Sandy Bridge 2500/2500k vs Nvidia 7800 GTX

[brandonb]

Hi all,

My sister has an old hand-me-down of mine from 2005. It is an AMD 4800+ and an Nvidia 7800gtx. It's recently giving her troubles, artifacts in the video, etc. So I was going to upgrade her to Sandy Bridge. However, her son, plays a few video games.

I'm thinking of letting him buy a video card if he chooses, but I'm curious what the difference would be between integrated video vs their older graphics card. So I can say "You will get about the same performance, but if you want something better, you need to pony up some cash." Or "This thing has about 50% of the graphics power of the old setup... I know that sucks, but save your pennies." The end result will be the same, as they will get the Sandy Bridge regardless. I'm wondering how I should prepare them, as the discussion is likely going to come back to me about it at some point in the future. Thanks.

(From what I can tell, the 7800 GTX is a bit faster than the Sandy Bridge but I'm not really sure, as the CPU might just offset that difference, etc)

 

[Sp12]

Any particular reason for SB? I'd be willing to be they'd see a lot more out of an SSD and AMD tricore than a SB quad and a hard drive. That said, if you want SB a less-expensive version may be appropriate.

This is assuming they don't do heavy photo/video editing and the like.

 

[f4phantom2500]

if the only problem is the video card why not just grab a used 4850 for like $50 instead of spending $ on a new cpu/board/ram? as the last guy said, ssd is also a good idea. i just built my parents a rig with (mostly) old parts; x2 3600, 2gb ram, 7900gs...the only 2 things i bought were a new psu and a sandforce 1200 based ssd. that computer is faster (for general usage) than my desktop, which has an athlon ii x3 435, 4gb ram, 4850, and 2 caviar green 640gb in raid 0 (from what i gather these drives are faster than the 500gb caviar blues)...but on the other hand my build has been running the same windows install for over a year (both computers running win 7 ultimate 64bit).

 

[Arkaign]

Used video card is a good idea, or a deal on a HD5670 or so. If it doesn't already have it, getting it to 4GB would also help.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

The 7800GTX should definitely be faster than the HD 2000. The HD 3000 would be much closer in performance, although the 7800 is likely to be a tad faster overall. It's pretty difficult to gauge because no one (properly) benches the 7800GTX anymore and it has a much different architecture than current generation GPUs.

But you make it sound like they're going to get Sandy Bridge regardless.