Had a nasty power spike the other night and my 8800 GTS 320MB bit the dust.

I built my rig last year with a "buy the low/decent bang-for-buck GPU now, upgrade to the next gen bang-for-buck later" mindset. I had been planning an upgrade in the next few months already but I guess mother nature thinks I should do so sooner than later.

Anyone have any thoughts about the GTX 260? I'm looking at eVGA's 896MB flavor. Both real-world reviews from hardware forums and a few geeky friends speak very highly of it... calling it the 8800 of this gen. As always, I'm looking for as much feedback and info as possible so I thought I'd toss a post up here.

A couple of months ago I got a rig with a pair of GTX 260's. Seems pretty good for the price and I haven't noticed any major bugginess so far.

Just for fun the German 1&1 of three popular "Ameran" words:

Spelling is "kaputt" with double "t".
"Angst" with a capitalized "A"
"Übersomething" with an "Ü" (get a new keyboard)

Link to a text on entymology of "kaput", just to komplettely derail this thread after 1 real answer..

http://www.forward.com/articles/kaput-a ... %99t-ours/

Goliath, did you consider the Ati HD4870 as an option? I thought it has a better value for money than the 260.

I did, but I've had better history with NVidia over ATI, so even though the price and performance is similar, I prefer Nvidia.

Also, the eVGA versions of the 260s tend to be quite overclockable to speeds where it will outperform its ATI counterpart.

my 9600gt wasn't keeping up how I wanted, I ended up getting a 9800gx2, I found one for $250 USD and as far as I know it outperforms the gtx280. I may be wrong, but from what I remember that was the case. I'd check out a 9800gx2. I snagged a pny brand that I am happy with.

I've got an ATI 3850 with 512 on board. I haven't tried anything newer then Clear sky, but that with my rig (amd 9600) ran CS on highest DX 9 detail @ 1440x900 (high monitor res) at near 30fps all the time (put it down to next lower res to keep it at a constant 30+ fps).

btw, I don't need a special keyboard to say übersomething.

You don't need a special keyboard to say Über, all you need is a keyboard with an alt-key and a num pad, with numlock on, you can just press hold "alt" and hit 0220 combo on the numpad and then release alt. It makes the Ü character.

goliathvt wrote:

I did, but I've had better history with NVidia over ATI, so even though the price and performance is similar, I prefer Nvidia.

What kind of history? Performance, support or going kaputt?

Unless you want gaming in Linux, I'd recommend a 1gb HD4870 if you must buy right now. If you do go for the GF make sure you get the 212 pipe'd one that nvidia had to bring out to be able to compete with the Radeon. It's stupid but they're not changing the name of the card even though it is roughly 8% faster in shader-bound situations than the "old" GF.

EDIT: here's a pretty good review of the extra pipe'd card.

I decided to go with the 260 GTX. I got the thing for $264 PLUS a $40 Mail In Rebate PLUS Far Cry 2, which I already have for myself but was going to also get a copy for my bro for his upcoming birthday.

Factoring all that in, the thing will cost me $174 since it's saving me the intended cost of FC2. And, the step-up program from eVGA means I can probably get the 216-piped version for the cost of shipping assuming the price drops a little bit in the next 3 months.

The lowest price I could find for the ATI 1GB HD 4870 was $290 without any rebates or bundled games, so I've effectively saved myself $116 by going w/ NVidia. Money talks.

As for the Nvidia over ATI argument: I have had all kinds of problems with ATI drivers in the past, when I had my 9800 Pro back in the Doom3 days. I was one of those frustrated people who, when trying to edit maps in D3, had to suffer through 3-5 second waits when trying to advance the camera 1 keypress in D3Edit if a particular glass texture was in view... once that texture was out of view in the editor it was back to smooth sailing... but the problem was an ATI driver snafoo that took weeks and weeks to be resolved. Those problems left a bad taste in my mouth... and I've seen quite a few issues and gripes about ATI continuing to be slow to resolve driver-related issues.

Since I will likely still have this card when the next RTCW or RAGE comes out and I plan to mod for both, I really don't want to risk any repeats of that headache.

And finally, heat and power consumption... from what I've researched, the HD 4870 and the 260GTX both overclock well, but the heat output and power consumption by the 4870 is nuts. I (will) have an Antec BP550 so I liked the fact that the 260 didn't seem to be a power and heat hog.

goliathvt wrote:

The lowest price I could find for the ATI 1GB HD 4870 was $290 without any rebates or bundled games, so I've effectively saved myself $116 by going w/ NVidia. Money talks.

as far as I am concerned, that IS the only thing to debate about! Cost!

