Good budget card - Gigabyte GF 7900GT SLI 256MB?

[jayb59874]

Hi there, I have only recently go tback into making my own machines and need to ask some really stupid obvious questions. Is this a decent card, the price is about 200 pounds in the uk so I would say about 350 dollars US.

Do SLI cards have to be used in pairs or can they be used individually, I am basically looking to get good performance and I am cutting back on the processor as i will over clock it and upgrade to a dual core after AM2 and Conroe push down the prices of dual core by the end of the year.

I am really pushing the boat out on this card financially so are there any other cards people would recommend around 300 dollars or preferbaly lower. I am not the most experienced at overclocking and will probably only push the CPU a little so def do not want to mess around with the GPU.

Thanks in advance for all the help you can give

 

[Heyyou27]

SLI doesn't double performance, so you'll be better off upgrading to a new better card than 7900GT in the future.

You're not doubling your RAM and CPU speed as well by adding a second videocard, so of course you’ll never receive a 200% performance increase.

The 7900GT is a good card in the 300-350$ price range, but I'd recommend an X1800 XT over it; OpenEXR HDR+AA, High quality Anisotropic filtering, and awesome AVIVO features.

 

[Heyyou27]

True, but you pay double for the video cards, and you don't get the double performance which you should get.

Once again, you do not understand the concept of two videocards. You're not doubling your CPU power or RAM; yes SLI and Crossfire performance should be better, but it's not capable of being 2x that of a single card solution because all you are doing is adding a second card. Try playing a game without a CPU and tell me how it goes.

 

[d0nu7]

Thats only for the video card though, if it cost double for the whole system, then yes, a doubling of performance is expected, but, say with my computer, it was about 25% of the cost of the whole computer, so if adding another one produces about a 30% performance inscrease, the price makes sense.

 

[guyinyourattic37]

If you're going to overclock i would get the 7900gt. I forget were but they go it to 725core and 1800+mem. So u get a 7900GTX just w/o the 512 ram.

 

[Heyyou27]

That does require some modifications though.

 

[ZOldDude]

If you're going to overclock i would get the 7900gt. I forget were but they go it to 725core and 1800+mem. So u get a 7900GTX just w/o the 512 ram.

No...what you get is a 7900GT overclocked like mad (with a $2 volt mod they can do over 700/2000).

Price on Newegg last night was $299 and a came with a free video game.

 

[Heyyou27]

Makes me wish I had 7900GTs now.

 

[Heyyou27]

You're paying twice the price of your videocard, and in my experience, SLI performance increases have been very good; the only games that I don't notice a large benefit seem to be on Half-Life2 (Doesn't need SLI anyways) and Age of Empires III (Bigger deal)

 

[d0nu7]

Yeah, I do see where you are coming from. I am a bit biased as I just ordered my second 7800GT for my setup. For me, I mostly play CoD2 and CS:S, and the performance increase in CoD definitely is worth it for me. At full, I get about 26 fps, and from the looks of the chart, I should expect about a 40% or so increase, putting full settings into the playable range. Ill take my paycheck from Radio Shack and spend it on that anyday. But yes, it definitely depends on the application. And so, for most, it is not worth it. In other news, my e-penis just grew about 8 inches.

 

[Heyyou27]

I'm angry at Age of Empires III; enabling SLI at most gives me a small framerate boost. Every other game allows for a higher quality level.

One thing SLI is very good for is UT2004 1280x1024 16xS antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.