6600gt vs

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: Fox5

Originally posted by: ciproxr
I would but i dont trust saphire , and the other brands were over my budget

Sapphire makes ATI's name branded cards, so theoretically they should be the same as a Built By Ati card.

I had a BFG 6600 GT, and it kept freezing and locking up my games. The problem was overheating. 6600GTs run VERY fast; faster, in fact, at least in terms of pure clock speed, then almost any other NVidia based card.

I find this hard to believe. My MSI VIVO 6600GT (which I just replaced with a X800XT) had no problems with overheating, and even overclocked to 570mhz (70mhz over stock) with no problems, and memory hit 540 as well, though I forget if my 6600GT shipped with 450 or 500mhz memory. And mine was AGP, so it had the hot PCI-e to AGP bridge as well.

they all ship with 500mhz mem. agp's are downclocked to make pcie look better

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: mwmorph

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
i dunno, the 6600 is a newer card with more video decoding features and such from what i remember. and of course shader model 3 support.

? um... the x800gto came out far later than the 6600gt. ATI wanted to move some of their extra binned cores that failed to run at 16 pipes and were relegated to the 12pipe x800gtos late last year/early this year. The Nvidia purevideo requires purevideo software that costs extra from nvidia. SM3 is worthless on 6600gts, if you turn on parallax maping/HDR/Soft Shadows god help you keep those framerates playable above a 640x480 or 800x600 resolution.

I dont know about you but i;d hate to fdrop $130 on a video card and pay $30 for a video decoder that supports 5.1(the $20 package only supports 2 channel audio, the $50 package adds DTS support)

not true, just look at fear. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/09/02/x800gt_roundup/9.html
i had it at 1024x768 with stuff like parralax mapping working just fine.

new toms article onpixel shader http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/13/new_3d_graphics_card_features_in_2006/

 

[SelfishGene]

Just a quickie;
Guild Wars and Serious Sam 2 both use HDR lighting, and do so fine without any slowdowns (relatively). HDR lighting can also be used in Age of Empires 3 with the 6600GT, but damn, it's just not playable. Unfortunately AoE 3 is not exactly a well optimized game and there are hardly any vcards out now that CAN play it with full settings in a multiplayer environment.