Need help on choosing a Video Card

I vote for the eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS. I have one and think it is wonderful.

I think he's got the idea that he can get better performance if he spends more, but his question was between the 3 graphics cards up there at the moment.

I'd say that I personally own an X1950Pro, and I believe its pretty good. I can play C&C3 with everything on Ultra High, but it lags on large battles. Bringing it down to no AA and everything on High solved the problem (I might get away with a few things on Ultra High, but I couldn't be bothered tinkering).

You get what you pay for, so like the others said, if you can afford xxx, go for xxx.

I'd stick with the ATI offerings on the list. I won't go for the 8600 or below, but the 8800 series should perform much better than anything up there at the moment, but you'd be paying for that.

And you DON'T have to buy eVGA, I'm still absolutely puzzled to why everyone is recommending them, as I see that only the trade-up policy puts them above the competition; and thats something that most people will not take advantage of anyway. They are equal to other brands when it comes to speed and quality.

Unless you see yourself taking advantage of the trade up policy, go with the brand thats:
a) cheapest, or
b) best bundle, and most importantly
c) easily available.
Sometimes its worth paying a few dollars more to get a bundled game you'd play, instead of a software suite/game you'd never use.

7950 GT for sure.
Ok for overclocking as well. The Ati 1950 are notoriously bad overclockers!

Another reason to go ATI:

http://www.steampowered.com/ati_offer1a/

CMH said:

Another reason to go ATI:

http://www.steampowered.com/ati_offer1a/

Click to expand...

yeah....i guess. Although nvidia did the same didn't they with Splinter Cells and a few others.

Personally i have no allegiance to either. I just buy what a good deal and good performance at the time.
I bought a non-brand 7900GS 256mb and they notoriously overclock to speeds well beyond 7900GT without problem.

Thanks for the suggestions and advice so far, guys, please keep them coming. I've looked into the 8800 series already, but it's out of my price range at the moment. I could, however, be able to buy a GeForce 8600 GTS, if people would suggest it over the cards I have posted above. I also wasn't planning on overclocking very much, if at all.

And lol, CMH, you drive a hard bargain. That steampowered deal sure is tempting. =D

CMH - I think people recommend EVGA because they are reasonably priced and they are often clocked faster than other companies versions, right?

Another quick question, which is more important: Memory Clock Speed or Memory Size?

SNGX1275 said:

CMH - I think people recommend EVGA because they are reasonably priced and they are often clocked faster than other companies versions, right?

Click to expand...

I always recommend eVGA because I've had great expierences with them. Not to mention that they are the true nVIDIA card.

Memory clock is more important in general. If you play at high res with lots of AA/AF, then memory size becomes important, but as long as you have 256MB, and you don't play at larger than 1280x1024, then memory clock and bus are far more important than size. The X1950XT is the best videocard in that list. It bests the 2 there, and it's also better than the 7900GTX by a small margin. It's the second best DX9 card ever, just after the X1950XTX. I definitely recommend it. I have a 7950GT, which is (to me) extremely powerful, especially compared to my old card. But I would have bought a X1950XT(X) if the store had them at a reasonable price.

SNGX1275 said:

I think people recommend EVGA because they are reasonably priced and they are often clocked faster than other companies versions, right?

Click to expand...

If that is true, then I don't see why I shouldn't be recommending eVGA myself. I'll look into it later.

I mentioned it earlier and I'll mention it again: the 8600 series perform less than the X1950Pro, but they're apparently priced for that difference (ie: cheaper). They also support DX10, which IMO is useless for at least another year or so. Even then, we're not sure how much of a performance hit would DX9 cards perform in those games, or if it would perform at all, but I reckon games would still support DX9 cards for the next couple of years before DX9 is phased off.

I would've bought myself the X1950XT(X) if I could afford it.

And to clarify things, I'm after the best hardware out there. I'm not an AMD fanboi (I've never owned AMD chips, always been Intel), and I've nothing against nVidia, have used solely nVidia chips until 4 years ago with a BUDGET 9200SE. And then the X800XT which lasted 6 months, and now the X1950Pro.

CMH - The 8600 have new PureVideo HD stuff where they take even more load off the CPU than the 8800s decoding HD video. Not really a selling point for gaming, but for the BluRay/HD DVD/HTPC crowd it is nice, allowing a 'mid-low to mid' graphics card to be paired with a midrange cpu and still do HD decoding without problems.

Hrmm.....

I read about that somewhere, but I kinda dismissed it, because its not relevant for most people.

Its a good way to differentiate cards which perform exactly the same otherwise though, thanks for the tip.

Thanks guys, this has really given me better knowledge of video cards and now I think I'll go with the Radeon X1950XT. Thanks for all of your help!