Can't decide on what card to buy!!

Some people might disagree, but I don't think SM3 is worth it for cards of that caliber: yes, the effects are nice but they require more power than those cards have and games that require SM3 are years away and wont work on today's hardware anyway.

The X800GTO is a very good choice.

LOL SM3 would cripple the 6600gt if you turned it on.

Yep the x800gto is a nice card and has plenty of room for overclocking

The one downside is that the X800GTO available here only comes with 128mb of ram instead of the 256mb in many US stores.

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/pro [...] _uid=97827

So, not really sure. The price is pretty for UK. The same retailer is selling a 512mb 6800 for £125 ($220) and a 6800GS for £160 ($280).

PowerColor ATI Radeon X800 GTO 256MB DDR3 £129.19 pre order or

Sapphire ATI Radeon X800 GTO 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (AGP) £135
in stock

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/AGP.html

or better than all of them:

Connect3d X850 Pro 256MB GDDR3 DVI £150

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/pro [...] uid=101494

Dont touch the 6800 512mb it has been crippled with a 128bit interface and 512mb of ram is a waste on this card. The extra ram is just marketing.

Point of View 6800GS AGP £160
for that price I would get the
PowerColor ATI Radeon X850 XT 256MB DDR3 for £10 more.

But we are now talking way over his £120 budget

Its a close call, maybe just down to your preferance ATI or Nvidia

I would say the x850 pro has a slight edge in performance terms but does lack SM3.

I personaly would get either the x800gto 256 from overclockers and overclock it or try and find a little extra for the x850xt as that is a very decent card and will last for a good while.

SM3 is not used in many games and SM4 which will be more widely used IMO is out soon, so i dont feel its that important.

Overclockers is fine, no prob here i use both suppliers.

this will give you an idea of how much you need to spend to see an improvement

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/1 [...] age16.html

I would hold off for DX10 cards

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6143883/p-4.html

very good point

I may have to knock £30 or so off my budget. I think the sound card on my second machine has died. It was an AWE64 on and ISA slot but the sound on it has been really crackly recently and has now disappeared totally.

That would rule out the 6800GS and X850 Pro and probably the X800GTO 256. Is the GTO worth getting with only 128mb??

The X800GTO will be slightly crippled by the 128MB (heck the GF6600GT is). But I have a feeling it'll still slightly outperform the X1600Pro, which will in turn outperform the GF6600GT. Just be sure that the X800GTO isn't crippled in other ways with slow memory and slow clocks.

And truely the GF6600GT can only consider most truely SM3.0 differences (compared to the X800's SM2.0B) as checkbox features only to be used as slideshow effects or very minor performance boosters (not enough to gain ground on X800GTO).

The X1600Pro would likely make slightly better use of SM3.0 effects, but even still it won't be very playable compared to the better cards which can truely benift most.

As for Oblivion, it's requires SM2.0, SM3.0 is an additional benifit, but on the GF6600GT it'll likely be somewhat unplayable, even on the X1600 you'd likely turn it on to see what it could look like at it's best, and then turn it off to get the best playability. And considering that I'd say you'll probably get the most out of an X800GTO since you'll likely be in SM2.0 mod for most situations; but really the wisest course of action is to wait for good benchmarks.

Forgive me if this was mentioned by you or someone else, but the only problem with comparing the 128MB GTO and the 256MB GTO is the 128MB ones usually have much slower memory speeds. The lower clocked 128MB GTO still beats a 6600GT, but a 256MB higher clocked one beats a 6800GS AGP.

This is No new info for you I totally realize, just thought the OP might want to look into clock speeds and I didn't notice on quick glance if anyone brought that up or not.

I know *looks at burnt out card*.

They make a x1600 pro for AGP

BUT

it would never outperform the X800gto

x1600 pro has 12 pipes, 5 vertex 128bit bus and 12.8gbps bandwith 500/800 core/mem DDR2

x800gto 12 pipes, 6 vertex 256 bit bus and 31.4gbs bandwith 400/980 core/mem DDR3

The gto is a fair bit better and will easily oc to the 500 core speed of the x1600.

Actually, the X1600 has 12 pixel processors and 12 pixel shaders, but they work in banks of 3... so it can only output 4 pixels per clock.

It's more like a 4-pipeline architecture than a 12-pipe. That's why it performs so inconsistantly.

Ok confused the hell out of me but I believe you, its still a not as good a the GTO

Good view of the X1600 architecture and how it's layed out;
http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/rv5xx/

Think of it like this, when complex shaders requiring multiple passes or multiple source targets are required then the X1600 does better than a pure 4 pipeline design (like the R9600/X600) because they have to go through the whole pipleline 2-3 times for each pixel whereas it can stagger the load and essentially do it in 3 times the speed, but if the pixel shader load is light then the max it can still output is the same as the simpler design because both are still limited by having 4 ROPs. They also both have only 4 texture units.

So under easiest conditions it'd never perform better than a regular 4 pipeline design, but under the most gruelling pixel processing situation theoretically it could come close to matching a 12 pipeline card that needed to do 3 transformations/clocks for each pixel operation.

Realistically though it currently performs closer to a slightly underperforming 8 pipeline design, but in the future the performance results should look closer to an overperforming 8 pipe design.