8600gts vs x1950xt

I'm about to build a new system and was just wondering which card to get. Unfortunately I can't find any reviews comparing these two cards. Tom's only has the 8800 series in their comparison. I realize that the 8600 is "future" proof but if the x1950xt is faster than I would rather that now and get the 8800 series later once the shock of a whole new system subsides. Any advice?

By the way the following are pretty much written in stone.
e6600
asus pk5 (not deluxe)
2 gigs 800mhz with good latencies (4-4-4-12)

P.S. I plan on mild to medium overclocking!

Get the X1950XT for now and then buy the 65nm GF8/9 or HD2K card later once they are needed and DX10 games are truely out.

The GF8600 (likely like the HD2600) won't be playing DX10 games with any amazing abilities, so for when you did want to play a DX10 title, you'd likely be playing it so low as to be better of with DX9 path anyways, and once again you're back to being much slower than the X1950Xt.

If this were a very long term build and you were a light gamer the GF8600 would be the way to go, but if you're going to be swapping out anyways, then go with the X1950Xt or even save some money to put towards that new replacement and get the X1950Pro.

I agree the 1900xt is definately the better choice. Theres no telling how well the 8600GTS will perform in DX10 games.

I checked the specs and the 8600 gts has higher clock speeds on both the core and memory. How can the 1950xt be better.

I want to buy the xt to help the underdog but in the end I want the better card.

Because clockspeed isnt the only thing that determines performance. If it was, why do you think Intel abandoned the Pentium 4 3.8 GHz to make their new highest end chip run at 2.93 GHz?

The number of shader processors and the width of the memory bus makes a huge difference in performance. Think of them as what you multiply clockspeed by to get actual performance.

So you could have a 2 GHz GPU, but if it has 4 shaders, it will be slower than a 500 MHz GPU with 96 shaders (the 8800 GTS). much slower actually.

The main reason the 8600 series isnt so great is because it lacks memory bandwidth and shading power.

You are all men of honour and insight... I thank you for your time and thoughts!