motor

irrational_i · 05-31-2005, 07:32 AM

Originally Posted by tuffguy

Originally Posted by irrational_i

I work with hardware often and the difference between the 6600GT and 6800GT is not that great

I think SLi is not that great, unless you plan to run your games in 1600X1200. Then the SLi will shine.

You obviously don't work with hardware that often, or you wouldn't say that.. :P

To see what games SLI works in:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...0u-sli_15.html

It depends on whether the game can make use of SLI:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...0u-sli_22.html

Notice what happens when you turn on the visual goodies:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2284&p=7

3DMark:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...0u-sli_31.html

Move your mouse over the second pic:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2281&p=2

I have read most of those articles. To explain my comment quickly:
The 6800GT is easily the best performance/money ratio. The 6600GT runs fine in real-world apps and is MUCH cheaper. Most people I know run games in 1024X768 on 17" CRT monitors. In this case the 6800GT is still much faster than 6600GT, but you can't really observe it. Games we often play are Warcraft3, Neverwinter Nights, Quake3, Morrowind. The difference is hardly noticable.

I recently upgraded to a 19" LCD monitor and now I would also prefer a 6800GT to run in high res with everything turned on full.
If you run games at over 1280X1024 res, then you will start noticing the differences in the newest games like Doom3 and Half Life2 with the 6600GT still being a touch slow.
Remember the 6600GT is also GDDR3 memory, not he DDR of the base 6600 or 6800. It still suffers from fewer pixel pipes and narrower memory bandwidth. This being the reason it drops far behind in very high resolutions.

When you hit 1600X1200 the SLi comes into play with a noticable difference. The difference between 80fps and 50fps is not always noticable and paying double for an SLi setup is not always worth it.

So my argument is that if you have the money - go for it. If it is an issue, the 6600GT will give adequate performance at half the 6800GT price.
And I'd rather go 6800GT than 6600GT SLi.

And of course if you have sucky RAM and slow cpu, the gfx card won't come into its own. You need a complete machine. :D