6600gt vs 6800

Which is better for games like oblivion and fear.

Asus Geforce 6800 256bit 256mb
XFX Geforce 6600gt 128bit 256mb

I know these arnt great cards but it is a straight choice between the two and the guy im building this pc for has a very limited budget. The interesting thing is that the 6800 was cheaper even though the 256bit cards are normally expensive compared to the 128bit cards.

Thanx

 

I had the same question a long time ago. And posted about it on HWF, you can find the link here

But here's the summary from my findings,

The 6800 has more pipelines than the 6600. Although the 6600 has higher clock speeds, the lack of pipelines will make it perform less than the 6800 card from Asus.

All 6800 cards have 12-16 pipes and 256bit memory where the 6600s have 8 pipes and 128 bit memory.

BigB once told me this;

 

This is a 6600GT vs a non gt 6800

is the Gt going to make the 6600 better than the non gt 6800.

 

That sums it up though it's a plain jane 6800 he's talking about, not the GT version which is about twice as fast. Either way the 6800's a good bit faster, neither is going to handle Oblivion or FEAR on highest settings naturally but you might get FEAR on High with a moderate resolution and probably no AA on the 6800, and for Oblivion Medium is about as far as I'd expect. Could be wrong thoug, there's lot of things you can tweak.
The nice thing about the 6800 though is, at least for the AGP version you have a very high chance of unlocking it's 4 extra pipelines and 1 extra vertex shader that have been disabled, with riva tuner so you can essentually have a low clocked 6800GT. The memory clock on the PCIe 6800 is especially low (600MHz at stock) but you should get 700 out of it anyway.
To sum it up the extra memory bandwidth and 4 additional pipelines (before unlocking) make it a good purchase for a tight budget.
But for that money I think he's be better off with a 7600GS, they run cheap, you can get one for under $125, and I've seen $55 after rebates (sorry I realize this is for us UnitedStates guys). But the point is you should be able to find them pretty cheap.

 

Any 6800 > any 6600. The 6800's have more pipelines, which has them trumping the 6600's any time.

 

Though don't get confused if you see a 6800XT of a very rare 6800LE, those are 8 pipe cards that aren't really going to give a major speed increase, though they are 256-bit.