Video card questions?

[ingeborgdot]

I am building another machine and want to swap video cards. The newer machine is just for certain things and I want to take the video card I have from my other machine I built in Dec. and put it in my newer machine because my older machine is for more heavy duty things. It is a 7900 GS PCIe and the new board will have PCIe 2.0. Will that work in this board? If so, what would be a good card to use for my board now that is the old standard PCIe under $125? Will the new 2.0 standard work in my board or is it best to look for a card that is of the old standard 1.1? The new card will be running a 24" 1900x1200 monitor.

 

[mpilchfamily]

The PCI-e 2.0 slots are backwards compatible with the old slots. All the 2.0 adds is some more speed and more voltage available to the cards. Not to mention true 16x per slot speeds for CF and SLI configurations. The 7900GS will work fine with the new system. Though it may be a bit short on GRAM for supporting the monitor you want.

 

[ingeborgdot]

The new system will only have a 22" monitor 1600x1200. My old system has the 1900x1200 24" monitor.
Actually, what would be an upgrade that would even be worth it to upgrade to. Is the 9600 line much of an upgrade to the 7900GS?

 

[myocardia]

Definitely leave the 7900GS in the old system. For ~$100 today, you can buy an 8800GT, which is about 20x as fast as a 7900GS, @ 1920x1200. That may be a slight exaggeration, but not as much as you might think. A 7900GS is fine for up to 1280x1024, but starts struggling @ 1600x1200, and that's with ~1 year old games. By the time you get up to 1920x1200, it will be utterly unplayable, with any game that's less than two years old. For reference, a 7900GS is slightly slower than an 8600GTS, and the 8600GTS performs very poorly with any newer game.

 

[ingeborgdot]

When I say old system, it is 8 months old. It has a Q6600 and oc to 2.8 right now. It will have the 24" screen. The new one is a 22" and will just be used for office, quickbooks etc. The old one is used for a lot of video editing and needs something better.

What do these choices look like?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814130380

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814130377

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814130379

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814129112

 

[ingeborgdot]

How important are the stream processors?
The visiontek 4850 has 800 where many of the GTX and + have only 112.

 

[Proteusza]

Unfortunately you cant really directly compare them because their architectures are so different. Best things to do is to look at benchmarks.

In the case of Nvidia cards, the stream processors are always clocked 2-3 times higher than the GPU clock. So a 700Mhz nvidia GPU might have shader clocks close to 2000Mhz for example (not sure of exact figures but its about there).

The 9800GTX+ is pretty similar in performance to the 4850, but generally loses slightly.

 

[Denithor]

Palit 4850 w/aftermarket cooler for $148AR is probably your best bet for 1920x1200 gaming & video work.

Otherwise the first 9800GT you found (with Crysis) is not a bad deal.

 

[s44]

At your price point, you can't beat this.

 

[ingeborgdot]

I quit being stingy and upped my price point. I went with the visiontek 4850.