Help Me Decide

[Ketchup]

My 6800 has done me well the past three years, but my newest games (NFS Carbon and Sid Meyer's Railroads) have brought it to it's knees.

I want a card pretty close to $150 as I don't do a lot of gaming, and I would like it to last me a couple more years.

I have decided to switch over to socket 939 so I could get a pci express video card. I was pretty much settled on a 7950 GT, but I saw an x1950xt on Newegg for the same price.

The funny part was as I got to looking at benchmarks, the 1950 beats the 7950 in just about every game out there, even though they are the same price.

So now I am asking for some opinions from you all. Am I crazy for still wanting the 7950? (I like the classic nvidia control panel better than ATI's control center, and I like digital vibrance.)

My monitor runs 1280 x 1024, and I will probably have this monitor as long as I have the card. Would it make a big difference which card I get?

 

[tuteja1986]

XT is way faster but consumer power so you will need a decent PSU otherwise it will die or go with GT if you don't have a good PSU. If your only problem is control panel then use ATI tool tray which is more advance than any ATI/Nvidia control panel.
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3019&p=3

 

[Ketchup]

Thanks for the link. I have a 580 watt PSU, so it should be able to handle it.

 

[Laminator]

Go for the X1950XT. Carbon SUCKS on 7900 cards. A 7900GTX will get beaten by an X1950 Pro in that game. I can't even run it with motion blur at 1280x960, maximum in-game settings (including AA) without getting frames below 30 fps. In traditional games, the X1950XT is only a little faster than the 7950GT but it creams it in the newest games and it'll probably get worse as time goes on.

http://www.elitebastards.com/c...9&limit=1&limitstart=3

Okay, Carbon is kind of a drastic example but in newer games with lots of shader effects (Rainbow Six: Vegas, Oblivion, etc.) the X1950XT should be at least as fast as the 7900GTX.

 

[MarcVenice]

Why switch to socket 939 ? You crazy lol ? Switch to socket am2 or to s775. It's cheaper, and s775 with core 2 duo will be faster. AM2 offers the same performance as s939, but comes a lot cheaper !!!

 

[Synomenon]

Wow so the 1950 is a much better card than the 7950GT? Wish I had known that before purchasing one.

 

[s44]

Originally posted by: MarcVenice
Why switch to socket 939 ? You crazy lol ? Switch to socket am2 or to s775. It's cheaper, and s775 with core 2 duo will be faster. AM2 offers the same performance as s939, but comes a lot cheaper !!!

:thumbsup:

Heck, you can even switch to AM2+ already ($80 mobo at the Egg). DDR2 is insanely cheap.

 

[Noema]

I agree with the not switching to s939 suggestion.

 

[Laminator]

Originally posted by: IsLNdbOi
Wow so the 1950 is a much better card than the 7950GT? Wish I had known that before purchasing one.

Then again, the 7950GT has HDCP and it's faster in its own share of games as well (IL-2, Doom 3, etc.) but the most well-known games tend to favor the X1950XT and the traditional pipeline architecture of the GeForce 7 series is dead.

 

[Sunrise089]

Other than 512megs of memory (which I wish I had) my 7900GT overclocked is basically a 7950GT. I wouldn't call a X1950XT THAT much faster than my card, BUT since the prices are so close, then I would go with the ATI card.

PS - Sadly, these two cards are SO much better than what the green and red guys offer at these price points, or even $50 more, for their new parts.

 

[Laminator]

The NFS: Carbon example is probably the most drastic of the pixel shader differences. In most other games, even the newest ones, the 7950GT should only be behind the X1950XT by a little. As the games get older, the margin decreases and there might be some games where the 7950GT is faster. However, as the trend towards shader effects increases the margin is only going to get worse and who knows when another game like Carbon will come out?

512MB and HDCP may be important enough for some people to get the 7950GT. For pure performance, though, the X1950XT is the clear winner.

 

[Ketchup]

It looks like I will be going with the ATI card. The last ATI card I bought was a 9700 Pro. That was a great card back in the day.

I saw those Carbon benchmarks and was blown away. Could be a sign the ATI card would last me longer, but it's so hard to tell which way future games will go.

Thanks for the input.

 

[Laminator]

Future games will go towards the ATI card. Period. Unless games suddenly stop using shadows and lighting effects the quad-pumped pixel shader architecture on the ATI card will show itself to be more efficient with the rendering needs of future games, especially as cards sporting the new unified architecture become mainstream.

 

[bryanW1995]

I just bought the x1950xt on newegg. That was too good of a deal to pass up on that card imho. check out this link: http://www.tomshardware.com/20...ney/page6.html#summary

 

[Laminator]

Did you go for the Sapphire X1950XT 256MB on NewEgg for $150?

 

[Scougar]

The x1950xt does HDCP anyway, so that argument for getting the 7950gt for HDCP is wasted. (at least the Sapphire version has).

As long as you have a decent PSU and good CPU to back it up, the xt is a fantastic card for the money. I tried to convince myself when I was RMA'ing my x1950xt today (lol... not a good advert ) that the 7950gt was worth the money, but it just doesn't look that way unfortunately. Even the old 7900GTX struggles (faster than the gt) against the x1950xt even though the gtx has higher clocks than the 7950gt.

x1950xt everytime (hence why I have plumped for another).

Matthew

 

[Arkaign]

X1950XT + AM2 Nvidia Board + X2 + 2GB DDR2 + OC = Win