6600GT or 6800 nu... Low Resolution Gaming

P

Pooky

Gawd
Joined
Apr 7, 2004
Messages
750
A friend of mine wants to upgrade his GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64mb so he can play what few games he has with more eye candy.

The rest of the computer is:

AMDXP 2500
Asus A7N8X-X (nForce 2 with no dual channel support)
1gb Corsair Value RAM
80gb WD HDD
SB Live 5.1
DVDRW

Now, from what he says, he plays Call of Duty at 800 x 600 with everything on low, same with UT2004. Since he uses 800 x 600 exclusively, but would like to get up to 1024 x 768 "in the future", I've reccomended the 6600GT as the best choice for a new GPU, as well as a new AMD64 CPU. Now that I've explained to him what all the numbers on the cards mean, he is sure that a 6800 nu will service him better, even if he never leaves his 800 x 600 resolution behind. He also cites that new games will use the power of the 4 extra pipes and 2 shaders more than the speed and DDR3 of the 6600GT.

Even if he did increase to 1024 x 768, which card would be the better choice? He can't afford the 6800 now, and thinks that by August the price should drop $50, but I think that's a bit unrealistic, and he should just go for the 6600 now, since his resolution is so low that there might be no difference or need for the nu.

Thoughts, suggestions? Would a CPU upgrade be the better solution instead?
 
He is in for a surprise... he will want to up the resolution, trust me. Get the 6800nu even if it will be bottlenecked even more than the 6600gt.

~Adam
 
both cards will be fine for him if just considering CoD and UT2K4 with 1028x with probably most settings to the max if not all just depends on his taste.

i personally would go with the 6800nu just for more future proof. i doubt it'll dropped that low but who knows he could get lucky with some rebate of some sort.
 
either would be fine for this individual. The 6800 is faster, but the 6600GT will do just fine for his purposes.

Also, ironically the thing that makes the 6800 faster than the 6600GT is the memory bandwidth. Though the 6800 has 4 more pipes than the 6600GT, since its core speed is a lot less, the fillrate of the two is about the same - in fact at reference speeds the 6600GT is very slightly faster here. However in terms of memory bandwidth, though the 6600GT has faster memory, it only has a 128-bit memory bus. Since the 6800 has a 256-bit memory bus, it has more memory bandwidth despite its slower memory speed - 22.4gbps over the 6600GT's 16gbps. And it also has the extra two VS units.

So while you are looking at similar fillrate between the two, the 6800 has more memory bandwidth and two extra vertex shader units.
 
The PNY 6800nu has already showed up at newegg for $156, just tell him to wait until he can find another deal like that and keep an eye on the Hot Deal forum.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top