The Happy Friar wrote:

goliathvt wrote:

The lowest price I could find for the ATI 1GB HD 4870 was $290 without any rebates or bundled games, so I've effectively saved myself $116 by going w/ NVidia. Money talks.

as far as I am concerned, that IS the only thing to debate about! Cost!

So you would rather buy a Radeon 9200SE for 10 euros over a GF260?

if that's all I needed, yes.

Ok, being picky, Cost vs Performance.

It just so happened that pretty much every time I've went to buy a card the ATI's had a better cost vs performance.

Parts came in today.

Holy crap, Crysis w/ the Natural Mod and High/Very High settings is almost like playing an entirely new game. So far it's the only game that taxes this card. FC2 looks even more gorgeous with the settings maxed out, and for the life of me I can't find a way to dip the FPS from 60Hz (Vsync enabled) on Bioshock with this puppy. Lovin' it!

goliathvt wrote:

Parts came in today.

Holy crap, Crysis w/ the Natural Mod and High/Very High settings is almost like playing an entirely new game. So far it's the only game that taxes this card. FC2 looks even more gorgeous with the settings maxed out, and for the life of me I can't find a way to dip the FPS from 60Hz (Vsync enabled) on Bioshock with this puppy. Lovin' it!

Sounds great!

The last ATI i had was a Mach32...nice to hear you are happy with your decision!

One special Nvidia tip from me, because i found this information today: Videos were always too bright on my LCD, greys washed out etc...Nvidia now implemented settings in their new drivers for dynamic range settings of full and limited. You can find them here: NV Control Panel -> Adjust video color settings -> select the monitor you want -> select "with the nvidia settings" -> Advanced -> set "Full (0-255) or Limited (16-235)" to get perfect blacks.

goliathvt wrote:

Parts came in today.

Holy crap, Crysis w/ the Natural Mod and High/Very High settings is almost like playing an entirely new game. So far it's the only game that taxes this card. FC2 looks even more gorgeous with the settings maxed out, and for the life of me I can't find a way to dip the FPS from 60Hz (Vsync enabled) on Bioshock with this puppy. Lovin' it!

Heh, excellent man. I want a new card just so I can play Oblivion @ max and just don't care about low fps. You should try STALKER if you have it. Dynamic lights always were quite problematic. It ought to be nice to play that game at max details as well.

Had a nasty power spike the other night and my 8800 GTS 320MB bit the dust.

I built my rig last year with a "buy the low/decent bang-for-buck GPU now, upgrade to the next gen bang-for-buck later" mindset. I had been planning an upgrade in the next few months already but I guess mother nature thinks I should do so sooner than later.

Anyone have any thoughts about the GTX 260? I'm looking at eVGA's 896MB flavor. Both real-world reviews from hardware forums and a few geeky friends speak very highly of it... calling it the 8800 of this gen. As always, I'm looking for as much feedback and info as possible so I thought I'd toss a post up here.

A couple of months ago I got a rig with a pair of GTX 260's. Seems pretty good for the price and I haven't noticed any major bugginess so far.

Just for fun the German 1&1 of three popular "Ameran" words:

Spelling is "kaputt" with double "t".
"Angst" with a capitalized "A"
"Übersomething" with an "Ü" (get a new keyboard)

Link to a text on entymology of "kaput", just to komplettely derail this thread after 1 real answer..

http://www.forward.com/articles/kaput-a ... %99t-ours/

Goliath, did you consider the Ati HD4870 as an option? I thought it has a better value for money than the 260.

I did, but I've had better history with NVidia over ATI, so even though the price and performance is similar, I prefer Nvidia.

Also, the eVGA versions of the 260s tend to be quite overclockable to speeds where it will outperform its ATI counterpart.

my 9600gt wasn't keeping up how I wanted, I ended up getting a 9800gx2, I found one for $250 USD and as far as I know it outperforms the gtx280. I may be wrong, but from what I remember that was the case. I'd check out a 9800gx2. I snagged a pny brand that I am happy with.

I've got an ATI 3850 with 512 on board. I haven't tried anything newer then Clear sky, but that with my rig (amd 9600) ran CS on highest DX 9 detail @ 1440x900 (high monitor res) at near 30fps all the time (put it down to next lower res to keep it at a constant 30+ fps).

btw, I don't need a special keyboard to say übersomething.

You don't need a special keyboard to say Über, all you need is a keyboard with an alt-key and a num pad, with numlock on, you can just press hold "alt" and hit 0220 combo on the numpad and then release alt. It makes the Ü character.

goliathvt wrote:

I did, but I've had better history with NVidia over ATI, so even though the price and performance is similar, I prefer Nvidia.

