XFX 8800GT with COD, or 9600GT?

I had been looking at getting an 8800GT or a 9600GT, and in the end I decided to wait to see how the prices settle.

From my last forum post, it seems that the 8800GT and the 9600GT have similar performance, with the 8800Gt edging out the 9600GT a little – with the 9600GT doing better in SLI mode.

2 months later, now the prices on the 9600GT have dropped, and the cheapest I could find is $140 (but one of the big 3 (BFG,EVGA or XFX) is more at around $150:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 82E1681413

Now, I found this XFX 8800 GT XXX Video, 256MB DDR3 for $120 – but it also comes with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – which kinda makes this a better deal.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applica [...] aignID=533

The 9600GT is $20-$30 more – so the 8800GT still looks competitive, but everyone has been telling me to try COD, so to me it is more like a $60 difference.

Does this make getting the XFX 8800GT XXX a no brainer, or am I missing something. I mean how can I go wrong for $120 + a game I want to try?

Is there some $150 card coming out in the next month that will blow the 88800GT performance away?

http://en.expreview.com/2008/04/02 [...] up/?page=8

See graph. 2nd one is for CoD4.

Dagger, there is no 256MB 8800GT in those charts.

I agree with these guys. Avoid the 256MB 8800GT. Not only does it have slower memory clocks than the 512MB version, it falls to a fraction of the 512MB versions performance, which in many games starts to happen as low as 1280x1024 resolution.

In this review, they happened to have all three versions clocked the same to compare the amount of memory directly. In reality the vast majority of 256MB 8800GT are clocked lower than the 512Mb version. The two XFX ones have 1400 and 1600 MHZ GDDR3, where a reference 512MB has 1800MHz mem. Anyway, The 512MB version beat the 256MB version at the same clocks by an average of 76%.
crysis: http://en.expreview.com/2007/12/30 [...] %bc%9f/13/
Performance summary: http://en.expreview.com/2007/12/30 [...] %bc%9f/16/



Also, 8800GT 256MB vs 9600GT in COD4 - http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] page12.asp