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[Black Deatha]

Well, qucik couple questions for you GAF, 1. Is now a good time to persue getting a high end card? or is something really amazing coming out in the next couple months?

If I were to get a new card right now of what's currently available, what would be better, a nVidia card or ATI? I was looking at some benchmarks, and it seems the Radeon X850 XT PE is one of the best, but is betterd by the GeForce 6800 Ultra in SLI mode.

My current card is a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, I have been really happy with it, but I plan on getting a PCI-E board for my new PC.

Personaly, I am kinda leaning towards the X850 XT PE, but problem is I can't find the ATI version available, but I can find one by like Sapphire, can anyone tell me, would the ATI version be better?

Also if anyone could give me some comparison benchmarks between the cards...

Dont let me down GAF

~Black Deatha

 

[AntoneM]

Funny you should mention Sapphire since they actually manufacture ATI's cards and ATI just re-brands them. Anyway, ATI and Nvidia alway annouce new hardware in teh Spring so in this case new stuff should be just arounf the corner and if you want to have the best for more than a month or 2 I'd wait. You're right in that the x850 XT PT is the best stand alone card I don't see much point to SLI since many games aren't fully supported for it yet and you have to rely on driver updates in order to get the benefits.

Summary: ATI = Sapphire, new cards comming out in next few months, SLI not worth most peoples time.

 

[Black Deatha]

So, would it maybe be a good idea to get something like the X700 Pro right now for much cheaper and wait?

~Black Deatha

 

[AntoneM]

As far as I know, ATI's next card will be a varaint of it's current cards which are a variant of is 9xxx line obviously it will be heavily modified plus they will support SM 3.0 (not that big of a deal) Nivida is likely doing the same, make some tweaks to it's 6xxx line of cards and beef up it's current SM 3.0 support. I honestly don't think there is going to be a big change in hardware this comming generation just faster versions of what we already have. I don't think we'll see 2X the perfomance over the current gen.

If you are comfortable with waiting for the next round of cards (may/june) then I would recommend just getting a plain 6600 and overclocking it, it's cheaper than an x700 Pro or 6600GT and the performance isn't that much different, to put it another way, an overclocked 6600 won't quite perform at the level of your 9800 Pro, but they will only cost you $120 and will get you through the next couple of months. Comparatively a x700 Pro will cost about $150 and a 6600GT will cost about $180, that $30-60 doesn't seem like much but you might as well save it for your real card.