Upgrade advice please; SLI 6800GT getting old?

[ussff]

Being a gamer who (generally) waits for the price of the TOP games to drop off the top shelf has always allowed me to build a reasonable budget gaming PC. About a year ago I built my first SLI machine quite by accident, its a Dual Core 4200+ on an ASUS A8N, 2Gb Ram. When the Motherboard/CPU/RAM arrived and I realised I'd bought an SLI motherboard and I decided to dabble a bit with 2 6800GT's to replace my very ageing XP2800+ 1Gb RAM and Radeon 9600SE quite nicely.

The part I researched the most was the 6800GT's, bought second hand on ebay, I could never have afforded them new when they first came out, but know that many cards that came after them just didn't cut the mustard - the nasty shock was the extra power required to run them... (additional Thermal Take SLI PSU solved that) and then I find out not all games get a great kick out of an SLI configuration, go figure? But building it is part of the hobby... and its much quicker than the previous PC and I can now play Quake4, FEAR, C&C3, BF2142 etc at reasonable quality and looking to put Crysis to the test soon, hence I'm thinking I may need to tweak the graphics upwards!

Enough of the background - I think I can only go so far with the motherboard/CPU/RAM I have, with a graphics card upgrade before the newer graphics cards are throttled back by the PC I slot them in.

Prices of the GeForce 86/8800 are well under £100 and I was thinking now is the time to push the graphics up (and maybe another 1Gb of RAM too) to get the best out of this machine, before I dive into my next upgrade... which I'd build incorporating the new graphics cards I upgrade to now.

Will I benefit from a 3 figure upgrade if I buy a pair of any of the following?

XFX GeForce 8600 GT 256MB Fatal1ty Edition
Gigabyte 8800GT SLI 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
Sparkle GF 8800 GT SLI 512MB

My main fear is that I wont see too much of a performace lift from the 6800gt's and they wont act as the stepping stone to my next PC (possibly a quad core next year) as they are not the same quantum leap I made from the ATI9600SE to the GeForce6800GT... any advice or thoughts welcome on the cards I have looked at or others in the big wide world of graphics cards

[Chai]

Get ATI 4850.

[g0tanks]

Pretty much anything in the Geforce 9xxx or HD4xxx series will be a quantum leap. As Chai said, the 4850 will provide the most performance for it's value.

[ussff]

Isn't ATI Crossfire? If I wanted to stay with twin cards SLI doesn't it have to be NVIDIA for my mobo? and will the 9xxx still give the performance or will it suffer on my motherboard/CPU... with 2gb ram?

As for the 9xxx itself - from my basic brains, best always in the x8xx part of the series and a GT(s) if the ££'s allows?

[Lacus]

if you wanna remain twin SLI cards, yes..you do need a Nvidia chipset mobo (they run pretty hot imo)..well, if you do wanna remain on the Green side, just get 2x9800GTX+ (on par with 4850 if not mistaken)as for the ram, which OS are you running? I'll suggest going for 4gb since you do game.make sure you do have enough power to power up those gpus

[g0tanks]

Or you could just get an 4850X2.

[ussff]

Staying with XP Pro ATM ...not a VISTA fan. Infact I was forced off Win2k Pro only a couple oy years back when games stopped supporting them ...Lord of the Rings if I remember rightly

I'm not upgrading MOBO/CPU in the next few months - its a sneak cashflow upgrade - new GFX now that are suitable to run on existing SLI MOBO - then when I do upgrade the core of the PC, the new GFX cards I get now, will cross over to the new system.

9800's are still a bit pricey - but for the next leap up that I want in performance to make it worth while - that may have to be the choice. From your responses; my fear that the 4 cards I'd looked at were ££'s wasted as the performance lift would not be (in the short term) future proof to my next PC seems founded. Cheers!

[g0tanks]

Originally Posted by ussff

Staying with XP Pro ATM ...not a VISTA fan. Infact I was forced off Win2k Pro only a couple oy years back when games stopped supporting them ...Lord of the Rings if I remember rightly

I'm not upgrading MOBO/CPU in the next few months - its a sneak cashflow upgrade - new GFX now that are suitable to run on existing SLI MOBO - then when I do upgrade the core of the PC, the new GFX cards I get now, will cross over to the new system.

9800's are still a bit pricey - but for the next leap up that I want in performance to make it worth while - that may have to be the choice. From your responses; my fear that the 4 cards I'd looked at were ££'s wasted as the performance lift would not be (in the short term) future proof to my next PC seems founded. Cheers!

XP will be fine for gaming (it won't support DX10 but oh well), just make sure you get 64-bit if you are going for 4 gigs of RAM. If you live in the US/Canada then newegg has a really nice deal on RAM: Newegg.com - CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Desktop Memory

[ussff]

UK based nice to meet u!

Could someone please advise if buying a PCI-E 2.0 graphics card and putting it on my Asus A8N-SLI is ok? As I'm sure my mobo is not PCI-E 2.0 and all the NVIDIA 9800's seem to be... hence - will I get a performance drop off and in current mobo, to be increased when I upgrade to include a Motherboard with PCI-E 2.0 or will it just not work at all?

Really in the dark over all this PCI-E stuff, used to be fine when playing with AGP all those years ago

[g0tanks]

Originally Posted by ussff

UK based nice to meet u!

Could someone please advise if buying a PCI-E 2.0 graphics card and putting it on my Asus A8N-SLI is ok? As I'm sure my mobo is not PCI-E 2.0 and all the NVIDIA 9800's seem to be... hence - will I get a performance drop off and in current mobo, to be increased when I upgrade to include a Motherboard with PCI-E 2.0 or will it just not work at all?

Really in the dark over all this PCI-E stuff, used to be fine when playing with AGP all those years ago

It won't be a problem since PCI-E 1.1 will still offer enough bandwidth.