so I can pay for two Quadro's and I'm gonna have 60FPS at 512M draw distance everywhere and I'll wave to y'all as I fly by, but you wont see it cause it'll be so fast

#1 PCI express is not regular PCI, if you get a PCIe video card you will need a new motherboard that has it. #2 ATI is not a really good card for SL. Not to say it won't work but in my experience and what I have read from others, go with the Nvidia's. Also the 6600gt blows the doors off a 9200. There isn't a whole lot of difference between a 9800 pro and a 6600gt performance wise with SL, there is some but not enough to justify the cost. On the otherhand, the cost was justified to me just with the absence of frequent crashing.

If you are getting a new card, get a 256 mb or higher if you can. SL lives or dies with video memory, more so than most other games.

I would bloody murder to see ANY website use SL as a benchmarking tool.

Actually, from a realtime 3d application (read: gaming) perspective, the Quadro isn't actually a good card. It's designed with precision in mind, while the GeForce series are designed for pure speed. If you're not doing serious graphics work, the GeForce is what you want.

well my ATI 9600 overheated. My machine was locking up every 30 minutes playing SL. I had just "gotten used" to it. So I had to get a 6800GT and man the feeling I get from not having to get up and reset my machine every 30 minutes is sweeet




Everyone I asked said this. Even though all the specs say it's faster, and that I want the fastest one, people still tell me I don't want it.

BUT I DO WANT IT! I WANT TWO OF THEM!

And if they made a card that cost $100K and it was 40GB/s - I'd want that one instead!!

Great discussion here.
I'm about to purchase a computer to record footage from SL for this documentary I'm working on; www.theidealworld.tv

The budget is 2,000 and under. Below is the machine i was looking to purchase this week. Do you guys think this machine will do a good job of reducing lag. Ideally i need to get at least 24 frames a second as much as possible in the game even though i could speed the footage up in post production. So what do you think. Would i be able to get some nice shots with this set-up.



Intel Pentium 4 660 3.6GHz HT 800MHz 2MB Cache LGA775
Motherboard
Intel D915PBLL (chipset Intel 915P)
DDR2 Memory
Dual-channel: 4 x 512 MB DDR2 533 MHz / PC4200 240-pin
Hard Drive with Serial ATA interface
300 GB Serial ATA 150 / 7200 rpm 16MB cache
Video Card (PCI Express x16)
GeForce 6600 256MB DDR [PCI-E x16] DVI / TV-out
400 Watt ATX 12V Power Supply (24-pin)

Price 1,894 .99

With that set up, you have a good chance that you will see fast frame rates most of the time.
Unfortunatly, you will still see some slowdowns in certain instances but no one outside of organizations with black helicopters are immune. Also don't neglect the internet connection, it has a lot to do with it as well.

If your buget will allow, I would opt for a second 6600 in SLI mode so you can up the quality, draw distance and FSAA filtering so it looks good on film. No one wants jaggies.

A 6800ultra with 512 might just squeeze under the budget and give a significant boost over the 6600 for shooting video. The 512 of memory plus the added speed will help a lot. 2 6600gts in SLI runs a close second.

SLI won't help SL at all, SL is incourrigably cpu/main menory bound

yes you will get anywhere from 30% lower to 90% lower, or potentially even worse, since SL uses so many textures

and for those of you who are considereing getting two low performing cards to SLI, that basically never really reaches the speed of even one of the better performing cards... the bare numbers can be found here:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=47826

but in general its always worth it to get a 6800GT over a 6600 SLI, as the two 6600's won't even reach a single 6800GT's performance, and you can always (assumin we're talkin pci express anyway) add a second *6800* later, but even then understand its not going to boost basic game performance, the onnly thing it really helps is going to be 1600x1200 with max aniso and max fsaa...

especially if yer lookin a year or two down the line, don't bother, newer cards are coming that at their basic price points will offer more features than current 6xxx series cards do, at again competative price points... SLI in its current (dual card) form just doesn't really get you as much as it used to back in the voodoo2 days because now pretty much *all* modern games are cpu bound unless you are running at extreme resolutions with maximum image quality features... and honestly thats generally not very often, especially these days, with more and more people moving to 1280x1024 lcd panels

Wow that's - Oh bit of drool fell out - a nice system. I bet raid0 10,000rpm s-ata's would still fit in your budget. But be prepared for people to tell you that "You don't need something that fast" and then expect them to tell you it's "slower" after you find specs to indicate they smoke.


