Meltdown

[Nazgvl]

Ok, so apparently last night both of the 8800 GT cards i had in my machine decided to go on strike, permanently. How it happened or why, i dunno, the machine worked flawlessly the last time it had been used, a day or so back. Tried to boot up this morning only to get met with an alarm beep during boot up and no video signal (machine still booted up fine according to the motherboard codes).

Anyways, long story short, after a good 6 hours of tinkering it looks like vid card failure. Now my problem is finding a suitible (inexpensive) replacement for them. Was looking at 9800 GT (1gb) cards on newegg for about $130 each, but i figured id ask here if it was worth getting or if there were more modern cards that would play well with an nforce7 based motherboard.

Rest of the machines specs are as follows.

c2d e8400 (3ghz)
8 gigs ocz reaper ddr2
evga 780i nforce7 motherboard
creative x-fi extreme audio
150 gb wd raptor (boot drive)
600 gb wd caviar
thermaltake toughpower 850w psu
dvd
dvd-r

Im assuming amd cards are out of the question, and would probably rather maaintain the sli setup, so what do you guys suggest?

 

[happy medium]

Sounds like your motherboard went bad. Mabe not the video cards. The chances of both your cards going bad at the same time are not very good.
Could be a psu failure too.

 

[blanketyblank]

Why are you assuming AMD cards are out of the question? Just because you have a SLI mobo? $130 each is way too much for a 9800GT. I'd be looking to pay something closer to 140 for BOTH. For $260 I'd look for a good deal on a HD5850. Very possible with bing cash back as there are often 10%+ promos.

 

[CraigRT]

Too bad your mobo doesnt support Xfire or I'd sell you 2 HD4850's for a good price.

 

[Nazgvl]

Sounds like your motherboard went bad. Mabe not the video cards. The chances of both your cards going bad at the same time are not very good.
Could be a psu failure too.

Its not the motherboard. I had a second machine that had the same motherboard, cpu and powersupply. Took the motherboard and cpu from that one (was running as of this morning) and transplanted into the dead one. Using said 8800 gt cards and the 8 gigs of ram with the second mobo/cpu resulted in the same error. Took my ram out and substitued a stick from the second machine (again, working) and still got the same error. Wasnt until i took both 8800s out (after testing each singly) and dropped in one of the 7800 gtx from the second machine that it booted normally.

To test it wasnt aa power issue, i then added the second 7800 gtx from the second machine in sli, and again booted without issue. Two 7800gtx > one 8800 gt in power drain, so that covers the power supply. To make absolutely sure, i rebuilt the second machine with the cpu and mobo of the first, using its old memory and psu (both of which work fine), and dropped in one of the 8800s, gets the same error that i had gotten originally on the first machine. Since i know theres nothing wrong with the cpu/motherboard/ram/psu and i can duplicate the error everytime when i add in one of the 8800 gts, im fairly certain its safe to say the vid card is the culprit.


As for assuming no AMD cards, I wasnt just referring to the fact that its an sli board, but rather that its an nvidia chipset. Last time i tried an ati card on an nvidia chipset i haad nothing but issues, so i assumed the same going forward. I am open to suggestions though. Looking for something simple (im not interested in going AMD if i have to constantly tinker with it to get it to work on this chipset for example) and sub $300 all said and done that i wont need to upgrade the psu over. So whats the best bang for the buck in that situation? Is a single AMD economy card from now going to outperform a pair of last generation mid range card at near the same pricepoint?

 

[Nazgvl]

Anyone? Looking around newegg and zzf, looks like i could get a 5850 for about $300. Judging from the recent reviews on anandtech here, that card should be able to best the 9800 sli in their best games (heavy sli optimization) by a bit, and fairly significantly in everything else. Any opinions on this? Is there any specific brand card i should be looking at, ie Asus, XFX, saphirre? All seem to be roughly the same price.

 

[Absolution75]

Wouldn't a single 5850 destroy 9800's in SLI, not just best them?

As far as brand goes. Asus/XFX are both decent. MSI is pretty bland IMO - but if the price is right. Just go with whatever is cheapest imo, DOA graphics cards are quite rare.