8800gts 320 vs 3850 512

Hello and welcome to the forums mate

Simple answer : HD 3850

anyone have any other opinion?

EDIT: sorry missed it was the 512MB HD3850 you were refering to. I have and commented on the 256MB version. Something like the Powercolor Extreme 512MB would beat the 8800GTS 320MB more often, although 1024x768 wouldn't the the res you would see a big difference at. Seeing how the 320MB GTS drops off sometimes as res goes up, then the 512MB 3850 would leave it behind.

I have both cards but have not had a chance to directly test one vs the other. I would say, more often than not the 8800GTS 320MB would be ahead of the 3850. Pretty close overall though just depending on the game. Either is a good option as both can easily handle the res you talk about though. I'd look at prices for where you live and if the 3850 saves you a significant amount, go for that. Newegg is about $150 AR vs $180 AR.

if u game at that low res, perhaps the 256 mb 8800gt will hit the sweet spot. But i rather get the 3850 over the gts, u can probably overclock it to 3870 speeds.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] age17.html

At lower res, the 8800GTS 320 typically has a solid 20% or so advantage over the the HD3850 256. I doubt the extra 256MBs would impact performance much if at all at this res, especially looking at the negligible increase from the 320 version to the 640 with the GTS.

Another factor being filters; anti-aliasing has a more noticeable effect on smaller resolutions, so you'll be wanting to run 4x AA on any game you play, and the AMD cards are known for taking a bigger hit than the 8 series. The benchmarks back this up.

However, power consumption and price swing in the 3850's favor, so if it's significantly cheaper, I'd go that way.

The pink panther is probably right that the 8800GT 256MB will perform the best for you, but it probably can't justify the price jump, and don't think about upgrading that monitor anytime soon.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] i=3175&p=6

At this point I would stay away from anything less than 512MB on a graphics card. True, the benchmarks don't show much of a difference in many games, but benchmarks don't accurately gauge how your experience will be when playing for an extended period of time. The alt-tab bug still gives me chills.

HD 3850 can be OC'd easily to HD 3870 so it will perform near 8800GT 512
and a 8800GT 512 is better than 8800GTS 320