whats up! I have narowed it down and think i am going with a Geforce 6600 but there are so many name brands to chose from any suggestions would be helpful,here are some of the names A open Aeolus,chainetech ,gigabyte,EVGA ,XFX. some are 128 MB others 256 MB will that make a big diffrence? thanks was thinking about the radeon 9600 but im going with the 8 pipelines.LOL I have learned a lot from this site
Well if you can try and get a 6600GT, they are very good budget cards. I myself have an XFX AGP 6600GT (128MB) and I have no experience with other cards. Mine is very good and is also a very good overclocker as well, if it's an AGP card most of the manufacturers run the RAM at 900MHz when the RAM is the same stuff used on the PCI-e cards and that runs at 1000MHz, XFX run it at 1000MHz straight out of the box and I've had my card up to 1200Mhz on the ram and 600MHz core (from 500MHz). I heard that the XFX cards are great overclockers so that's one nof the reasons I chose them.
All of those brands would be good, but depending on your wants, you may want to look at some brands over others. AOpen's cards (with the Aeolus naming scheme) seem to be the cheapest out there. I'm using a PCIe eVGA GeForce 6600GT myself, and it works great. XFX and Chaintech cards are your best bet for overclocking. If two cards are equal, save the RAM amount, if you're looking at anything less than a 6600GT, going with 256MB over 128MB is going to be wasteful as the cards really don't have enough grunt to benefit from the extra RAM. Of course, if the 128MB card is within, say $5 of the 256MB card, if you wanted the 256MB, then I could see the point, but otherwise no.
I don't know what your ;ooking to pay but I got a leadtek 6800 128 for 177.00 an free shippi9ng from acool.com. which has 12 pixel pipelines where a 6600 only has 8 and i used riva tuner to unlock the other 4 pipes and verts so except for not haveing ddr3 it is almost a gt overclocked to 375 800
I'm in the same situation as the thread-starter. I currently have the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum board (agp) and I'm looking to get a 6600 GT card. (currently using GF4 Ti-4600) My main concerns: 1. 128mb or 256mb? (price difference is $30-$50 or so) 2. Should I stick with AGP and just replace the card or switch out my mobo for a K8N Neo4-F and get a PCI-e card? Is it worth it to switch to PCI-e?
The difference between a 128 and a 256 is not going to be anyware as much as going to pci-express, as pci-express has twice the data transfer as agp, agp 8x verus pcie at 16x unlessyou are talking about a 6600gt with ddr3 then you will have slightly more gain on agp yet still not as much as pcie. not to mention you'll have the benifit of the nforcea chip set
at the moment, pci-E over AGP doesent have that much gain, for examply, an identical card like x800xt pe (AGP) like mine, and x800xt pe (pci express) doesent have much performance gain over AGP. 256mb of memory is needed now for running games like DOOM 3 or F.E.A.R at high settings. 256mb would be better, dont go for any 512mb cards, thats just not worth it, no performance gain what so ever. more ram doesent offer much of a performance gain, but F.E.A.R and DOOM 3 need 256mb of memory if your going to have alot of eye candy turned on and settings at highest.
We need to look at the bigger picture here. I wouldn't recommend anyone to get an expensive AGP card now if they were planning to upgrade in the future. However at the moment, PCI-E isn't utilized fully, but not just performance but for future proofing PCI-E is the way to go. Even high end AGP cards now are expensive and PCI-E cards are cheaper, and it will end up being cheaper to switch to PCI-E in the long run.
