Which card for my new gaming machine???

I'm building a gaming rig, but on a coors light budget. I've got a case with a 500 watt psu, and an Abit k9n sli motherboard with the Nvidia 570 chipset. Should I spend the money on a new 8800gts card even if it will be bottle necked, or purchase an older card, such as the 7600?
thanks

I agree with Senor Bob.

Sure the GTS-320 may be bottlenecked, but so what, this is your good graphics upgrade, and then later you upgrade your CPU sometime later. If you get the GF7600 you will have agraphics limitation later when you upgrade or when more demanding games come out.

While there may be technically a bottleneck for the card, the reality is that it will open up many more options to you than the GF7600GT would (and if you're talking about the GF7600GS slap yourself for me for thinking such a thing ).

The GF8800 will last you alot longer as a competant gamer saving you from another upgrade sooner, with more features in the meantime.

get a 7800 gs,7900 gs good solid card or wait for the 8600 to come out they will be cheap about 200 or less i heard 180.

The CPU is an Athlon 64x2 4600.

I agree the GF8600 is a frickin' waste. Less than or equal to X1950Pro performance, for $200, heck for $259 you can get the GTS-320 and for that $59 it's a much better card with much longer life, including better resale potential. After those GF8600s hit the market their price should drop like a stone one people realize how little they currently offer for games (it's nice to talk DX10, but until people see something tangible it's not going to get much extra coin over a GF7900GS or X1950GT).

The GTS-320 has all those benefits, and the potential for asymertric internal processing if nV can get their drivers to split the load, I'd rather have the option of an extra 32 stream processors for something like physics.

I can't think of any reason to consider the GF8600 series over the GTS-320, and if price is a concen, then the X1950GT or X1950Pro would be the next best options IMO.


OH yeah BTW, that X2 4600 may be a theoretical botleneck, but that's like saying that Air is a bottleneck for a car, it's needs nitrous. The X2 4600 should be fine for most games, and while maybe some things need to be tweaked, it's far from as bad as something like a plain AMD64 single core 3xxx series CPU.

Sure we all want better, but when taken to extremes nothing less than an octo-core LN2 SLi rig is good enough. The X2 4600 should let him get value out of the GTS-320.

Well the OC will help you out, and remember the 4K procs are dual core the single cores 3xxxs that are hurting from both end finger-cuffed by two bottle-necks IMO.

Could you get more, sure, but it should be playable, until you find a good deal and move to the next build, which I would recommend once you know what the story is with games like Crysis etc. The GTS-640 should last you well into next year, and will be great for gaming regardless of what comes out. X can be better than Y but that doesn't make Y useless.

Just look at the X1900 and GF7900 series, both great and competant cards, and only differing slightly, with both giving solid/great gameplay.

Check your Power Supply to make sure it will handle the 8800 first. There is a list of approved PSU's on Nvidia's web site.

I agree this week it's the 8800 next week 8900? LOL

Good Luck

Just to reinforce what's already been stated here 10 times...

That 4600 X2 will definitely not be a bottleneck for an 8800 GTS 320. The only way it might slow you down a bit is if you're running at low resolution like 800x600 or 1024x728. I'm assuming your monitor supports at least 1600x1200...

buy the eVGA 8800gts 320 for that cpu you can even run 8800gtx without bottlenecking.