Everyone who's saying quadros are slower: Show me a benchmark please. All the specs (available on the nvidia site) indicate they are MUCH faster. 30x faster throughput which is where my big bottle neck is.

So to sum up, Quadro's are the fastest and I'm covering my ears going LALALALALALA so you can't convince me otherwise.

while i have your attention! fa has a p4 2.53ghz, 1.5gb ram, and a geforce FX 5700 ultra, 128mb. is it reasonable for me to believe that by upgrading my motherboard/processor, and/or my video card to something in the $200-300 price range (geforce 6600?), i may be able to leave local lighting on *most of the time? if so, which upgrade should i focus on first? i currently have no pci express slot. is this a situation i should remedy before purchasing my next video card? SL runs great for me as is...i just really really want that local lighting!

Not sure of the exact price, living in the UK and all, but,
If you had $1200+ to spare, why not get a couple of those new GeForce 7800 GTXs, if you have the motherboard to support it?

Because these posts are from 03-21-2005, that card wasn't out. And little did they know that two 6600GT's in SLI is acutaly only slightly better than a single 6800GT speed wise. Another thing to remember, if you want to run in SLI get a 256MB card, NOT a 128, when you run in SLI it does NOT double your ram, so if you have 128mb you will always have 128mb.

What are some good websites for buying video cards and memory?

Wow i'm shocked no one pointed this out yet but GeForce and Quatro are THE SAME DAMN CARDS. The difference is certain options are enabled on teh drivers for the Quatro for 3d rendering software like Maya to perform better and a bit of processing speed. Other than that NOTHING is different because its the same chipsets. I can softmod my GeForce card into a Quatro easily, however, the options enabled for Quatros aren't all that good for gaming and sometimes slows down your games. So unless you're more hardcore in 3D modeling than gaming its not worth it to buy a Quatro setup. But if you have the money and wanna be different you can softmod a Quatro into a Geforce and take advantage of teh extra processing power without overclocking, but I don't think that is worth the pricetag.

I have just upgraded from a Geforce 6800 to Geforce 7800GTX in hopes it would improve my gaming expierence and maybe even SL. I was aiming low with the SL part and for good reason, I have benchmarked this new card in games and synthetic ones like 3dmark 2003 and 2005. It runs about twice as fast as my old card, I am very impressed, yet has NO benifit in SL. My framerates are still pretty much crappy espicaly in a crowded room. So my opnion is you dont really need to go above I would even say a 6600GT in hopes for better SL framerares, its just not gonna happen. Here are my specs that matter, for your refrence:

AMD 64 Socket 939 3500+ OC to 3800+ speed
MSI Geforce 7800GTX 256MB OC to 471/1280
2GB Corsair PC3200 ram running in dual channel CAS 2.5
Soundblaser X-FI Xtreme Music
460 Watt Enermax Power Supply, 33A on 12V Rail
Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA
MSI Neo 4 Platinum (nForce 4 Chipset) SLI

Second life is almost entirely cpu bound once you get into the geforce 4 series. Better cards let ya run higher rez and nice features like fsaa, but they will not help yer base framerate much, if at all, unless you are jumping from extremely sub-par consumer cards, or built in video

Makes sense eltee, I agree with you 100%. Hopefully this will make those who want better FPS in SL not choose the best video card. But Doom 3 wise its a great choice

Thanks Eggy
Soon I will be the owner of a GeForce 6800 256 MB PCIe 16X card.

Then my specs will be:

Pentium 4 3.0 GHz 630 2MB L2 Cache
GeForce 6800 256 MB PCIe 16X
1 GB DDR Dual-Channel memory
200 GB Sata HD with 7200 RPM 8MB Cache

I have a SLI mother board and OMG i only running one gt6600 gb and its really fast. I am hoping for a duel 7800 GB(s) by atleast by april when prices drops. and 2 more giga or memory.

I got my new video card today and its an incredible improvement. I can turn on options I've never been able to use before, there is even less lag and the map loads a lot faster. But thats when I'm not around anyone else so it might be different in a crowd or a very full sim.