Which is better out of the two?!?

[xSeongminx]

So I decided to put together a junker with all of the parts that I have laying around my house. While rummaging through my closet, I managed to find two video cards; an eVGA 8500GT and an ATI X800 Vanilla. The 8500GT has 256 MB of memory and the X800 has 128 MBs. Out of the two, which is better? I've been looking at 3DMarks and I'll admit, they do come pretty close. I just wanted your guys' opinion. I'll be using this computer to play CS: Source btw.

 

[Andrew1990]

The X800 has more raw horsepower but lacks SM3.0 which some newer games require. The 8500GT on the other hand supports a lot of features but doesnt have any power to back those features up.

To put it into perspective by using what we call "Rodent Power" here on these forums,

We have one rat(X800) and a mouse(8500GT). They both need to chew a hole through a wall to get some cheese. The rat can chew an inch per hour while the mouse can only chew 1/4 of an inch an hour. The mouse though has a pick axe that allows him to chew through steel walls. The problem is the mouse doesnt have the strength to use the pick axe to get through the steel wall in a timely matter and the rat cant get through the steel wall at all.

So all in all it comes down to what type of wall(game) you are going to play. You said CSS is the game which doesnt require a pick axe as it is a wood wall. The rat(X800) can easily beat the mouse(8500GT). as it has more (RP) then the mouse.

 

[xSeongminx]

Haha, thanks for the sweet analogy. I'm going to have to borrow that some time =). Looks like I'll be sticking the the rat!

 

[betasub]

LOL, to continue the analogy, although the mouse is weaker than than the rat, it is smarter (e.g. able to use that pick axe!), and there are some tricky tasks that the muscular rat just can't figure. Getting through the wooden wall (CSS) isn't too tricky, so the rat can win out on brute strength alone.

 

[FalseChristian]

It's pretty sad that a GPU that is 2 generations newer is significantly slower than a plain-jane X800.

 

[Denithor]

Not really, the 8500GT wasn't designed to be a gaming card. Even the 8600GT from the same era, which was designed as the "mid-range gaming card" for that series, sucked hard in many games and couldn't keep up with the previous generation (often beat by the 7600GT and almost always beat by the x1800/x1900 series from ATi).

 

[PingSpike]

I feel like the x800 series cards were fairly underrated when they were out. My x850xt ran oblivion nice and smooth at 1024x768, all high.

 

[AmongthechosenX]

becasue everyone was all "oh my 6800GT is amazing"...

i've had 2 X850 pro cards. they ran most games at 1280 x 1024 without issues. Tribes vengeance, FEAR, far cry. actually i only upgraded because of a driver bug in crysis for that version driver with that card i had. those cards still ran COD4 really well at 1024 x 768.

 

[Timorous]

I had an AGP X800XT until recently, only upgraded to play some SM3.0 + games and because my CPU was a bottleneck. I managed to play Fallout 3 though with most settings on med/high at 1024x768 with 2xAA at around 20fps, for me this is just about playable. It does seem to have had more legs than the 6800's

The vanilla X800 is probably faster than the 8500gt unless you want to play PS3.0 games like Mass Effect or Bioshock.

The X800XT is 50% faster than the 8500gt according to the latest toms hardware chart (this is all the FPS added together so specific scenarios might be different) and I do not know how much faster the X800XT is vs the vanilla X800.

Funnily enough the X800XT is also about 22% faster than the 6800 Ultra.

After all that though I am glad ATi/AMD decided to change the damn naming scheme.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

Eh, his X800 only has 128MB of memory fellows. I'm pretty sure the X800s work best with 256MB and above. I know the vanilla X800 and X800GT with 256MB of memory are competitive with the 6600GT, while the 8500GT did struggle to even match the 6600GTs performance. If there is a performance hit with relatively small memory, I'd say the performance would be a wash. You should probably go with the 8500GT since it at least has SM3.0 support.

Of course, you could build your system, install one card, run a bunch of benchmarks, install the other card, run the same benchmarks, and compare the results. You could even post them here, as I am now interested to see how these two cards perform against one another.

 

[Andrew1990]

What resolution are you playing at anyway and what are the rest of your PC specs?

 

[ss284]

The 8500GT overclocks quite well; I think I have mine running at 625/1000.

 

[octopus41092]

I would go for the 8500GT. It would do better on the newer stuff and you can OC it more than the X800.

 

[toyota]

Originally posted by: Denithor
Not really, the 8500GT wasn't designed to be a gaming card. Even the 8600GT from the same era, which was designed as the "mid-range gaming card" for that series, sucked hard in many games and couldn't keep up with the previous generation (often beat by the 7600GT and almost always beat by the x1800/x1900 series from ATi).

while the 8600gt was quite sad it is still MUCH better than the 7600gt in newer games. the 7600gt did get 1 to 2 fps better at 1280x1024 in Prey and Fear when it was first released but that was remedied just a few weeks later with new drivers. the original reviews do look horrible for the 8600gt but again newer drivers came out and made huge differences in games. STALKER and FEAR performance nearly doubled and all other games got much faster. now getting back to newer games the 8600gt is about twice as fast as the 7600gt and even beats the 7900gs and sometimes the 7900gt in some games.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-5.html
Crysis 1024x768 Medium Quality
8600GT 30fps
7900GS 17fps
7600GT not playable at those settings

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6177688/p-6.html
Bioshock 1024x768 High Quality
8600GT 40fps
7900GS 38fps
7600GT 25fps

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6183967/p-4.html
COD4 1280x1024 Max Quality
8600GT 36fps
7900GS 25fps
7600GT 19fps

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6183499/p-4.html
UT3 1600x1200 Max Quality
8600GT 39fps
7900GS 28fps
7600GT 19fps

 

[xSeongminx]

The rest of the system specs are:

Celeron D 331 2.66 Ghz
ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2
2 GB PC-5300 Memory

I know that the CPU and motherboard are weak but they were all I could find. I'm going to be running Vista if that makes any difference...