Just on the off chance that I need to buy a new motherboard, and therefore a new vid card I decided to look around at what prices were like these days. I was very pleased to see that the 6800GS and amazingly the X850XT were both at $169 off newegg. Darn cheap, especially since the X850XT was once $500+! Anyway my money is on the 6800GS as it performs very much like the 6800Ultra (when it's OCed a bit) and has shader model 3 and SLI support. I imagine the X850XT is a little faster in some tests besides HL2 but if it's not much I'd go with the 6800GS (or another similarly priced card) as I could bump up performance bit time if I needed to by adding another card. If you want to look into something else I have pretty narrow spec demands: 256MB 256-bit interface GDDR3 HD support would be nice Under $200 is ideal, no more than $250. Good clock speeds, like 400/1000 or better. If there are two cheapo cards that would fall in this price range yet yield >6800Ultra performance I'd concider that too. Thanks for that help
I'd probably go with the GS. I've seen how they perform in games and read nothing but good reviews. Plus, SM3 looks brilliant!
I would go for the 6800GS if you already have an SLI motherboard, if you don't have an SLI motherboard and would need to get one.. i would buy the X850XT & a Crossfire compatible motherboard (2x ATI cards @ PCI-e x16). A close friend got hooked on games later on in life and decided to build himself a computer (or get me to do it..) so he brought a Sapphire Crossfire 939 Motherboard, AMD64 4400 X2, 1GB 2-2-2-5 memory and some other ridiculously nice parts but he put two X850XT's in.. and i swear it performs better than a friends 7900.. But then it depends on what games you're playing If you're like me and only play DOD:Source online, you'd be fine playing with an X300 128MB
Thanks dudes, yeah I was thinking that the 6800GS would be the way to go as all the X850XT's seem to be really loud, according to the reviews. The X850Pro I used in my friends computer at first was a like a wind tunnel and it uses the same cooler.
After checking out some sites it looks like the 7600GT is the new mid/high end baby. It's only 128-bit but with massive clock speeds up to 580/1500 out of the box it screams past both the 6800GS and 6800GT in the tests I've seen. Good stuff for under $200:good: