Upgrade to 8800gts?

[orwell84]

The downside to upgrading to a 22" widescreen monitor is the extra load it puts on my GPU. I am currently running: AMD 4000, 2G RAM, 7800 GTX. I know that my processor might be a bottleneck if I upgrade to the 8800gts, but the games that are slow seem to do much better in lower resolution.


I was wondering if upgrading to a 8800 GTS would be a worthwhile upgrade. Also, would a processor upgrade help at all. I am using a DFI NF4 board.

My system is struggling with games like Armed Assault and Bioshock, though both are playable at lower resolutions.

Thanks for the help.

 

[daveybrat]

Your cpu will not be a huge bottleneck. At higher resolutions, you should get up to double the performance of the card you have now. I know because i went from a 7900GS to an 8800GTS.

You would benefit far more from a video card upgrade than a cpu upgrade. A 4000+ should still be sufficient for today's games. And you can always upgrade that next if you really wanted to. But for now, GPU > CPU!

 

[stnicralisk]

I have a bottom end conroe and I have no problems playing the latest and greatest (bioshock, oblivion with texture mods and parallax) at 1600 x 1200 with at leaast 8x AF and my frame rates stay fairly high, never dipping below 60 in bioshock (except sometimes if i snap about 50 pictures really quickly) and never below 40 in oblivion with all the mods. As long as your CPU can handle the physics in the game then in general bumping your CPU speed up only gives a marginal boost.

 

[Pain999]

If your running at 2.4 GHz it could help a little if you could overclock to around 2.6 GHz, but it is not holding you back as much as the video card. Even if you eventually upgrade to a new cpu/motherboard a 8800 would not go wasted.

 

[orwell84]

Any advantage in going with the 640mb version over the 320mb?

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: orwell84
Any advantage in going with the 640mb version over the 320mb?

better for higher resolutions. More memory helps with high rez textures and surfaces.

Although some say that fast memory clocks can help overcome the size limitation.

 

[betasub]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Although some say that fast memory clocks can help overcome the size limitation.

Don't believe them, cmdr! Video memory bandwidth isn't a substitute for available video texture memory: exceeding vRAM limit causes texture caching to system memory. An analagous situation is having fast system RAM, which is great if you don't exceed its capacity, but not much of an advantage if you hit its commit limit and are forced to access virtual memory on the hard drive.

 

[cputeq]

I'm almost in your situation, but worse! I run a 7800GT. Yesterday I got tired of waiting and ordered a 8800GTS 640MB version.

I run right now a 24" monitor. While nice, it's horrible trying to game on it because I can never run native resolution...although the scaling on the monitor is excellent, even if I run at lower resolutions my poor 7800GT is so slow I don't get much in the way of satisfactory FPS.

I went ahead and bit the bullet, payed more for the 640MB card, because I would really hate to start running out of texture memory with newer games appearing, and higher resolutions seem to generally fair better on the 640MB card, depending on which benchmarks you peruse.

I typically buy a new video card every 2.5ish years, so I figure the 8800 will last me at least until then.

 

[orwell84]

I'm leaning toward the 640 mb version too. It sucks finally having a decent sized monitor and having to turn down the resolution. Which version did you buy? I like EVGA cards myself.

 

[cputeq]

Yeah I got the base model eVGA for like $379 with $20 MIR. I went with eVGA because I know their customer support is generally dependable.

I could have gotten a slightly overclocked MSI card for the same price, but some of the 'Egg reviewers were complaining of support/RMA difficulty with the company.

eVGA has a pretty active forum (both customers and employees), and a lifetime warranty (if you register the card!), so I went that route.

I must admit, though, a few years back I had a very pleasant RMA situation with PNY, so they may also be someone to look at...not sure what their warranty length is though.

 

[ctk1981]

I went from a SLI 7800GT CO setup to a 8800GTS 640MB from BFG Tech. I run a 24" monitor....with the sli setup it still couldn't play most of my games well at the native resolution. In fact some games I just straight up quit playing until I got the new video card. One was Vietcong 2, which now plays very smooth....Oblivion I can run on high settings and some AA at native resolution with no problems. Stalker....dunno yet, I'll jump back in once I finish up vietcong 2, but stalker was a real torture on those old 7800GT's....I'm betting it plays quite nicely with the new card.

On the other hand I really need to get going on putting the rest of the upgrade in. C2D chip, Asus A5K board, etc etc.....on a aging 3800 socket 939 thats stood up to the test of time well enough for me. Just figured it was time to upgrade while everything is relatively cheap.

 

[orwell84]

What about waiting for the 9800gts? Apparently they are coming out in Novemeber. Or I could get an EVGA 8800gts and use their stepup program.