Pretty close in price and performance I think. Both use DDR3 ram and I think the 8800GTX with the extra ram (768mb) might actually perform better. One thing to note though as I have a buddy running an 8800GTX is that NV has not released a driver for it since December 20, 2007. New drivers for the entire 9xxx series including the 9800GTX and my 9600GT were released April 1, 2008. Be warned and this is the way NV works you might see limited driver updates for the 8800 series or no further support at all
Yar, 9800 gts is more supported, and will receive new driver updates. The 9800 runs cooler, if you can find a watercooled version you can overclock it pretty well.. The 8800GTX, like the HD2900XT, is a great overclocker, and has more bits/memory... but it runs hot.. hot hot.. A gtx at anything other than stock clock almost always requires some sort of specialized non-stock cooling. If anything I'd actually wait for the new nvidia cards to be released within a year or so, and get a cheaper 9600gt or such. ALSO Video Card Comparison - GPUReview.com stock-clock comparison. 9800 has less bandwith at stock but has more texture units (and more texture fill rate) Unfortunately that dosen't mean as much now.. lol The raster processors and the memory bus bit size, + how much onboard memory, decide how well you can run the extra features like anti aliasing and aniso. Soooo, 9800 for nvidia support and cooler overclock, more texture units and cooler overall running.. or 8800 for more memory and faster AA, and faster high resolution modes (2k+). And don't focus too much on memory bandwith as well.. till we get PCI-E 3.0 maybe hah. HD2900XTs have the biggest memory bandwith of most commercial cards, especially overclocked to the max on liquid nitrogen!
I have 4 days to make a decision,because I am doing a whole new build, and I don't want to get stuck with this 6800gt.
I am still tempted to go for the 8800gtx,based on more mem and extra mem bit.The diff is $70 in price,I have to make sure of what I do because there are no refunds.
But it's much hotter and older. Both are quite evenly matched, don't forget 9800GTX has much faster clock speed. You can check on reviews to see which is faster.
Noted your other post as well the 9xxx series do run a lot cooler. Overall Cyberwarrior reading the feedback from other members I also think the 9800GTX would be your best choice. Even the downsized G94 GPU on this 9600gt runs incredibly cool
I have as well and to be honest I am an ATI fanboy and have good reason to be this 9600gt is the first NV card I have run since June 2003. Quite impressed with it and even though it has a dual slot cooler I still consider it a "stock" cooler. Ran a test using GPU Caps for you called the "FUR" test. I ran this for 10 minutes increasing the GPU clock from 650 to 750. Two screenshots the first shows the default settings and idle temp of the GPU. The 9800GTX is of course a much superior card to this as the 8800GTX is .. but making a point ... NV has really done a nice job cooling down the 9xxx series GPU's
The main reason I am doing this is,I have waited since '82 for a class action lawsuit to conclude and it finally did last month. Uncle Sam killed me in taxes but,I made up my mind I was going to get the hardware to build my ultimate rig.Unfortunately the Mrs does not agree with me so I have to play low keyed,but I am getting stuff far superior to the setup I have now.
Hmm.. Personally, I would go with the GeForce 9800 GTX. Not only does it run cooler, it also has a better video processor (VP2) and you can count on NVIDIA to work on improving its performance in future drivers.
