Geforce 7900GT or 8600GTS

No, get the 3850 or 8800GT 256 or 8800GS. 7-series cards dont handle new games very well. The 3850 is around the same price as the 8600GTS and gives twice the bang. Same with the two 8800s. If you can find a 7900 really cheap (like £40) then it'll be a decent deal, but dont spend anything over that.

Whats the rest of your system like?

my 7950gt can play crysis at med settings, everything else (bioshock, oblivion, supreme commander, dark messiah, TF2, call of juarez) on all high at 1280x1024.
i would say it depends on the resolution you run.
though, i agree with Maziar, the 3850 is a better card than either of the ones you mention.

I can find a 8600gts for $125-140. A 8800gt is over $200. The 3850 is about $180. I will have to consider if I want to spend the extra $40-50 to get the 3850. I have always had nvidia and a little unsure about going to ATI, which I am sure there is a huge thread on already.

I found a 7950gt 256 for $125. If I don't want to spend the extra money for the 3850, I should get this 7950 instead of the 8600gts, right?

Will I need a large power supply?

System Specs
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz
BFG Geforce 6600gt
400w power supply
1GB DDR2 SDRAM

hmmmm, I do not know, I will look tonight. Does it matter?

Also, considering my CPU, could it become the bottleneck, for lack of better words, resulting in not taking advantage of a 8800 card pass the capabilities of a 7900 card? In other words, the CPU processing power demanded by the 8800 is beyond the capabilitiy of my CPU so I should just settle for a 7900? What are your thoughts.

By the way, THANKS to everyone for their input.
John

The 8600gts won't bottleneck on your cpu- I did an upgrade on a vista machine for a customer, and the graphics went to a 5.6- games were not only playable but very enjoyable!

Here's the card I used:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814130291

Read the reviews on newegg, they are realy good!

Yeah, that does seem a little pricey for a 8600gts.

Does anyone think my CPU will be bottleneck with a 8800gs?

what are you referring to when you say 5.6 or 5.8 games?

Because you can get a 3850 for at cheaper price which would be leaps ahead of 8600gts.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814241066

Well then get a 3850...sheesh! Go where the power is, where you budget leads you, and where you hardware will support.

Marvelous211....I would like to know how it is you feel vista preformance ratings are "bogus".... they may not be the best measure of preformance... but they are better than nothing... most people don't have a copy of toms hardware preformance testing suite lying around...

The best measure of performance is to look at real-world benches. In a way, you do have access to Tom's Hardware's suite of benches: just look at reviews.

Synthetic stuff is never as consistant as real world benches - but even compared to synthetic benches, Vista's performance rating is pretty vague.

If you feel the need to summarize your videocard performance in a number, look at 3dMark, not Vista. And even then, it's far from perfect.

Nobody is mentioning the 2900Pro which I think is a shame. It outperforms the 3850 256mb and has huge OCing potential. It's pretty much a 2900XT with lower clock speeds and currently a 256-bit bus which doesn't seem to hinder it at all.

You can find them for $159 at Newegg, just make sure you have a decent enough power supply to run it because it does take a bit of juice to run it, but not nearly as much as the old 2900 Pro or 2900XT. One 6-pin power adapter will work great in it.

Excellent post; Totally agree with ya.