What kind of history? Performance, support or going kaputt?

Unless you want gaming in Linux, I'd recommend a 1gb HD4870 if you must buy right now. If you do go for the GF make sure you get the 212 pipe'd one that nvidia had to bring out to be able to compete with the Radeon. It's stupid but they're not changing the name of the card even though it is roughly 8% faster in shader-bound situations than the "old" GF.

EDIT: here's a pretty good review of the extra pipe'd card.

I decided to go with the 260 GTX. I got the thing for $264 PLUS a $40 Mail In Rebate PLUS Far Cry 2, which I already have for myself but was going to also get a copy for my bro for his upcoming birthday.

Factoring all that in, the thing will cost me $174 since it's saving me the intended cost of FC2. And, the step-up program from eVGA means I can probably get the 216-piped version for the cost of shipping assuming the price drops a little bit in the next 3 months.

The lowest price I could find for the ATI 1GB HD 4870 was $290 without any rebates or bundled games, so I've effectively saved myself $116 by going w/ NVidia. Money talks.

As for the Nvidia over ATI argument: I have had all kinds of problems with ATI drivers in the past, when I had my 9800 Pro back in the Doom3 days. I was one of those frustrated people who, when trying to edit maps in D3, had to suffer through 3-5 second waits when trying to advance the camera 1 keypress in D3Edit if a particular glass texture was in view... once that texture was out of view in the editor it was back to smooth sailing... but the problem was an ATI driver snafoo that took weeks and weeks to be resolved. Those problems left a bad taste in my mouth... and I've seen quite a few issues and gripes about ATI continuing to be slow to resolve driver-related issues.

Since I will likely still have this card when the next RTCW or RAGE comes out and I plan to mod for both, I really don't want to risk any repeats of that headache.

And finally, heat and power consumption... from what I've researched, the HD 4870 and the 260GTX both overclock well, but the heat output and power consumption by the 4870 is nuts. I (will) have an Antec BP550 so I liked the fact that the 260 didn't seem to be a power and heat hog.

goliathvt wrote:

The lowest price I could find for the ATI 1GB HD 4870 was $290 without any rebates or bundled games, so I've effectively saved myself $116 by going w/ NVidia. Money talks.

as far as I am concerned, that IS the only thing to debate about! Cost!

The Happy Friar wrote:

goliathvt wrote:

The lowest price I could find for the ATI 1GB HD 4870 was $290 without any rebates or bundled games, so I've effectively saved myself $116 by going w/ NVidia. Money talks.

as far as I am concerned, that IS the only thing to debate about! Cost!

So you would rather buy a Radeon 9200SE for 10 euros over a GF260?

if that's all I needed, yes.

Ok, being picky, Cost vs Performance.

It just so happened that pretty much every time I've went to buy a card the ATI's had a better cost vs performance.

Parts came in today.

Holy crap, Crysis w/ the Natural Mod and High/Very High settings is almost like playing an entirely new game. So far it's the only game that taxes this card. FC2 looks even more gorgeous with the settings maxed out, and for the life of me I can't find a way to dip the FPS from 60Hz (Vsync enabled) on Bioshock with this puppy. Lovin' it!

goliathvt wrote:

Parts came in today.

Holy crap, Crysis w/ the Natural Mod and High/Very High settings is almost like playing an entirely new game. So far it's the only game that taxes this card. FC2 looks even more gorgeous with the settings maxed out, and for the life of me I can't find a way to dip the FPS from 60Hz (Vsync enabled) on Bioshock with this puppy. Lovin' it!

Sounds great!

The last ATI i had was a Mach32...nice to hear you are happy with your decision!

One special Nvidia tip from me, because i found this information today: Videos were always too bright on my LCD, greys washed out etc...Nvidia now implemented settings in their new drivers for dynamic range settings of full and limited. You can find them here: NV Control Panel -> Adjust video color settings -> select the monitor you want -> select "with the nvidia settings" -> Advanced -> set "Full (0-255) or Limited (16-235)" to get perfect blacks.

goliathvt wrote:

Parts came in today.

Holy crap, Crysis w/ the Natural Mod and High/Very High settings is almost like playing an entirely new game. So far it's the only game that taxes this card. FC2 looks even more gorgeous with the settings maxed out, and for the life of me I can't find a way to dip the FPS from 60Hz (Vsync enabled) on Bioshock with this puppy. Lovin' it!

Heh, excellent man. I want a new card just so I can play Oblivion @ max and just don't care about low fps. You should try STALKER if you have it. Dynamic lights always were quite problematic. It ought to be nice to play that game at max details as well.