Hi to you all. I am new here and not much knowledge with the pc chat techs. But I would appreciate some guidance. I have recently upgraded from my nvidia 5600fx and now have the option of 2 cards, 1 is the nvidia 6600gt 256 mb or a radeon x700 pro 256 mb. I have also bought the game 'Fear', and would like to know is there a better card between them to play this? I am asking this as the local pc component shop sells these both the same price, well the radeon is £10 less. I am mainly up for the games use. The pc has an Athlon 3200+ 64 with 2gb of ddr 400 memory if this helps with an answer. any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks for reading, Craig
The 6600GT performs better in most games than the X700, so you're better off spending the extra money for it.
Yeah the X700Pro has a memory speed of like 980MHz (with Turbo Enabled, it's an overclocking option in the software you get with some X700Pro's) and the 6600GT is like 1GHz stock, plus the 6600GT has a faster core as well I think, it runs at 500MHz (not too sure on the X700Pro's core speed) The 6600GT's are pretty good overclockers, get a nice cooler and you'll reach much faster speeds, had mine @ 600/1200 before, ran totally stable through benchmarks and Far Cry. As for FEAR I think with that CPU and RAM and a 6600GT you'll be able to run it fairly well, medium settings I reckon.
Agreed The X700 Pro is basically a revamped 9800 with 128Bit bus instead of 256Bit, has 425Mhz Core and 864Mhz memory speed at default which is considerably slower than that of the 6600GT. In addition the 6600GT is still pretty much the king of mainstream.
Hi, many thanks for you all taking the time to read and respond. This info means a great deal to me as I dont want to buy ' A Donkey ' of graphic cards.... not that I am calling the radeon a donkey, its just that the nvidia seems to get a very good remark. thanks craig
It's what we're here for, I was thinking of gettin an X700Pro and made a thread about it here and in the end decided on a 6600GT, I had to buy a new cooler for it (I'm a noise freak and hate loud computers now) so made a thread here, I chose the Vantec iCEBERQ 5 Permium VGA Cooler and it's awesome, virtually silent so I'm happy.
hi, OK.... whats with this cooler thing ? Should I get one? How much and what does it do, apart from cool it. Thanks craig
Well it depends, stock coolers can be loud, and I hate noise, you might get one and have a rather quiet cooler on it, but one I got (XFX AGP) had a really loud cooler, so I bought a new one to lessen noise (the one I got is virtually silent) and cooler the card better than a stock cooler. PCI-e 6600GT's can use Arctic Cooling VGA Coolers, these are apparently very good, meant to be damn near silent and have great cooling abilities. The AGP 6600GT can't use the Arctic Cooling VGA Cooler because of the AGP to PCI-e Bridge chip on the card.
Under normal circumstances the 6600GT has only 128MB's of vram which is sometimes a problem with games, such as FEAR, but the extra 128MB's will really help you out in the future and you'll have no problem out doing the X700Pro. However I can't help but suggest getting an X800GT if you can afford it, that league of cards is better than both the X700Pro and 6600GT, and the X800GTO is even better still though by this point we're talking about almost $170 which may be too much though the deal is still amazing for the performance gain you'll get with it. As for the cooler I wouldn't worry about it, changing from the stock cooler standard on all modern graphics cards, to a third party one will void your warrenty and the risk is fairly high of damaging the GPU. Just do a little reseach and read reviews to make sure the cooler isn't too loud to begin with and stock will otherwise be fine and allow for decent overclocks so long as your core temperature doesn't exceed about 80* C.
Hi, Well I bought it today. Nvidia 6600gt made by Xpert Vision, is this any good ? £125 for the 256 mb. Should i leave it or have a ' Tweek ' as I believe the term is. thanks craig
Tweaking (Overclocking) can be done with a stock cooler, it will probably invalidate your warranty and a stock cooler will only allow a certain overclock as they're not usually the best at keeping things cool, they keep it at a reasonable temperature but with an overclock the card can generate more heat.
WOW, Crikey !! Installed the card and running it in the highest setting frame...... I think this is the best, quote me if I'm wrong. anyway many many thanks for the advise on this . I believe this is the best money Ive spent on the pc yet, absolutely fantastic card. thanks again Craig.
