9600GT?

Hi, I am going to upgrade by old Nvidia 6800GT

I have a crossfire compatible motherboard, and have been told that the 9600GT will beat 2 HD 2600XTs in crossfire (i can get either of these for the same price)

which of these should i get?
or is there an entirely different card i should be looking at (my price range is 120-150$)

(if this is helpful)I want to play Bioshock, Age of Empires III and a little bit of COD4

Thanks

Get one better than 2

Between the 9600GT and the 8800GT it's a toss-up - they are very similar price/performance.

I recommend getting a dual slot 9600GT (like almost any of the overclocked models) and overclocking it even more. It will perform almost as well as an 8800 and be MUCH quieter

indeed, whats the secret. I heard it has a new ROP design which allows it to do AA with better performance.

very interesting, so Nvidia purposefully withheld drivers for the GeF 8s to make the 9s look better, not surprised.

the 9600GT is only a fair price at ~$130 ~$140 ~$150. at 160 or so the 8800GT is way better.

Thanks for your replies
so if nvidia is releases new the new driver optimizations the 8800gt will only get better from a price/performance stand point

will a 9600gt w/ a passive cooler over clock as well as a dual slot one?

will 2 HD 3850s beat a single 8800GT or a single HD3870?

*Sign* It's AMD now... Remember ATI?

The only passive 9600GTs have massive dual slot heat pipes.... Its an ugly sight... MASSIVE!!
why do you want passive cooled ones anyway? a small fan can make a huge difference
http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id- [...] rsion.html

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are games where two HD3850 256MB can match an 8800GTX even. 512MB's would be even better.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/sho [...] =3151&p=10

I'm looking to upgrade from a 6800 gs. Will the 9600 gt be able to run with the 350 watt psu that Dell provides for a Pentium 4 based system.

The 6800 gs just stopped working. Any other suggestions for a good replacement that the cpu can keep up with.

crysis scales awesome.

I totally disagree with you. SLI (not sure on Crossfire) scales awesome in the GPU demanding parts of Crysis. My 50+ hours benching Crysis beg to differ with your proven claims. I can show you real world Crysis gaming of over 50% scaling, more importantly at settings one GPU can not handle on it's own.

I'll go fire up my gaming rig and copy over some fraps framerate results to show you a histogram of actual gameplay on one 8800GT vs SLI 8800GT.

The screenie is from the same save point I benched, but it is an old screenie with 2xaa and nothing to do with the no fsaa results below.

Here is a recent Fraps benchmark of Paradise Lost at 16x12 High 0x/16x. Basically it entails escorting Prophet while his suite is freezing up. Very repeatable results in this 45 second Paradise Lost manual run through. I posted the fraps log of 4 runs in another thread showing that.

I tell ya, without question I'll take SLI for Crysis. I've played it all the way through with SLI 8800GT and most of the way through with a single 8800GT. Not sure where you got your info from, but Actual gameplay can scale way better than the Crytek Island GPU benchmark many sites use. Some parts of the game are more CPU limited, but there are parts of the game that kills a single GPU and SLI does incredible at. Worth every penny IMO just to keep the fps up in those GPU crushing areas.