7800GTX vs 7900GT

LORD

LORD

Geek Trainee
Hello people,

OK, i've been looking at upgrading my video card and I thought I was going for a 7900GT until I saw that ebuyer still have some 7800GTX's for about the same money (£200 or so).

Simple question, which is faster? I've looked at Toms hardware etc etc but i'm finding it difficult to find any articles comparing the two cards back to back. I know that the 7900GT is the newer card but the 7800 is the GTX version.

I'll probably get another gig of RAM whilst im at it but I dont think that will make a difference to which card i'll buy.

Thanks :)
 
LORD said:
Hello people,

OK, i've been looking at upgrading my video card and I thought I was going for a 7900GT until I saw that ebuyer still have some 7800GTX's for about the same money (£200 or so).

Simple question, which is faster? I've looked at Toms hardware etc etc but i'm finding it difficult to find any articles comparing the two cards back to back. I know that the 7900GT is the newer card but the 7800 is the GTX version.

I'll probably get another gig of RAM whilst im at it but I dont think that will make a difference to which card i'll buy.

Thanks :)
Click to expand...

i reckon that the 7800 offers more value for money as it's only bout £200. the 7900 is bout £350 i think and the performance difference is not relatively proportional to the price difference in both of these cards.

direct x 10 would be coming out so i wud rather get the 7800 as it wud cope with all of the games and wait later till DX 10 compatible cards come out, but at the end of the day, that's wat i think and it's totally up to u as to wat u choose.

the bottom line is that i wud go wid the 7800.
 
Well for performance, the 7900GT is better, The 7900GTX series are around £320 - £380 at overclockers.co.uk, you can pick a 7900GT 256mb up for about £210 inc VAT, but i would opt for a 512mb version as that extra memory will help, but the Gainward BLISS Geforce 7900 GT "Golden Sample" is £276. If i were you, i would buy an X1900XT, its better than a 7900GT 512MB. At overclockers an X1900XT "Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT " is £264 inc VAT, and from what i have heard, there good overclockers and they also can beat a 7900GTX, but he down side with the X1900 series is there large cooler, there pretty loud!. Hmm wierd, overclockers has stopped selling the 7800 series :\. Anyway if you want to buy a new graphics card, oerclockers are the place to go, Great delevery, with my x800xt pe, once i ordered it, 15 hours later it was at my door, overclockers are based in Staffordshire, and i live in yorkshire, thats quite a fair distance.

Overclockers UK
Nvidia 7900 Series
ATi Radeon X1900 Series
ATi Radeon X1800 Series

It seems that the ATi Radeon X1800XT card beats the 7800GTX in some games, at overclockers the X1800XT's are in between £205-£250. There is an X1800XT 256Mb for £164, and then the GTO range of X1800XT cards which use the cores of the X1800XT as the X1800XT is not been produced anymore so the GTO is using up all the old cores. If you want to wait for Direct X10 and the R600 from ATi then maybe somthing like an X1800XT 256mb, X1800GTO or the 7900GT 256mb will do untill then, the X1800GTO is pretty cheap at around £140, will play most games decent, if my X800XT can then i am sure an X1800 series or 7900GT series can :good:. So the 7800GTX, X1800XT and X1900XT have pretty beefy coolers, the GTO X1800 has a single slot sollution, and the 7900GT has, well a smaller cooler by alot compared to the 7900GTX and 7800GTX cooler, i dont know if its single slot though. There is some advantages with the X1900 series compared to the 7900 series, the X1900 cards have 48 Pixel shaders, stll has 16pipelines though, i dunno why but ATi says it has 8pipelines on the product comparision :s.
 
Get the 7900 GT. It offers better performance than the 7800 GTX and it's cheaper, (At least... On all the US site's I've seen).
 
Willz said:
Well for performance, the 7900GT is better, The 7900GTX series are around £320 - £380 at overclockers.co.uk, you can pick a 7900GT 256mb up for about £210 inc VAT, but i would opt for a 512mb version as that extra memory will help, but the Gainward BLISS Geforce 7900 GT "Golden Sample" is £276. If i were you, i would buy an X1900XT, its better than a 7900GT 512MB. At overclockers an X1900XT "Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT " is £264 inc VAT, and from what i have heard, there good overclockers and they also can beat a 7900GTX, but he down side with the X1900 series is there large cooler, there pretty loud!. Hmm wierd, overclockers has stopped selling the 7800 series :\. Anyway if you want to buy a new graphics card, oerclockers are the place to go, Great delevery, with my x800xt pe, once i ordered it, 15 hours later it was at my door, overclockers are based in Staffordshire, and i live in yorkshire, thats quite a fair distance.

Overclockers UK
Nvidia 7900 Series
ATi Radeon X1900 Series
ATi Radeon X1800 Series

It seems that the ATi Radeon X1800XT card beats the 7800GTX in some games, at overclockers the X1800XT's are in between £205-£250. There is an X1800XT 256Mb for £164, and then the GTO range of X1800XT cards which use the cores of the X1800XT as the X1800XT is not been produced anymore so the GTO is using up all the old cores. If you want to wait for Direct X10 and the R600 from ATi then maybe somthing like an X1800XT 256mb, X1800GTO or the 7900GT 256mb will do untill then, the X1800GTO is pretty cheap at around £140, will play most games decent, if my X800XT can then i am sure an X1800 series or 7900GT series can :good:. So the 7800GTX, X1800XT and X1900XT have pretty beefy coolers, the GTO X1800 has a single slot sollution, and the 7900GT has, well a smaller cooler by alot compared to the 7900GTX and 7800GTX cooler, i dont know if its single slot though. There is some advantages with the X1900 series compared to the 7900 series, the X1900 cards have 48 Pixel shaders, stll has 16pipelines though, i dunno why but ATi says it has 8pipelines on the product comparision :s.
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Thanks for the substantial post :) I'm going to stick with Nvidia for two reasons.

1. I've had two ATI in the past and in my experience the drivers for ATI cards aren't as stable as Nvidia.

2. SLI seems to be a better bet than Crossfire if I decide to go doen the twin card route in the future.

Thanks.
 
if you could, you may like to save up got a Nvidia 7950 GX2, got 2 cores, 1gb memory, and just think if you got 2 of those cards, you would have quad SLi :good:, the cheapest 7950GX2 is £400 though :\, so £800 for 2 cards is alot.
 
I wouldn't bother with the 7950GX2, it's a super fast card but by the time you get the money and start enjoying it DX 10 cards will be out (around September). The 7900GT is fast enough to run anything you throw at it this summer and most of next year but when DX 10 is only a couple months away it's kind of hard to swallow.
 
Would it be better for me to wait until September for a DX10 card? I'm not sure if there will be any DX10 cards with similar performance to a 7900GT that will be around the same price. This is why the PS3 will sell so well :rolleyes:
 
Well, when DX10 comes out, i dunno what lineup of cards will be coming out, there is loads of rumours about teh R600 from ATi, most likely this will be a £500+ card, who knows what Nvidia has to offer. If you want to upgrade now, then buy a 7900GT if your going with Nvidia, i was reccomending the 7950GX2 as maybe you've got loads of money to spend, then it wouldent matter about buying a new card when DX10 comes out, i am sticking with my X800XT PE card now and waiting to see what comes out for Direct x 10, the money that i was going to spend on a new graphics card and motherboard is now going towards a new sound card, my X800XT PE cant take nearly any game at full settings at the moment, this includes F.E.A.R, Oblivion, NFSMW etc.., If you could find an X850XT PE graphics card for around £120-£130 that is AGP, get it, i know its ATi, but they will play all games up untill DX10, just the down side of these cards is, loud big cooler and they dont support SM3.0, and most games that support HDR (High Dynamic Range Lighting) <think thats what its called, require a card with SM3.0, but its not a big loss if you dont have SM3.0. I remember before the X1800 series, the X850XT PE was about £350, you can buy an X1900XTX for that price now :o
 
i read somewhere its abit of a waste of money to get such a high powered card unless you have a monitor which can deal with higher resoultions (greater than 1280 x 1024 ). is that true?
 
daisycutter said:
i read somewhere its abit of a waste of money to get such a high powered card unless you have a monitor which can deal with higher resoultions (greater than 1280 x 1024 ). is that true?
Click to expand...

obviously u wouldnt want a 7900gtx and use it with sum crappy old 15inch monitor which supports 800 * 600. u shud have a monitor wich supports at least 1280*1024 but it'es better if u have a 1600*1200.
 
well, its good to have somthing like a 7900GT or GTX on a montior with 1280x1024 res, i used that res in games all the time, and i sometimes lag with my card, i know with a 7900GT your not going to lag, but the better the gamer get, the more chance a card like the 7900GT will even find it hard at a res like 1280x1024.
 
It really depends. On a 15 in monitor 800x600 wouldn't even look that bad, due to the small size of the screen. I feel jacking up the resolution really doesn't improve the games visual appeal all that much. So long as you can do 1024x768 on a 16/17'' monitor it's fine by me. Texture quality settings, character/enviromental detail, foliage, HDR, bloom, FSAA, ASF, etc. make a much bigger impact and those are the things you upgrade for, even if your monitor won't push the big resolutions.
The bad news is ATI and nVidia, while they are planning on releasing DX 10 cards in September (ATI may be November actually) they'll most likely start out with their flagship big-boy card they plan to show off with. It won't be cheap but with in a few weeks they should come up with midrange or mid/high end cards. It's a while to wait so it's your call. If you went with the 7900GT you'd only be missing out on about 3 or 4 games the actually supported DX 10 untill summer 2007 when you may want to upgrade again.
 
Also, i dont think they would be any point even buying the R600 or w/e its going to be called, as Usually the first high end card they bring out is only the high end card for a couple of weeks or months, then they bring another card out and make the previous high end card not tht good, seems like at release there was lots of problems with the X1800's, dont know if that was the case with nvidia, ATi will release after nvidia just to see what Nvidia's got, only people with heaps of cash would buy the first high end DX10 card.

Have you seen F.E.A.R on a 15" monitor at 800x600 or even 1024x768, it looks awfull, all the lines are not even straight, and it dont look that good, even on my old 15" monitor i insisted on 1280x1024, even my desktop res was 1280x1024, i dont know how i managed with 1024x768 and even 1152x864, was awfull.
 
Wow, guess we have different standards dude, I ran fear on medium/high settings at 800x600 and thought it looked very good. I ran Riddick on High at 800x600 and had no issues with that either, I noticed no discernable difference between 800x600 and 1024x768, even 1280x1024 didn't really make a difference to me on my 17" monitor.

The R600 has been taped out to see what yeilds are like, they're not really going to be making any major changes between September and November, it's not really possible. Both cards will be great but both have different approaches.

nVidia's going for more pipelines (32) less shaders, (a 2:1 ratio) while ATI want to go for the unified shader approach. Such as 50 pixel, 14 vertex and geometry lines per clock, or 40 vertex, 10 pixel and 14 geometry information per clock. Either way they want it all to add up to 64. We'll see which works out better for DX 10 games.
 
so the r600 might have 10 pixel pipelines? thats pathetic!.

there aint no diffo between reseloutions on crt and lcd, well from what i have seen there aint, just 1024x768 is rubbish on either monitor.
 
The only point about LCD monitors and resolution is that its clearest at its native resolution. My BenQ runs at 1280x1024 and I run BF2 at 1024 x 768 to get a slightly better framerate. Its a little blurrier but not that I notice when the game is running.

I have a feeling I might wait until the first slew of DX10 cards come out and see if there are any games that use the new features. My 6600GT runs as well as I need it for now.

Ah the eternal conundrum of PC ownership :x:
 
well, when games come out with direct x 10, then you will want a direct x 10 card to get the full potential out of the games for example all the effects, you also need Windows Vista to play Direct X 10 cards.
 
Willz said:
so the r600 might have 10 pixel pipelines? thats pathetic!.

there aint no diffo between reseloutions on crt and lcd, well from what i have seen there aint, just 1024x768 is rubbish on either monitor.
Click to expand...
Can't say I totally understand the premise of unified shaders myself but I was just using that as an example of how it just needs to add up to 64 (as we do know that's the plan for the R600). It's more likely that it'll be at least 20 or 24.
 
ok, just to answer the post question. The 7900GT is faster than the 7800GTX. no questions asked.
 
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