Catasrophic failure - Reusing Old Card, Need help on the best one...

[Havocme]

My Main system suffered a major failure. I am now trying to rebuild into an old case from old parts I have held on to. I have $0 to spend on this rebuild (while I save for whole new everything), so my choice on video cards is between these two:

GeForce 8500 GT - http://us.msi.com/product/vga/NX8500GT-TD256E-OC.html#/?div=Specification

and

XFX GeForce 7900GS - http://www.motherboards.org/reviews/hardware/1653_1.html

The base system they will be going into is circa the same era, 2gig of RAM, 2.2GHz on the CPU. I can't remember much more of the parts right now, but I don't think they will bottleneck either card.

I know the 8500 is 1 "higher generation" of chipset, but it is only 256mb onboard memory, just like the 7900. I had heard that during that time frame, a higher end prior generation could sometimes meet or slightly exceed a lower end next generation card.

Thoughts?

 

[SPBHM]

back in the day I remember the 7900GS beating the 8600GT for old games (older than 2006) and slower for the newer stuff, but the 8500GT is significantly slower than the 8600 (32 vs 16 "cuda cores"), but geforce 7 really struggles with newer SM3.0 stuff compared to G8x, and the 8500GT probably have better GPU acceleration capabilities for videos and stuff

realistically, none is good and the 8500GT uses less power, and probably can help with h264 video better, so I would probably go with that, but the 7900GS is probably a faster card for playing some older games.

 

[GaiaHunter]

7900GS is considerably faster than a 8500GT.

The 8500GT is around the speed of a 7300GT.

On the other hand the 7900Gs is around the speed of a 8600GT/8600GTS.

The games where the 7900GS will struggle due to lack of feature will more likely than not be also unplayable with a 8500 GT.