Looking for help understanding video cards...

[Bonzai]

Alright, I'm building a new PC and plan on getting an average video card to get myself running, and will upgrade to high-end later. But I've run into a problem! While doing a search on the GeForce 7600 GT, I found this webpage which showed me a variety of cards with the same name, and they were all slightly different. I thought that nVidia owned GeForce cards, but I found out that they simply made the chipset. So that brings me to the questions... Why such a wide variety when the cards have the same name? is 256MB sufficient for a card that i'm going to be upgrading anyway? Does DDR2 or DDR3 make a difference for the video card?

Edit 1: Oops I forgot to post the link for the variety of GeForce 7600 GT's

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...Submit=ENE&SubCategory=48&Tpk=GeForce+7600+GT

 

[RedFox911]

The reason, there are many different types of the same card, is dependent on the different clock speeds, or memory speeds... ext.

For instance, one card may have a core clock of 624mhz and another may have a cc of 534 mhz.

I currently own a 7600gt and its a great card. It doesnt have direct x 10 though so thats why im going for the new cheaper, 8800gt.
For you i would recommend the 8600gt, its a great card and has dx10, not to mention it only costs a little bit more than the 7600gt.

 

[Bonzai]

Cool, thanks for the help! I'll probably end up bumping up to the 8800 series about May of 2008. But until then, I just need to finish building my PC.

 

[_FAKE_]

8600GT is slightly faster than the 7600GT for slightly more money. The DX10 feature in it is rather useless because the card simply cannot handle DX10 games, it lacks the power. Though if you can afford it, it wouldn't be a bad choice for older games, or if you don't mind playing todays games at low-medium quality.

Don't worry about the different brands of GPU's, I'd just pick the cheapest one. The more expensive ones usually mean they come with a third party coolers and/or are over-clocked, and you can do all that yourself with no troubles.

Next year should be a rather interesting year for GPU's and even CPU's. I'm currently contemplating on whether I should get the HD3870 next week (And delay registering my car for 4 weeks) or waiting till next year and there might be a more wide range of GPU's with better price/performance ratio's. I think the latter will be my decision though. Though I really want to play Crysis and UT3 etc, I guess it will have to wait